4.  CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

a.  Challenges    

Many protected areas face serious problems from urbanization. These problems are likely to increase as the world becomes more and more urban. They will be exacerbated by other global change factors, such as overall population growth, migration, climate change, and continued spread of invasive alien species.

Local authorities often fail to take protected areas into account in planning and regulating the use of privately owned land. In many countries, such land-use decisions are commonly influenced by bribery. In many cases, local authorities also fail to control other factors that affect protected areas, such as pollution, crime, and overdrawing of groundwater.    

To overcome these problems, protected area managers need broad support from citizens, but city dwellers tend to have less and less contact with nature: the urban poor often have no access to natural areas, while more affluent people often choose to spend their leisure time in activities that separate them from nature, such as with electronic entertainment or in off-road vehicles. If people haven’t experienced nature, they won’t care about it. People who don’t value the natural environment may vote for political candidates who have no interest in protected areas.

b.  Opportunities

As rural protected areas become urban ones, opportunities arise to use them to educate the urban public about the benefits of nature. Being close to people makes it easier to earn public support.

Urban local governments can be important allies for protected areas. This is more likely to happen as a new generation of environmentally conscious city managers and planners emerges.

Several articles in The Urban Imperative (Trzyna 2005a) describe innovative ways of engaging urban people. These include programs in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, France, India, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 

5.  LESSONS LEARNED

Realize that the answers are more political than technical

When asked what they would do about urbanization and protected areas, no doubt most conservationists would start talking about land-use planning, zoning, regulation of privately owned land, buffer zones, and an overarching ecosystem approach to resource management.

Although these tools are certainly useful, the reality is (a) protected area managers rarely have authority to implement them alone; and (b) such tools usually don’t work well in places where protected areas are under pressure from urbanization, unless they are accompanied by political action.

Since protected area managers are usually restrained from intervening in politics, they need to make alliances with those who can.   

Forge alliances

Alliances are essential for many reasons. They come in many forms, ranging from temporary coalitions around immediate issues, to formal long-term partnerships, to umbrella organizations that deal with a wide scope of subjects. Many examples are given in the case studies above and in The Urban Imperative (Trzyna 2005).

Some potential allies are obvious, such as other conservation organizations, both governmental and nongovernmental. Other allies may be less obvious: local agencies of many kinds, organized groups of recreational users, public health authorities, local businesses. Some allies are specific to situations, for example, in Kenya, the commercial fishing industry concerned about the decline of the Mombasa fishery; in the California desert, the military wanting to discourage urbanization near its reservations.

Talks aimed at forming alliances should begin as early as possible. Top-down bureaucracies tend to decide what they want to do and then look for partners. It works better the other way around. Intermediaries, such as NGOs and consultants expert in negotiation and convening, can be useful in this regard.  

Multipurpose projects are a good way of building long-term partnerships. In Los Angeles, for example, water and conservation agencies and outdoor recreation groups found they had a common interest in restoring the natural area behind a flood-control dam. In areas around San Francisco and Rio de Janeiro, interconnecting trail systems with common signage have helped to build good relationships among agencies.

Encourage social entrepreneurs

People with entrepreneurial skills are essential to making partnerships work and seeing that creative ideas are carried out. These agents of change are not always extroverted “leaders.” They often prefer to have a low profile and work behind the scenes as connectors, quiet supporters, and constructive critics. Entrepreneurs need to be identified, encouraged, and supported.

Help and engage your neighbors

Urban neighbors are much more likely to help protected areas if protected areas help their urban neighbors. In Kenya, Lake Nakuru National Park is giving direct support to local schools and is assisting the municipality of Nakuru with water and sewage facilities. In South Africa, Table Mountain National Park provides employment and life-skills training to people from neighboring shantytowns. In California, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy works with city officials to provide poorer areas of Los Angeles with access to nature.

Protected area agencies should think in terms of urban engagement, rather than urban “outreach,” which can seem patronizing. Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) widely used Ladder of Citizen Participation is useful in discussing local community involvement:

·         Rung 8: Citizen control

·         Rung 7: Delegated power

·         Rung 6: Partnership

·         Rung 5: Placation

·         Rung 4: Consultation

·         Rung 3: Informing

·         Rung 2: Therapy

·         Rung 1: Manipulation

Ideally, citizen involvement should push upward toward at least Rung 6. In some locations, going to Rung 7 or even Rung 8 might be desirable and possible, but in most countries there would be statutory and other barriers. These issues are discussed in detail in a case study from Australia in The Urban Imperative (Parker and Punturiero 2005, 68-72), which concludes that, currently, management of most protected areas is incompatible with community involvement much beyond Level 3.

