Guidelines for privately protected areas

Abstract

Equilibrium Research offers practical solutions to conservation challenges, from concept, to implementation and evaluation of impact. With partners ranging from local communities to UN agencies across the world, Equilibrium explores and develops approaches to natural resource management that balance the needs of nature and people. The founders, Nigel Dudley and Sue Stolton, see biodiversity conservation as an ethical necessity, which can also support human wellbeing. www.equilibriumresearch.com The Turner Endangered Species Fund (TESF) TESF was launched in 1997 and is dedicated to conserving biological diversity by ensuring the persistence of imperiled species and their habitats with an emphasis on private land. Our activities range from single species conservation actions to restoration of ecological communities and functional ecosystems. We are unique in our efforts to bring the role of private lands to the forefront of ecological conservation. We aim to use the best science to effectively conserve biodiversity and disseminate reliable scientific and policy information. We are determined to establish a new level of effectiveness for private-public efforts to redress the extinction crisis.

The contribution of land tenure diversity to the spatial resilience of protected area networks

“…Protected environments and mountain catchment areas (which are also both private) add an additional 10.14%, whilst world heritage sites (mostly state‐owned) and forest wilderness areas (state‐owned) add 13.12%. The total area under protection by our calculations (11,240,665.12 ha, 9.2% of South Africa's land area) is slightly higher than reported by state agencies (DEA, ; Mitchell et al, ). This is probably a result of additional private nature reserves identified in our study that are not currently captured by official datasets.…”

“…At the same time as community management or co‐management of protected areas appears to be expanding (Aswani et al, ), privately owned protected areas are increasingly being considered for achieving conservation targets in a difficult economic climate (Bingham et al, ; Mitchell et al, ; Stolton et al, ). Private lands have the potential to increase the resilience of protected area networks.…”

“…Private lands have the potential to increase the resilience of protected area networks. They may contribute to increasing redundancy (both in terms of adding more areas to the protected area network and buffering of public protected lands), and connectivity (Fitzsimons & Wescott, ; Mitchell et al, ; Wallace, Theobald, Ernst, & King, ). They may also offer complementarity to state‐owned protected areas by protecting areas with high agricultural potential that may be less easily protected by state‐owned parks, such as riparian (Wallace et al, ) and low‐lying areas (Gallo, Pasquini, Reyers, & Cowling, ).…”

“…South Africa offers a unique opportunity to understand tenure diversity at a national scale, thanks to its long history and record of privately owned protected area gazettement (De Vos et al, ), as well as well‐developed institutional framework encompassing a broad diversity of protected area types (DEA, ). We expected that the spatial footprint of privately ownedprotected areas (in South Africa, private nature reserves, contractual national parks and stewardship nature reserves, Appendix S1) would differ from that of state‐owned areas (in South Africa, national parks and provincial‐, forest‐, local‐, and development nature reserves) because privately owned areas are created under different socio‐economic incentives and constraints, and often with different objectives (Cumming & Daniels, ; Mitchell et al, ). Resilience theory suggests that privately owned protected areas will improve the resilience of the reserve network by increasing its area (number of species is a function of area), redundancy (adding more examples of habitat types that are also represented in the state‐owned network while also offering a wider range of management strategies), and connectivity, facilitating the regenerative ecological processes of dispersal, gene flow and propagation as well as providing a form of ecological memory (Bengtsson et al, ).…”

A synthesis of knowledge about motives for participation in perpetual conservation easements

“…Private land conservation is recognized by the IUCN for helping to achieve conservation goals like Aichi Target 11, which would not be attainable with public land alone (Mitchell et al, 2018). As a result, there has been a renewed focus on private land conservation as a supplemental means for reaching conservation goals (Kamal, Grodzińska‐jurczak, & Brown, 2015; Mitchell et al, 2018; Stolton, Redford, & Dudley, 2014).…”