Climate Change Publications
Natural Solutions: Protected areas helping people cope with climate change
Nigel Dudley, Sue Stolton, Alexander Belokurov, Linda Krueger, Nik Lopoukhine, Kathy MacKinnon, Trevor Sandwith and Nik Sekhran
IUCN, The Nature Conservancy, UNDP, Wildlife Conservation Society, The World Bank and WWF, 2010
A report funded and commissioned by IUCN-WCPA, TNC, UNDP, WCS, The World Bank and WWF with a preface by Lord Nicholas Stern. The sixth report in the WWF Arguments for Protection series. Natural Solutions details, for the first time, how protected areas contribute significantly to reducing impacts of climate change. This well referenced report discusses how protected areas store carbon and capture additional atmospheric carbon dioxide; and documents their role in maintaining ecosystem integrity and providing essential ecosystem services that will help us adapt to climate change.
Link: https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2009-045.pdf
This Operations Manual provides a practical method for including ecosystem management in sustainable development planning and implementation at the site and landscape levels, with key knowledge and six steps for planning management for ecosystem services. It is produced by ICIMOD with UNEP-WCMC and is suitable for use in all types of terrestrial protected area management planning. It is based on understanding and working with ecosystem functioning to supply ecosystem services in a straightforward and practical manner. It includes promoting resilience to climate change, as well as the use of indicators.
Link: http://lib.icimod.org/record/32857
PARKS, 2016
An editorial in the IUCN WCPA PARKS journal providing an overview of the role of protected areas as natural solutions to climate change.
UNDP, 2015
The publication focuses on showcasing and capturing lessons learned on the process of making the case to government and other stakeholders for Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) to be included in broader adaptation strategies, and for the policy and finance shifts needed to bring this about. The report notes that: Protected areas were found to be an ideal scale for planning and implementing landscape level EbA (page XIV).
PARKS, 2014
This paper in the IUCN WCPA Journal PARKS highlights how protected areas agencies and their partners in four countries have begun working together to implement ecosystem-based approaches to climate change adaptation. By sharing experiences and knowledge, protected area agencies in Kenya, Mexico, Chile and Colombia have increased local and national capacity to contribute to climate adaptation strategies through research, monitoring, planning, active management and ecological restoration projects.
Link: https://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/parks_20_1_keenleyside_et_al.pdf
Suren N. Kulshreshtha,Silvia Lac, Mark Johnston and Chris Kinar
Canadian Parks Council, 2000
This study had two distinct phases: One, an estimation of the physical quantity of carbon being stored in the study parks; and two, an economic valuation of the stored carbon. The conclusion was that the protected areas in Canada play a significant role in terms of carbon sequestration.
Link to Climate Change Overview