‘Protected areas’ or ‘parks’ are catch-all phrases for areas of land or sea that are being protected in the name of conservation.
Over 12% of the land on our planet is in a protected area. That is a vast two billion hectares – over twice the area of the USA.
Land with ‘protected area’ status isn’t automatically the centre of lots of conservation activity; many protected areas only exist in theory and are known as ‘paper parks.’
Different kinds of parks have different implications for the people living in the area. Some parks are ‘strictly protected’, where people are largely banned. Other parks incorporate the ‘sustainable use’ of resources in the ethos of how the area is managed.
For tribal peoples, the impacts of strict reserves can be severe: requiring that they are removed from an area and can no longer access its resources. Sustainable use areas, on the other hand, can help tribal communities to protect their lands and resources from external pressures (such as logging, large scale agriculture, or mining).
Indigenous peoples’ complex systems of protecting and managing their territories are increasingly being recognised and valued by conservation scientists. There are now global directories of ‘indigenous and community conserved areas’ (ICCAs). ICCAs protect at least as much forest land as official protected areas – perhaps even twice as much.
It is vital that protected areas are not used to violate the rights of local tribal communities. Any protected area on tribal peoples’ lands should only be established with the free, prior and informed consent of those communities. To best serve the interests of both conservation and tribal peoples’ rights and needs, governments and conservation organisations need to work towards recognising the land rights of local tribal communities and helping them to protect their territories from outside threats.