Abstract
Mountain Protected Areas (MPAs) represent a significant share of global protected areas. Often they are managed as systems, rejecting the traditional view of them as “islands of nature”, fenced off from the outside world. In mountain regions, affected by depopulation and relative economic deprivation, networks of protected areas (NPAs) qualify as suitable actors for participating in implementing social and economic policies additionally to their classical objectives of maintaining biological and cultural diversity, e.g. through ecosystem services. The EU Commission Action Plan for Nature, People and the Economy (2017), devoted to reaching EU 2020 goals on biodiversity, identifies as its priority: “ensuring better coherence of biodiversity conservation with broader socio-economic objectives”. Aiming to achieve that, NPAs can be a governance instrument suitable to induce sustainable territorial development. The Authors aim to present the main results of a targeted analysis promoted by ESPON focused on MPAs in Europe including case studies from the Alps, the Apennines and Bulgaria. The results of the research highlight the value and the promising opportunities offered by mountain NPAs for implementing “green infrastructure” policies in several fields through a functional approach built on a coherent system of areal components, where PAs are core elements. Possible action fields of NPAs include nature conservation & ecological connectivity, planning for sustainable use of natural resources (e.g. through agriculture, forestry, fishing, human settlement, recreation, etc.), and green economy policies for European SMEs being notably desirable for mountain regions. NPAs show a greater value if considered as tools for integrated landscape management aimed to developing regional green economies and infrastructures in territories in need of novel approaches to economic development, based on the sustainable use of their assets and ecosystem services.
https://www.uibk.ac.at/congress/imc2019/