Change the IUCN Protected Area Categories to Reflect Biodiversity Outcomes

In 1872, United States President Ulysses Grant set aside 2.2 million acres of wilderness, primarily for recreational purposes, as the first formally recognized protected area (PA)—Yellowstone National Park. The concept took hold slowly over the next hundred years, and PAs are now recognized as essential to biodiversity conservation [1] and as irreplaceable tools for species and habitat management and recovery. Today, over 100,000 sites (11.5% of the Earth’s land surface) are listed in the World Database on Protected Areas [2]. PAs have always been recognized as having broad roles, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) included the role of conserving biodiversity in its definition: “An area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other effective means” [3]. Despite this recognition of biodiversity’s prime significance, when the IUCN established the classification system for PAs (Box 1) in 1994, it categorized them based on their primary management objectives rather than on their biodiversity features (and associated cultural resources). Each category is defined by broad management approaches to be delivered through appropriate techniques for, among other purposes, regulating visitors, educating the public, controlling the utilization of natural resources, and restoring degraded biological communities. The category system was established to reduce the confusion that had arisen from the adoption of many different terms to describe different kinds of PAs, to provide international standards for global and regional accounting and comparisons, and to provide a framework for collecting, handling, and disseminating data about PAs [3]. Despite these advances, the PA category system retains a fundamental flaw: because its focus on management intent is unrelated to the basic goal of promoting the persistence of biodiversity, categories do not reflect the role of PAs in biodiversity conservation. For example, the priority management objectives for category V (“preservation of species and genetic diversity”) and category IV (“maintenance of environmental services”) are aimed at preserving species. However, without explicitly identifying the biodiversity elements or processes to be preserved and the outcomes to be measured—for example, which species or vegetation types are to be conserved, the improvement in viability of an endangered population to be achieved, the trend in community composition proposed, or the nature of ecosystem processes to be maintained—these objectives remain imprecise, the necessary management activities difficult to define, and the outcomes not amenable to quantitative review. Furthermore, under the current IUCN categories of PAs, Yellowstone National Park falls into category II, and presumably its primary management objectives are, among others available in the list for category II, the following: (a) to protect natural and scenic areas for spiritual, scientific, recreational, and tourist purposes; (b) to perpetuate, in as natural a state as possible, representative examples of biotic Change the IUCN Protected Area Categories to Reflect Biodiversity Outcomes