Journal article
Comparing expedient and proactive approaches to the planning of protected area networks on Borneo
- Abstract:
- Protected areas are an important tool for wildlife conservation; however, research is increasingly revealing both biases and inadequacies in the global protected area network. One common criticism is that protected areas are frequently located in remote, high-elevation regions, which may face fewer threats compared to more accessible locations. To explore the conservation implications of this issue, we consider a thought experiment with seven different counterfactual scenarios for the Sunda clouded leopard’s conservation on Borneo. This allows us to examine two contrasting paradigms for conservation: “proactive conservation” which prioritises areas with high biodiversity and high risk of development, and “expedient conservation” which focusses on areas with the lowest development risk. We select clouded leopards as our focal species not only because of their emerging conservation importance, but also because, as top predators, they represent both keystone species and ambassadors for wider forest biodiversity. Furthermore, a published analysis of the likely impacts of forest loss in their habitat provides a benchmark for evaluating the modelled outcomes of alternative hypothetical conservation scenarios. We find that, across all metrics, expedient reserve design offered few benefits over the business-as-usual scenario, in contrast to the much greater conservation effectiveness of proactive protected area design. This paper sheds light on the challenging trade-offs between conservation goals and the competing land uses essential for the economic development and well-being of local communities.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.7MB, Terms of use)
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(Preview, Supplementary materials, pdf, 391.0KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s44185-024-00052-8
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- npj Biodiversity More from this journal
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 20
- Publication date:
- 2024-08-21
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-07-11
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2731-4243
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
-
2025066
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2025066
- Source identifiers:
-
2203757
- Deposit date:
-
2024-08-21
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Macdonald et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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