Local people value environmental services provided by forested parks

Garnering support from local people is critical for maintaining ecologically viable and functional protected areas. However, empirical data illustrating local people’s awareness of the importance of nature’s services is limited; hence possibly impeding effective ecosystem (environmental)-services based conservation efforts. Using data from five protected forests in four developing Southeast Asian countries, we provide evidence that local people living near parks value a wide range of environmental services, including cultural, provisioning, and regulating services, provided by the forests. Local people with longer residency valued environmental services more. Educated as well as poor people valued forest ecosystem services more. Conservation education has some influence on people’s environmental awareness. For conservation endeavors to be successful, large-scale transmigration programs should be avoided and local people must be provided with alternative sustenance opportunities and basic education in addition to environmental outreach to reduce their reliance on protected forests and to enhance conservation support.

...Several contributions in this volume have stressed the importance of alternative sustenance opportunities and of financial incentives for conservation endeavours to be successful (Sodhi et al. 2009; Wilcove and Koh 2010)...
...Ignored in such essentialising representations of communities and their geographical space are the often large influxes of migrant settlers (Forsyth and Walker 2008, p. 208; von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2007) or the effects of large scale, government sponsored transmigration programs as that of Indonesia (Murray Li 2007, p. 259; Sodhi et al. 2009; Rist et al. 2010)...
...If this leads to a concentration on royalty collection by various regional and central administrations, then it is important that such benefits are passed on and that governments move beyond mere national development goals, so that communities at the grassroots level see sufficient incentives to uphold practices regarded as important for conservation (Sodhi et al. 2009)...

Keywords (7)

Local people value environmental services provided by forested parks,10.1007/s10531-009-9745-9,Biodiversity and Conservation,Navjot S. Sodhi,Tien Ming

Citation Context (3)

David S. Woodruff. Biogeography and conservation in Southeast Asia: how 2.7 million years...

Lian Pin Koh, et al. Conserving Southeast Asia’s imperiled biodiversity: scientific, manage...

Christoph Antons. The role of traditional knowledge and access to genetic resources in b...

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Citations (6)

Integrated high-dimensional cortical structural marker for very mild Alzheimer's disease

Copper-treatment increases the cellular GSH content and accelerates GSH export from cultured rat astrocytes

Biogeography and conservation in Southeast Asia: how 2.7 million years of repeated environmental fluctuations affect today’s patterns and the future of the remaining refugial-phase biodiversity (Citations: 10)

Invasive species in Southeast Asia: the knowledge so far (Citations: 6)

Conserving Southeast Asia’s imperiled biodiversity: scientific, management, and policy challenges (Citations: 3)


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