O valor das áreas protegidas para além da conservação da natureza: identificação de assets em unidades de conservação federais

Abstract

The implementation of Protected Areas (PAs) is recognized worldwide as a key element for the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem services and has expanded rapidly over the last century, despite the challenges in terms of effectiveness, management, social impacts, etc. These areas have clear social and economic costs that are increasingly difficult to justify during times of increasing food insecurity and financial crisis. It has recently been suggested that framing protected areas in terms of their biophysical, human, infrastructure, institutional and cultural assets might provide a stronger platform for both increasing their political resilience and generating financial investment. Many such assets are already recognized by PA managers, although they are neglected or underutilized. Management Plans (PMs) are key elements for achieved the objectives of creating a PA; presents a diagnosis of the area; and broadly defines the focus of management actions and a resource allocation. Thus, we assumed that information on the recognition and exploitation of PA assets could be extracted from the management plans. We applied a recently proposed asset framework to management plans (MPs) for Brazilian Federal Protected Areas, and we compare the approach of the assets between the categories and groups of PAs. 119 PMs of Full Protection and Sustainable Use, among the categories: National Parks, Ecological Stations, National Forests and Environmental Protected Areas were revised and we obtained a total of 4,108 assets. We did not observe a difference in the number of assets among categories or groups of PAs, but among the five classes of assets between PAs there were correlation and differences. It should be noted that the absence of an asset from the management plan could be due to: i) the asset being absent within the park; ii) the asset being present within the park, but not deemed relevant during the elaboration of the management plan; iii) gaps in the diagnostic during MPs elaboration, or; iv) the asset not being recognized by the people who draft the MPs. We discuss how the PA assets approach can contribute with the PA management and improve their effectiveness.