There are not enough national parks around the world. Or better put, there is not enough active protection of nature, which we typically expect in the form of a national park. But before we blindly embrace the formula, we need to understand how a national park works. …and even more why it can fail.
National capacity
It is relatively easy to recognize a territory for its nature and label it as a national park. The hard part is making sure that everyone accepts this new status. This comes with communication, the offering of alternative revenue streams for people in and around the forest, and also enforcement when necessary. A territory that gets recognized as a national park but that does not receive active monitoring and management is cursed. It becomes a vacuum because private parties are not allowed or incentivized to protect and the government didn’t foresee the operational capacity. Labeled as a national park, but unprotected on the ground, deforestation just continues.
Perverse incentives from the carbon offset market
Today, carbon offset gets recognized for either the replanting of degraded forests or for the protection of actively threatened forests. ‘Actively threatened’ is a status that provokes more questions than answers. The illusion of the so-called passive protection of remoteness makes it even more difficult. This means that for ‘unthreatened’ — whatever that means — forests, there is no offset program available. Assigning a national park status is therefore sometimes the worst you can do. The very status makes it unthreatened on paper, even if reality is different. It complicates even more the access to offset revenue, which is crucial to set up active conservation.
National parks are a great concept and we hope to see more of them. But they need the right context to succeed. That means that global offset certification systems need to include àll forests in its approval. Governments setting up national parks need to provide infrastructure and capacity to actively protect or they should leave open a revenue opportunity for the private sector to do it for them.
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