Sustainable Finance for Protected Areas

Insufficient investment is being made in protected areas, and innovative approaches are required for generating the additional financial support required.
The need for additional resources arises from the imbalance between a country's needs for managing protected areas on the one hand, and the ability of the country to mobilize resources on the other. Resources can be augmented through existing mechanisms such as the fiscal system, user charges, resource rent capture, and privatization, as well as through new mechanisms such as environmental taxes, betterment charges, and so forth. Even so, it appears that domestic resources in most developing countries will continue to be inadequate for financing the conservation of biodiversity due to the limited tax and capital base of many of these countries, their under-developed taxation systems, and the need to direct resources to more urgent development priorities.