Some conservation professionals wonder where to draw the line in serving disadvantaged populations. “We can’t become social service agencies,” one park manager complained at The Urban Imperative workshop at the 2003 World Parks Congress. Joe Edmiston, Executive Director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, responded: “Environmentalists often write off urban ecosystems, but you can’t write off people” (Trzyna 2005b, 110).  

Engage political and community leaders

Organized visits are very effective ways to show political and community leaders the resources, opportunities offered, and problems faced by protected areas in urban and urbanizing settings. Such leaders include not only national, state or provincial, and local government officials, but also heads of local businesses, universities, civic associations, and opinion leaders, especially members of the press.

In working with decision-makers, choice of words is key. In one city council, a policy document that used the words “biodiversity” and “nature” was not well received, but once the term “ecological services” was substituted, the council approved the otherwise identical policy. 

The term “protected area” can give the wrong impression. For many residents of urban and urbanizing regions, it implies such places are off-limits. “Conservation area” might be a better choice of words.

Decision-makers respond to numbers. The more benefits can be quantified, the better: numbers of visitors, numbers of students served, money generated from tourism that stays in the local and national economies, quantities of water generated, and so forth.

Educate conservation colleagues

The doctrines and priorities of agencies responsible for protected areas, and many of their NGO allies, typically relate to protected areas in the hinterlands. The leaders of these organizations need to be educated about the special problems faced by protected areas in urban and urbanizing situations, such as urban-based crime and urban air and water pollution. They also need to be educated about the special opportunities offered by urban protected areas. In addition to providing ecosystem services to cities, and recreation for urban residents, these opportunities include strengthening support among urban voters for large-scale conservation everywhere.

Educate and engage the public

Over the long term, the most important things that can be done to cope with urbanization are educating the public about its impacts on protected areas, and engaging them in finding and carrying out solutions. Here are a few examples of approaches that have worked in various urban and urbanizing places:

·      Work closely with NGOs sophisticated in communication.

 

·      Keep the messages simple, for example, “This is where your household water comes from,” or “Foreigners visiting this park bring money to our local economy.”

 

·      Appeal to loss of local history, culture, and identity as well as loss of nature.

 

·      Don’t be afraid of appealing to emotion. People are motivated more by what they believe and feel than by what they know.

 

·      Help people understand the environment as a whole and how the specific natural place they are visiting is an important part of it. Help them understand the world is as dependent on nature as it ever was.

 

·      Where appropriate, help establish and support a “friends of the park” group — but before doing so, consider that such groups are not always an efficient use of staff time, and explore alternatives, such as working through existing NGOs.

Give special attention to immigrants

Many of the world’s cities have become magnets for immigrants from other countries. Three of the cities discussed above are good examples: Cape Town, Los Angeles, and Nairobi. Newcomers, even those from other parts of the same country, are often unfamiliar with the natural environments of their new homes, environments that can differ radically from their places of origin. For instance, many people moving to Los Angeles from more humid climates see California’s deserts as wastelands. Probably the most successful effort to reach out to immigrants is the United Kingdom’s Mosaic Partnership (Memon 2005, Mosaic 2006).

Demonstrate good environmental behavior

Heavily-visited protected areas in urban and urbanizing environments present an excellent opportunity to promote by example such sustainable practices as recycling, green building, and solar energy. One such opportunity is in Joshua Tree National Park in California, which has more photovoltaic solar cells than all other units of the U.S. National Park System combined.        

Bypass the local establishment if you must

Bruce Babbitt, U.S. Secretary of the Interior during the Clinton Administration (1993-2001), writes that “local officials, with few exceptions, seem unwilling or unable to stand up to the onrushing forces” of urban sprawl. In U.S. terms, he concludes that the ingredients of success are grassroots demand, amplified by writers “giving voice to a strong regional identity,” effective state governors and good state legislation; and a “carrot” in the form of funds from the national government. The examples he gives are Everglades National Park and the New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve (Babbitt 2005, 5, 175-179).

The action recently taken by Kenya’s President to set up a regional development board for Nairobi within the national government is another example of recognizing a need to bypass local authorities.  

