PoWPA Activities and best practices

This page presents the 13 priority PoWPA Activities, for which the project has been providing country assistance. Click below the corresponding activity to access the guidance, lessons, and best practices emerging from the project's implementation in 47 countries.

 

Activity 1.1.1

Establish time-bound and measurable (e.g. numerical) national/regional protected area targets and indicators by 2006.

Activity 1.1.4

Conduct, with the full and effective participation of indigenous and local communities and relevant stakeholders, national-level reviews of existing and potential forms of conservation, and their suitability for achieving biodiversity conservation goals, including innovative types of governance for protected areas that need to be recognized and promoted through legal, policy, financial institutional and community mechanisms, such as protected areas run by government agencies at various levels, co-managed protected areas, private protected areas, indigenous and local community conserved areas.

Activity 1.1.5

Complete protected area system gap analyses at national and regional levels based on the requirements for representative systems of protected areas that adequately conserve terrestrial, marine and inland water biodiversity and ecosystems. National plans should also be developed to provide interim measures to protect highly threatened or highly valued areas wherever this is necessary.

Activity 1.2.1

Evaluate national and sub-national experiences and lessons learned on specific efforts to integrate protected areas into broader land- and seascapes and sectoral plans and strategies such as poverty reduction strategies.

Activity 2.1.2

Recognize and promote a broad set of protected area governance types related to their potential for achieving biodiversity conservation goals in accordance with the Convention, which may include areas conserved by indigenous and local communities and private nature reserves. The promotion of these areas should be by legal and/or policy, financial and community mechanisms.

Activity 3.1.1

Identify legislative and institutional gaps and barriers that impede the effective establishment and management of protected areas, and by 2009, effectively address these gaps and barriers.

Activity 3.1.2

Conduct national-level assessments of the contributions of protected areas, considering as appropriate environmental services, to the country's economy and culture, and to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals at the national level; and integrate the use of economic valuation and natural resource accounting tools into national planning processes in order to identify the hidden and non-hidden economic benefits provided by protected areas and who appropriates these benefits.

Activity 3.1.5

Identify and remove perverse incentives and inconsistencies in sectoral policies that increase pressure on protected areas, or take action to mitigate their perverse effects. Whenever feasible, redirect these to positive incentives for conservation.

Activity 3.1.6

Identify and establish positive incentives that support the integrity and maintenance of protected areas and the involvement of indigenous and local communities and stakeholders in conservation.

Activity 3.2.1

Complete national protected-area capacity needs assessments, and establish capacity building programs on the basis of these assessments including the creation of curricula, resources and programs for the sustained delivery of protected areas management training.

Activity 3.4.1

Conduct a national-level study of the effectiveness in using existing financial resources and of financial needs related to the national system of protected areas and identify options for meeting these needs through a mixture of national and international resources and taking into account the whole range of possible funding instruments, such as public funding, debt for nature swaps, elimination of perverse incentives and subsidies, private funding, taxes and fees for ecological services.

Activity 4.1.2

Develop and implement an efficient, long-term monitoring system of the outcomes being achieved through protected area systems in relation to the goals and targets of the PoWPA.

Activity 4.2.1

Develop and adopt appropriate methods, standards, criteria and indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of protected area management and governance, and set up a related database, taking into account the IUCN-WCPA framework for evaluating management effectiveness, and other relevant methodologies, which should be adapted to local conditions.