The World's Protected Areas: Status, Values and Prospects in the 21st Century

Front Cover
Stuart Chape, Mark Spalding, Martin Jenkins
Univ de Castilla La Mancha, 2008 - Nature - 359 pages
Extensively illustrated with maps, color photographs, and graphics, this state-of-the-art reference offers a comprehensive and authoritative status report on the world's 100,000 parks, nature reserves, and other land and marine areas currently designated as protected areas. Now covering over 12 percent of the Earth's land surface, protected areas are the great strongholds of biodiversity and landscape conservation. They also provide a wide range of valuable ecosystem services: protecting food and water supplies; regulating weather patterns; protecting watersheds and coastlines from erosion; maintaining places of historical or cultural significance for recreation, solace or spiritual wellbeing; generating income and employment from tourism, and more. This timely volume offers a benchmark overview of where these protected areas exist worldwide, what they have and have not accomplished, what threats they face, and how they can be better managed to achieve the goals of conserving biodiversity and other natural resources.

Copub: UNEP-WCMC
 

Contents

4
2
West and Central Africa
7
South Asia
52
Eastern and Southern Africa
62
Cultural Heritage Management
73
Tables
155
Global blueprints for protected areas
164
Climate change and ecological
171
networks
195
160
202
Boxes
210
1
218
North Africa and the Middle East
258
Northern Eurasia
268
International protected areas
318
Copyright

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