Is past research on the effectiveness of protected areas flawed?
The researchers raise some red flags about past studies, which have found that protected areas can be effective in halting forest clearance. Past studies have largely reached those conclusions by finding that deforestation rates in parks are lower than adjacent unprotected areas. But this may not be an apples-to-apples comparison. For example, montane protected areas are often at higher elevation and inherently less accessible than adjacent unprotected forest. The new study avoids this methodological bias by comparing deforestation rates on the same land before and after designation as a protected area. According to the authors, only three other studies have taken this approach and they all found that ecological degradation remained constant or increased after the designation of a protected area. However this study runs into a methodological problem of its own – it may be that social or economic conditions had changed in the period of 1992-2002 and deforestation would have been even wo
