The key importance of protected areas and their design to environmental conservation, sustained economic development and quality of life in an uncertain climactic future

It is increasingly being realised that protected areas are of key importance not only in direct environmental conservation within the area that they occupy, but also in environmental conservation in the surrounding areas, and in supporting sustainable economic development and the quality of life in the countries within which they lie. The success of protected areas, furthermore, depends greatly on their design and on their positioning with respect to surrounding land management. Drawing in particular on the example of the Danum Valley Conservation Area, but also on examples from elsewhere in the tropics, this paper first reviews this wider role of protected areas. It draws attention to their role in safeguarding water supply and its quality, in protecting against river flooding, safeguarding river and coastal fisheries, underpinning outside the protected area itself, and helping to both guard against and aid recovery after fire in the sustainable forestry area that may surround them. Then the question of the design of protected areas and the surrounding area is considered. It is argued that this is of particular importance in Southeast Asia, where rapid economic development and accompanying land-use change in areas close to protected areas together with regional climatic change are providing additional threats to protected areas. Evidence of a sharp increase in the frequency of both droughts and heavy rainfall in recent years is presented. This, together with the spread of plantation species that are particularly prone to fire and land-uses that promote repaid runoff and erosion, means a prospect of increasing risk of both fire and floods in Sabah, which would threaten both the survival of protected areas (if fires spread to them) and have economic and health consequences for the country and region as a whole. It is argued that the design of protected area strategies need to take account of current and predicted climatic change and the land-use of surrounding areas, with careful provision of adequate buffer areas and wildlife corridors. The advantages of a east-west corridor of selectively logged forest and incorporating the protected conservation forest areas of Danum valley and the Maliau Basin in eastern Sabah are then given as an example.