Forest protection attracts people, people wreck forests

When the Governator first proposed shuttering California state parks in May, I argued that could be the best thing for the parks, because wild-land protection often amounts to a slower form of wild-land destruction, trading the swift slaughter of logging saws for the measured bludgeoning of hiking boots. If you really want to protect forests, keep people out entirely.
A study published this month in Science underscores this point. Four environmental scientists from the University of California, Berkeley studied 306 protected areas in 45 countries in Africa and Latin America. They found human population increased at the edges of most protected areas at double the normal rate. And they found that human populations also increased inside 85 percent of the protected areas.
The study helps allay concerns that forest protection deprives native people of resources. In fact, those people often gain resources that societies develop around protected lands, including roads, clean water, sewer systems, jobs, foreign aid. And there’s no indication the people who live near protected areas cease to exploit their natural resources.
But that means population growth can be a problem: “If humans are drawn to PAs (protected areas) for the economic opportunities they provide, international funding for conservation may, ironically, exacerbate the same anthropogenic threats to biodiversity it aims to alleviate.”
The scientists found that increased human population correlates with higher investment by international agencies and conservation groups. The more money we pour into protected lands, the more people show up there, and the more damage they do to the forests we’re trying to protect.
The Berkeley scientists hope we don’t take their study as an excuse to stop protecting forests. Instead, they propose we plan for the population boost that may follow protection:
By no means should this possibility rationalizereduced funding for PAs and the communities around them. Instead, it suggests that international and local funding must go in part toward developing spatially dynamic PA systems that account for patterns of human settlement and needs of local communities. Creation of large multi-use buffer areas surrounding core habitats and corridors (possibly with mixed-use buffers of their own)between PAs may facilitate effective protection of biodiversity while supporting potentially heavy human settlement on PA borders. Additionally, approaches that pair PA-based conservation witheconomic development targeted at areas more distant from PAs may aid rural communities while simultaneously reducing human pressure on PAs (28). Such advanced landscape planning, in concertwith effective PA management, may maintain and increase the benefits of PAs for rural people while also ensuring those benefits do not result in unsustainably heavy use of the flora, fauna, and processes PAs endeavor to sustain.
via Science: abstract here.
Maybe I covered too many planning commission meetings, but when I hear “mixed-use buffer” I see gas stations, convenience stores, trinket shops and cheap motels. I have a better idea: keep people out entirely.