A Proposal to Modify the Latest IUCN-CMP Unified Classification of Direct Threats and Conservation Actions for Biodiversity Conservation into a New List of Threats to Protected Areas = A Proposal to Modify the Latest IUCN-CMP Unified Classification of Direct Threats and Conservation Actions for Biodiversity Conservation into a New List of Threats to Protected Areas

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Discussion on threats to protected areas (PAs) began to be largely held in the early 1980s with the IUCN study on the world`s 43 most threatened PAs. The discussion started evolving along with the introduction of the concept of protected area management effectiveness (PAME) late 1990s, and those of evidence-based conservation and key biodiversity areas as site protection targets several years later. Based on the third concept, the discussion on the threats to PAs and that on biodiversity began to converge and in 2006, IUCN and Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) launched the Unified Classification of Direct Threats (UCDTs) and Conservation Actions (UCCAs) (Version 1.0) for biodiversity conservation, based heavily on evidence. The first global study of PAME two years later almost entirely applied the threats classification scheme to PAs. However, even though the main goal of a PA can still be said to conserve biodiversity to date, there should be distinction between the threats to biodiversity and those to PAs. Focusing merely on conserving biodiversity may lack proper attention to things such as 1) governance and planning to help conservation activities be effective, 2) local community engagement in PA management, and 3) cultural resources that the conservation site embraces. Little attention to those things turns them into threat factors, so they should be included into a new list of threats to PAs that is proposed here. This study argues the legitimacy of them entering the list. Around the main literature like the latest UCDTs (version 3.1), UCCAs (version 2.0), the modified UCDTs utilized in the second and the latest global study of PAME in 2010 and one of the latest PAME reports published by Korean National Park Service (KNPS) and IUCN in 2009 (which is also the easiest for the author to discuss with people around him), about 30 journal articles, reports and online sources were reviewed to reorganize the threats to PAs and to support that the above-mentioned three things are qualified to become new threat factors if appropriate attention is not paid. Lack of Governance and planning, local community involvement in PA management and cultural resource conservation should all be regarded as threats to PAs. IUCN has long worked to attract attention to the importance of the first two items, but they have more been seen as something to make efforts to implemented, not a type of threat in case of little existence. Cultural resource conservation is recently receiving increasing attention particularly in Asian PAs since the conservation philosophy of Asia considers nature and human beings as one entity. The proposed new list of the threats to PAs with those three items hopefully helps capture a picture of more comprehensive status of the threats to PAs.