A digital approach to quantifying political vulnerability of protected areas

Abstract

Abstract Protected areas (PAs) are often seen as opportunity costs and are therefore vulnerable to political decisions that open them up to public or private development initiatives. We reasoned that, ceteris paribus, PAs with high levels of public support should be more resilient to such decisions because; i) politicians in democratic societies are reluctant to make unpopular/controversial decisions that go against public opinion, and; ii) the proposed development of popular PAs is more likely to be met by vigorous resistance (‘push-back’) from NGOs and other societal actors. Nevertheless, public interest and, by extension, support for protected areas has rarely been considered in PA risk assessments. Here, we propose an innovative approach to assessing the political vulnerability of PAs that combines indices of developmental pressures (from the DOPA database) with an innovative culturomic-derived metric of public interest based on Wikipedia page views. Using automated methods, we quantify the political vulnerability status of 523 Brazilian PAs. Our analysis reveals a large number of PAs that may be politically vulnerable, being characterized by a combination of high developmental pressure and low/very low levels of public interest. For such PAs, we recommend managers take measures to increase public interest to ensure a healthy base of public support in the future. We conclude that digital metrics of public interest are simply and inexpensively generated, and could be easily incorporated into the existing assessment systems for protected areas.