Protected areas deliver for birds and people – but the benefits take time
A major new study of South Africa’s protected areas provides compelling evidence that conservation and economic development need not be competing objectives. Instead, protected areas can generate substantial benefits for biodiversity, local economies and tourism, with some of their most important returns accumulating gradually over many decades.
The research, published as a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, examined the long-term impacts of South Africa’s protected-area network on bird biodiversity, household income and tourism. The study was led by Gabriel Englander of the World Bank, with Dennis Engist of the University of British Columbia leading much of the quantitative analysis, and was undertaken under the guidance and supervision of Frederik Noack of the University of British Columbia. BirdLife South Africa’s Alan Lee contributed ornithological and SABAP2 expertise to the project.
Citizen science reveals the biodiversity benefits of protection
For BirdLife South Africa, one of the most significant aspects of the study is its use of data from the Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2) to assess how protected areas affect bird communities.
SABAP2 is one of southern Africa’s longest-running citizen-science biodiversity monitoring programmes. Since its launch in 2007, volunteer atlasers have accumulated millions of spatially explicit bird records using a standardised survey protocol. These data are increasingly important not only for mapping bird distributions, but also for detecting population change, informing Red List assessments and testing broader questions about conservation effectiveness.
The new study used these extensive data to compare observed bird diversity within protected areas with estimates of what those same landscapes might look like today had they not been protected. This counterfactual approach is important because protected areas are not located randomly: historically, they were often established in places that differed substantially from surrounding landscapes even before protection.
The results indicate that protected areas make a measurable contribution to maintaining South Africa’s bird biodiversity. Importantly, however, different components of the protected-area network play different and complementary roles. National parks and some of the country’s oldest protected areas appear particularly important for Critically Endangered and Endangered bird species, while other forms of protection make important contributions to other groups of species. The result reinforces the value of maintaining a diverse national network rather than judging protected areas solely by a single model of ownership or management.
Conservation benefits grow with time
Perhaps the study’s most striking overall finding is that the benefits of protected areas are not instantaneous.
Across both the biodiversity and economic analyses, recently established protected areas showed relatively small effects, whereas areas that had been protected for many decades delivered substantially larger benefits. The authors argue that studies concentrating only on recently proclaimed reserves may therefore substantially underestimate the true long-term value of conservation.
This finding makes intuitive ecological sense. Preventing habitat conversion today does not necessarily produce an immediate difference between a protected landscape and its surroundings. Over subsequent decades, however, land-use change, development and habitat degradation can accumulate outside protected areas, while protected ecosystems retain more of their ecological integrity.
In other words, the value of protecting land today may only become fully apparent to the next generation.
Protected areas and the economy
The economic results are equally noteworthy. Using a machine-learning approach to estimate how household incomes might have developed in the absence of protected areas, the researchers estimate that South Africa’s protected-area network is associated with approximately R300 billion in additional annual household income, equivalent to roughly 10% of South Africa’s 2011 GDP. Expressed in employment terms, the authors estimate this effect as approximately 7.6 million job-equivalents.
A separate tourism analysis estimated that visits to South Africa’s national parks generate around R7.7 billion per year in recreational value, in 2023 rand, for domestic and international visitors.
These estimates should not be interpreted as suggesting that every protected area produces the same economic benefits, or that difficult trade-offs around conservation never occur. Rather, at a national scale, the analysis provides little support for the idea that protected areas necessarily impose a choice between biodiversity conservation and economic development.
A powerful return on citizen science
For BirdLife South Africa, the study also demonstrates the extraordinary downstream value of long-term biodiversity monitoring.
The bird component was only possible because thousands of citizen scientists have spent years systematically collecting SABAP2 data across South Africa. Individual bird lists submitted during a morning’s atlasing may seem small in isolation, but collectively they form a national biodiversity dataset capable of answering questions that extend far beyond mapping where individual species occur.
Here, those records have helped quantify something particularly important: whether the decision to protect landscapes actually leaves South Africa with more birds than it would otherwise have had.
The answer from this study is encouraging. Protected areas matter, their benefits extend beyond reserve boundaries and biodiversity alone, and their full value may take decades to emerge.
That is a strong argument not only for maintaining South Africa’s existing protected-area network, but also for continuing to expand and strengthen it for the future.
The full report can be found here: https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/099718007232614921?deliveryName=DM286603
