Climate Change and Protected Areas Management

Dear Colleagues,

The establishment of protected areas has become a widely-used approach for biodiversity conservation around the world. Although the conventional approach to protected areas management relied on government ownership and management authority, recent decades have seen a shift toward the use of alternative institutional mechanisms, including communities, the private sector, and co-management networks. While these evolving institutional mechanisms represent progress toward the promotion of good governance in protected areas management, there is still the need to devise mechanisms for building resilient protected areas systems with the capacity to promote the conservation of biological and socio-cultural diversity in the face of uncertainties.

The need to account for uncertainties in protected areas management has gradually been receiving attention in recent years. Whereas the conventional approach to protected areas management was informed by the balance of nature paradigm, new insights from the field of ecology have highlighted the dynamic inter-dependence between humans and nature across space and time. As complex social-ecological systems, protected areas are subject to the influences of multiple drivers of change, including climate change impacts. There is accumulating evidence that suggests that human-caused climate change is already resulting in significant impacts on ecosystem health and human-wellbeing. However, there is also the recognition that the effective management of protected areas could constitute an integral part of a broader societal strategy to address climate change. The two broad policy responses to climate change are: mitigation, which aims at reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and adaptation, which refers to the mechanisms by which societies learn and adjust their social, economic and ecological systems in order to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change and to take advantage of opportunities.

The focus of this Special Issue is on societal adaptation to climate change impacts on protected areas. The scope of the Special Issue covers review manuscripts, theory-driven and policy-oriented manuscripts, as well as manuscripts reporting empirical data on climate change adaptation in various types and categories of protected areas in various parts of the world. Of particular interest are manuscripts offering theoretical insights on the process and determinants of climate change adaptation at the community, regional, national and other levels; manuscripts on the knowledge systems and institutional mechanisms for managing the impacts of climate change on protected areas; as well as manuscripts that provide methodological insights for assessing climate change impacts and adaptive capacity across multiple scales. The purpose is to generate debate among scientists and policy-makers on appropriate theoretical, methodological, and policy tools for managing protected areas in the face of climate change impacts.

Dr. Kofi Akamani
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• adaptive capacity
• climate change adaptation
• community resilience
• national parks
• protected areas
• wilderness