Biodiversity-related ecosystem services

Biodiversity is being depleted at an alarming rate (UN 2010). This is a problem, not only because biodiversity is intrinsically valuable, but also because biodiversity is the underlying asset from which all ecosystem services are produced. Biodiversity is best conserved in protected areas and national parks (Bruner et al. 2001). Establishing protected areas often has significant consequences for local communities. On the one hand, negative impacts occur when local communities are denied access to natural resources or are relocated to more marginal parts (Cernea and Schmidt-Soltau 2006). But even when communities are allowed to continue living near or inside protected areas the impacts of protected area establishment can be great: increased populations of wildlife increase crop damages and sometimes even cause personal injuries (Woodroffe et al. 2005) and the resource-use restrictions inside protected areas limit resource harvests for subsistence use (Wilkie et al. 2006). On the other hand, recent studies indicate that protected area establishment can also have positive livelihood effects: protected areas attract ecotourism, which can generate significant revenues at regional scale (Andam et al. 2010, Sims 2010). If these revenues trickle down to the local level, then protected area establishment can also have positive livelihood impacts at local scale.