From: Science and Development Network
Published July 11, 2008 08:50 AM

by Catarina Chagas

Protected conservation areas, previously thought to negatively impact marginalised rural communities, actually attract human settlement — a situation that could risk the very biodiversity that protected areas (PAs) seek to protect.

These are the findings of a paper published in Science last week (4 July).

The researchers assessed population growth within ten kilometre 'buffers' at the edges of 306 PAs in 45 African and Latin American countries, and compared them with background rural rates in the same countries.

Average human population growth rates on PA edges were nearly double the average growth rate in rural areas with similar ecological conditions. The results were strongest in Latin America.

"In the vast majority of parks, human growth rates are faster on protected area edges than similar regions away from parks. We did not anticipate that we would find such a strong result," George Wittemyer, a researcher at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the authors of the paper, told SciDev.Net.

For the full article, please see: http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/37626