Environmental Protection - Challenges

Challenges

• The main issues for developing countries like Brazil and Mexico are that protected areas suffer from encroachment and poor management.In Brazil, protected areas are increasing but there are significant challenges caused by human impacts. Logging and mining are potentially huge threats to protected areas. Between 1998 and 2009, 12,204 km2 of forest within protected areas was cleared, with 1,338 mining titles being granted and 10,348 awaiting approval. Developing countries need to allocate more money from their budgets if they hope to address these problems.
• African governments face several challenges in implementing environmental protection mechanisms. In Tanzania for example these include lack of financial resources to manage protected areas, poor governance and corruption, and significant illegal logging and hunting. Also with such large allocations of land to national parks, indigenous people have been forced to relocate what resulted in a lack of local participation in environmental decision making processes. As a result of these factors recent calls have been made to allow “parks with people” as a mean to encourage the support of better overall management and care of the land.
• Due to the Australian climate being dominated by deserts and semi-arid regions, most of the environmental protection challenges focus on availability and management of water resources. Even though this will continue to be an issue in areas of great demand, such as the Murray-Darling basin, several events were pivotal battles in environmental protection.

Case Study, Franklin River Dam:

In 1979, the building of an hydroelectric dam was proposed on the Franklin River in Western Tasmania. The advantages of this project would be increased power production and the creation of job in a region with one of the highest unemployment rates in Tasmania. Conservationist were concerned about the high concentration of Aboriginal sites and that it was one of Australia's last true wild rivers The issue quickly became a focus of environmental protection, with the Tasmanian Wilderness Society leading the resistance movement. The situation escalated from a state referendum to a public blockade of construction, eventually leading to federal legislative intervention and a state challenge in the High Court. The state lost the case with the area proclaimed the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park in 1981, part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.