Take advantage of international organizations and processes

International organizations, governmental and nongovernmental, can help with problems arising from urbanization around protected areas by providing expert advice, funding, and opportunities to exchange and synthesize experience.

In addition, formal processes under treaties and other intergovernmental agreements can sometimes provide remedies. For example, those involved in protecting Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya are seeking help from the Secretariat of the Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals. Some of those concerned about the poaching of abalone off Cape Town would like to see it listed under the Convention on International Traffic in Endangered Species. The sewage problems along the U.S.-Mexico border are a major concern of the International Boundary and Water Commission, a binational agency. 

Use advanced policy, management, and technical tools

There are well-tested policy, management, and technical tools that can help protected area managers cope with the challenges of urbanization. These include, for example, methods of collaboration, formal evaluation, geographic information systems, and satellite imagery that shows urbanization over time, often dramatically. Such tools could be used more widely.

Use policy and social science research

Although protected area agencies are accustomed to working with natural scientists, they are usually less accustomed to working with experts in such fields as economics, public policy, management, sociology, and health. The Urban Imperative has good examples of such research from Australia (Conner 2005, Senior and Townsend 2005) and South Africa (Roberts et al. 2005).

It is especially useful for protected areas to have ongoing relationships with universities in these fields and encourage faculty members and students to use their sites for education and research. A good example is the University of California’s new Sierra Nevada Institute (UCM 2006), which has formed partnerships with two national parks.

Help organize and participate in training and exchanges

No formal training opportunities have been identified in methods of responding to the specific challenges and opportunities posed by urbanization to protected areas. The IUCN Cities Task Force (IUCN 2006a) is exploring how this can be done most effectively.

Informal exchanges of urban protected area staff have taken place over the past several years, either independently or under the task force’s auspices, for example among Australia, Brazil, Kenya, and South Africa, but they have related more to management of urban protected areas, rather than the challenges of urbanization.

Draw on creative people and their ideas

As mentioned above (under Bypass the local establishment if you must), former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt concluded that writers “giving voice to a strong regional identity” are one of the key ingredients of success in standing up to urban sprawl.

Artists also play a key role, especially landscape and wildlife painters and photographers. Good examples could be given from each of the case studies in this paper.

Also important are ideas about what is possible in specific situations. In discussing citizen participation in their classic book on urban planning, Communitas, Percival and Paul Goodman (1960, 13) write that without such ideas, and concrete examples, citizen participation can be counterproductive or at best a waste of time for all concerned. If people are asked what kind of place they want to live in, “the answers reveal a banality of ideas that is hair-raising, with neither rational thought nor real sentiment, the conception of routine and inertia rather than local patriotism or personal desire, of prejudice and advertising rather than practical experience and dream.”

Adapt buffer zone and wildlife corridor concepts to local circumstances

A commonly used definition of buffer zones is that they are areas peripheral to a protected area “where restrictions are placed upon resource use or special development measures are undertaken to enhance the conservation values of the area” (Sayer 1991, 2). However, a recent review of the literature (Martino 2001) found no agreement among scientists or conservationists on the role of buffer zones. There are two opposing positions. One is that buffer zones are extensions of protected areas; the other sees them as a means of integrating protected areas and people.

In any case, it is difficult to generalize about using either version of the buffer zone concept in urban or urbanizing settings. In some places, it is simply too late to think about a buffer zone: houses, shops, and even factories have been built right up protected area boundaries. Where opportunities still exist to create a buffer zone, it requires regulating the use of privately owned land, buying or trading such land or the development rights to it, or restricting development on land already controlled by a public agency.

In addition, protected areas can be buffer zones for other types of protected areas, for example, those managed for sustainable use of natural ecosystems (IUCN Category VI) can serve as buffer zones for areas managed for ecosystem protection and recreation (Category II) or wilderness protection (Category IIb).

Examples of all these approaches are given in the case studies in this paper.

Those who succeed in creating buffer zones in urbanizing areas are politically skilled, adept at seizing opportunities, and know how to raise money from public and/or private sources. They realize that, although national and state or provincial governments can provide a legal framework, land-use decisions are essentially local and require negotiation parcel by parcel.     

The same principles apply to preserving wildlife corridors between protected areas; however, such corridors must be defined based on specific scientific knowledge of wildlife migration patterns.

In urban and urbanizing locations, farms and ranches are often good buffer zones, especially if farmers and ranchers are willing to adopt sustainable practices. 

