A groundbreaking study from researchers in Georgia unexpectedly finds that protected areas in two developing countries - Thailand and Costa Rica - may have helped relieve poverty in nearby communities over time.

Global efforts to protect nature are gaining some headway (for example see the REDD initiative). Setting up protected areas, in essence chunks of nature that are left untouched by humans, is a tool often touted as the best mechanism to do this. However, the evidence for protected areas really "protecting" nature are equivocal. In many cases the areas are too small and the protection status too poorly enforced for any positive effects to occur. Another controversial issue is how these protected areas affect the economic development of neighboring human communities. Some people argue that protected areas make poverty worse in local communities by restricting access to important economic activities like agriculture and logging. On the other hand, others have argued that locals may benefit from improved ecosystem services and associated ecotourism.

Moist cloudforest in the Monteverde National Park in Costa Rica. Photo by Miran Kegl/azote.se

The big problem in resolving this controversy is the lack studies investigating it with of good empirical data that doesn't suffer from a range of confounding variables. For example, since parks are often placed in very remote areas with poor infrastructure, the local communities around the area may already have a predisposition to poverty that is unrelated to the parks. A consequence of this is that many studies have documented high poverty levels associated with the establishment of protected areas.

The recent study, led by Kwaw Andam of the International Food Policy Institute in Washington and published in the journal PNAS, navigates around the above problems by controlling for confounding effects of geographic and baseline characteristics. In essence, the authors judge the effects of parks on local communities by comparing villages near protected areas with villages far from protected areas but that have matched characteristics such as pre-protection poverty, forest cover, land productivity, and access to transportation and market infrastructure. Another improvement on previous studies is that the authors apply poverty measures based on household-level data, which is the best comparative indicator of human welfare.

The results were surprising; the study found that compared to the control communities, villages adjacent to protected areas had less poverty relative to baseline levels. Based on this, the study concludes that protected areas in Costa Rica and Thailand were responsible for reducing the poverty level approximately 10% and 30% respectively.

This is a great study, in that it investigates this contentious issue at a deeper level than most previous efforts. However some caveats must be raised. The results could be an artifact of wealthier people migrating in to take advantage of new economic opportunities from tourism associated with the parks and displacing poor people in the original communities. The authors argue, however, that the protection of biodiverse areas may have helped the poor because of eco-tourism and the building of infrastructure, such as new roadways, which may have provided new economic opportunities. Despite the promising results of this study, it is clear that more research is needed to shed light on these finer scale but critically important details.