The World's Protected Areas Status, Values, and Prospects in the Twenty-first Century

About this book

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 60,000 parks, nature reserves, and other land and marine areas currently designated as protected areas.

Now covering about 12 percent of the Earth's surface, protected areas provide a wide range of valuable ecological benefits: they contribute to biodiversity conservation; supply food, water, and other resources; regulate weather patterns; contain potential medicines; generate income at local, regional, and national levels through 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.

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Biography

Stuart Chape is Program Manager--Island Ecosystems Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Program (SPREP), and formerly Head--World Heritage and Protected Areas Program, UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Mark D. Spalding, lead author of the popular World Atlas of Coral Reefs (UC Press) and author of A Guide to the Coral Reefs of the Caribbean (UC Press), has worked extensively with the United Nations Environment Program and is now Senior Marine Scientist in the The Nature Conservancy's Global Conservation Approach Team. Martin D. Jenkins is Senior Advisor, Species Conservation at UNEP's World Conservation Monitoring Centre.