Promote alternatives to urban sprawl

Recognizing that many people want a suburban or semi-rural lifestyle, protected area agencies can work with others to promote alternatives to sprawl. In The Experience of Place, Tony Hiss (1990, 179) writes of regions that are mosaics of urban, working landscape, and wild. This is a “cake that you can eat and have too. People can build on a landscape without eating away at it.” Even highly urbanized areas can be made more permeable and hospitable to wild species, as examples from Cape Town and Los Angeles demonstrate.  

Take aggressive action to control invasive species

Urbanization often brings with it invasive plant and animal species that can cause enormous and sometimes irreversible damage to biodiversity within just a few years. The examples from South Africa and Australia show how protected area agencies and local authorities can act aggressively to control them. The Web site of the Global Invasive Species Programme (GISP 2006) has much useful information and links to national and local Web sites.

Host conservation nerve centers in urban protected areas

What could be called “conservation nerve centers” have been established in several urban protected areas. Such centers promote synergy among agencies and NGOs by housing their offices and providing meeting space. One, in Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, is described above. In California, there are similar complexes in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco.

Work for transparency

Almost everywhere in the world, political influence undermines efforts to control unwise development around protected areas. Sometimes this influence is bought with outright bribery or even threat of violence. More often, it is obtained by trading favors or giving money to election campaigns. As former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (2006) puts it, elected officials simply “stay on the good side of those who have the money to give.”

In many countries, this is a very sensitive, even a dangerous issue. However, opportunities may arise to report corruption or make alliances with those who can do so. There is a growing international anti-corruption movement (TI 2006).

Accept that it’s probably not “already being done”

An all-too-typical response to hearing about an innovative program is “it’s already being done” or “we’re already doing that.” Helping our neighbors? “We’re doing that.” But look at the serious commitments taken on by Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy in California. Controlling invasive species? “It’s already being done.” But look at the aggressive programs in Australia and South Africa.

Chances are that much more could be done than is being done.

6.  CONCLUSIONS

Bridging the gaps

The conservation community should pay more attention to the challenges and opportunities posed by urbanization, but four gaps make it difficult to do so:

·      Protected area agencies tend to be dominated by large parks in the hinterlands. The special needs of protected areas in urban and urbanizing settings are often not well appreciated within these agencies, nor are the benefits such areas provide to large numbers of citizens, and the opportunities they offer to build public support for protected areas everywhere.

·      Separate sets of people and institutions work on urban and conservation issues. It is difficult to bring them together because they have different points of view and are unaccustomed to working with each other. This gap exists between sets of agencies and NGOs; and in research, publications, professional education, and professional associations, as well as in practice.

·      In addition, separate groups of people and organizations tend to work on green (nature protection) and brown (pollution control) issues. In urban and urbanizing locations, these issues often coincide.

·      There is often a lack of trust between protected area managers and those with whom they engage. The latter include local authorities and interests (businesses, farmers, traditional communities, etc.), conservation NGOs, and recreational users such as mountaineers and campers.

The conservation community should consider how these gaps can be bridged in different situations. At the international level, the Task Force on Cities and Protected Areas of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas (IUCN 2006a) has made a start. The 4th IUCN World Conservation Congress, to be held in Barcelona, Spain, in 2008, offers an opportunity to engage others in these discussions.

Making urban protected areas a global conservation priority

Global criteria for priority conservation targets, such as those listed in IUCN World Parks Congress Recommendation 5.04, “Building Comprehensive and Effective Protected Area Systems” (IUCN 2003), emphasize “large intact ecosystems” and “globally threatened species.” Protected areas in urban and urbanizing settings may not meet these biological criteria, but have a critical role in building and sustaining public support for conservation. This is especially true of protected areas in or near cities that are political, economic, or media centers. Protected areas in urban and urbanizing environments should be factored into global conservation priorities.

Sharing experience

There are no cookie-cutter solutions to the problems and opportunities posed by urbanization. Answers depend on national and local situations. However, there are many innovative ideas worth sharing. This can be done through international exchanges, telling stories of success (and failure) in depth, and holding seminar-workshops to exchange experience. This has started to happen under IUCN auspices.

Moving from awareness to action

The importance of building awareness and understanding among leaders and the general public is recognized in the conservation movement, but how can understanding lead to action? This is the biggest challenge, and it is essentially a political one.

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