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Conservation areas around the world face severe staff shortages, study shows

Students of the University of Hawaiʻi Marine Option
University of Hawaiʻi
Students of the University of Hawaiʻi Marine Option

New research shows that protected conservation areas around the world are facing severe staff shortages. The study focused on lands registered in the World Database on Protected Areas.

Eleanor Sterling, one of the study’s co-authors and the director of the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, said there’s “no place where there's sufficient personnel to run these large areas.”

The study found that in order to meet the current need, protected areas would need five times as many staff.

"Oceania, or the Pacific, is one of the areas of the world where there are the least number of people per area. This is in part because there are very few protected areas and some of them are vast, and in part because there's not as much data as we would like coming out of Oceania," Sterlin said.

"So one of the most important things is to extend this study and to start to think about what areas are managed by Indigenous management systems. So there might be some really important areas of the world that are being effectively managed using local techniques that don't qualify for these international metrics of what is a conserved area," she told HPR.

Sterling noted that effective management of natural spaces includes human needs, such as access to food resources and cultural practices.

Savannah Harriman-Pote is the energy and climate change reporter. She is also the lead producer of HPR's "This Is Our Hawaiʻi" podcast. Contact her at sharrimanpote@hawaiipublicradio.org.
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