Protected Areas and World Heritage Programme

1997 United Nations List of Protected Areas

The United Nations List of Protected Areas is an essential reference document for all who want to understand the progress made in responding to the challenges of biodiversity loss and other environmental threats around the world. It is a record of extraordinary human achievement over 125 years - a commitment by nations, peoples, groups and individuals to safeguard areas of land and sea from destruction. Protected areas represent human ideals at their best - they express a long term vision and a broad sense of responsibility towards people and nature.

This version of the list is the twelfth in a series, each recording steady expansion in the total area protected. There are now some 12,754 areas in the UN List, covering almost 8% of the land surface of the world (a far smaller proportion of the oceans is protected). Compared to the previous, 1993 edition of the of the UN List, this report includes 2,933 more sites covering 3.9 million more square kilometres. At the end of the century it can be said that practically every country has protected areas; some have a very sophisticated network of sites.

The UN List is produced through a partnership between IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) - formerly CNPPA - and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC). WCPA has helped WCMC in the collection of the data, but more importantly has redesigned the protected areas management categories system upon which the current list is based. The new system was adopted in 1994. It includes just six categories, the first five of which are similar to those used previously. Category VI is new: areas managed mainly for the sustainable use of natural ecosystems (or Managed Resource Protected Areas), thus recognising the increasingly close link between protection and sustainable use.

Another innovation in the new list is the inclusion of sites designated in the European Union under the Birds Directive - thereby recognising the competence which the EU has in the field of conservation. It is also good to be able to record our thanks to the European Environment Agency and the Council of Europe for their help in collecting the statistics from this region, under their collaborative agreement with WCMC.

There are some other changes. The title of the 1997 version, United Nations List of Protected Areas, omits specific reference to "national parks" since these are only one type of protected area; (a similar change has been made in the name of our Commission). It is also the first version of the List which has been prepared without support from a United Nations body, although, because of the List's genesis, the title still bears that organisation's name. Thanks are due to the Government of Norway and to Taiwan's Council of Agriculture for their generous support towards the costs of production and publication.

WCPA is only too aware that many of the protected areas listed here are poorly resourced and inadequately managed - a few indeed are no more than paper parks. A major emphasis in WCPA's programme will now be devoted to developing methods to help countries and site managers improve management effectiveness. Hopefully some of the results can be fed into future versions of the UN List, thereby enhancing its utility.

More than ever, the long term welfare, perhaps survival, of people depends on sound, ecologically-based management of the environment. For this, a world-wide network of well-managed protected areas of all types is essential. The UN List records the progress we have made towards that goal, and helps us understand the scale of the task still before us.

Adrian Phillips