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Natural Solutions: Protected Areas Helping People Cope with Climate Change
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Summary
This report provides an exhaustive overview of the literature regarding the role protected areas play in reducing emissions from land use change, and sustaining ecosystem services that will be vital to reducing the vulnerability of humans to climate change. Section 3, Adaptation – The role of protected areas, looks at reducing the impacts of natural disasters, safeguarding water, addressing health issues and biodiversity conservation and maintaining ecosystem resilience.
Year: 2010
Type: Report
Authors: Nigel Dudley, Sue Stolton,
Alexander Belokurov, Linda Krueger,
Nik Lopoukhine, Kathy MacKinnon,
Trevor Sandwith and Nik Sekhran
Published by: IUCN-WCPA, TNC, UNDP, WCS,
The World Bank and WWF
Some salient points from Natural Solutions: Protected Areas Helping People Cope with Climate Change:
- Resilience refers to the ability of an ecosystem to maintain its functions (biological, chemical, and physical) in the face of disturbance. A climate resilient ecosystem would retain its functions in the face of climate change. Measures are needed to maintain the resilience of ecosystems under new climatic conditions—so that they can continue to supply essential services including carbon storage and sequestration, and ecosystem services important to adaptation including disaster risk management (see Section 3).
- Sound stewardship of land, coastal and marine ecosystems will in consequence be critical to addressing climate risk
- Protected Areas management will need to be adapted, to address mitigation and adaptation needs, in addition to biodiversity management objectives.
- Ecosystem based solutions are not a panacea—and should not replace attempts to reduce emissions from fossil fuel combustion, but, rather, should be integrated into national mitigation and adaptation strategies aimed at promoting low carbon and climate resilient development.
- Protected Areas constitute one of UNDP’s flagship signature programmes in the BD focus area: our agenda is to unleash their economic potential for sustainable development. They are one land governance system, and can only every be part of ecosystem based mitigation and adaptation efforts. A major part of our work will be on assisting countries to design and manage PAs to conserve biodiversity, to promote sustainable development and reduce greenhouse gasses and attenuate climate risk. This constitutes a new challenge for the future.
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