Clean and healthy – Protected areas, biodiversity, and management of natural resources

Abstract

The rapid growth of urban areas seen in recent decades has led those dedicated to protecting biodiversity to focus on the problem of the possible effects of urbanization on protected areas (Güneralp and Seto 2013). Created to protect territories in which anthropic pressure was absent or at least modest, protected areas have always been considered, along a scale of attention to the needs of biodiversity, as the polar opposite of urban areas and in some way substantially incompatible with them. In reality, this view of two separate worlds, beyond being irreconcilable, reached a crisis when expanding urban areas began to approach protected areas ever more closely. At the same time, often heightened value is recognized in biodiversity connected to traditional anthropic activities for which, in some way, protected areas reached the urban areas (Trzyna 2014).