New York Times
KATE GALBRAITH

NEW YORK — Over the past weekend, President Barack Obama took a break from the heat — literal and political — to take his family on a whirlwind tour of two national parks in the western United States.

Skip to next paragraph

A blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line.

Go to Blog » Mr. Obama used his trip to Grand Canyon and Yellowstone to highlight the importance of parks to America’s heritage. (He was heard to pronounce the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone “cool.”)

But to the world at large, Yellowstone also carries a deep significance: When it was established in 1872, it was the first national park ever created. A movement was born.

“It’s been one of the great ideas that the U.S. has nourished here at home and stimulated others to follow,” said Bill Eichbaum, a parks expert at the World Wildlife Fund.

These days, 12.2 percent of countries’ terrestrial areas is protected, including more than 120,000 sites, according to a 2007 report from the United Nations Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Center. About 6 percent of territorial waters (defined as extending 12 nautical miles off a country’s coastline) are protected.

Experts say that the role of parks and, to use the broader international lingo, “protected areas,” has substantially evolved. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, parks were largely dedicated to protecting iconic landscapes, like the waterfalls and peaks of Yosemite or the vistas of Yellowstone. Exactly a century ago, in 1909, Sweden created nine parks — the first in Europe — to encompass some of its most scenic spots.

Now, according to Mr. Eichbaum, park creation is driven less by the call to celebrate magnificent landscapes and more by the need to nourish biodiversity or to protect threatened or complex ecosystems. That may be particularly true with the advent of global warming. Some environmentalists are advocating the creation of protected “corridors” — from Yellowstone to the Canadian Yukon, for example — to enable species to migrate more easily.

Parks have also changed to become more accommodating, experts say: There is an acknowledgment that they can no longer simply ignore the livelihoods of those who live around them. Park managers must now work to accommodate local, economic and recreational needs. Finding the right balance is tricky, especially in the developing world but also in places like the United States, where loggers and snowmobilers want to retain access to as much land as possible.

“In more recent years, public recreation, sustainable development and community models of protected area governance have become the norm,” states the Europarc Federation, a nonprofit organization representing the interests of park systems across Europe, in its new book “Living Parks: 100 Years of National Parks in Europe.”

Plenty of protected areas are still being established. But as a general rule, the areas designated for protection today tend to be smaller than they once were, said Charles Besançon, who heads the protected areas program that is administered by the UN’s World Conservation Monitoring Center. Development pressures mean that there is often less land contiguously available.

But there remains an area with vast possibilities: the ocean. At the moment, less than 1 percent of the ocean beyond countries’ territorial waters is protected.

Conservationists are increasingly turning their attention toward the sea. Pedro Rosabal, a senior program officer in the protected areas program of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a network of governments and nongovernmental organizations, said that marine environments tend to be “more fragile” in relation to climate change. They are highly vulnerable to changes in temperature, he said, which can affect coral reefs and other marine life. Overfishing is also, of course, a widespread problem.

Mr. Besançon of the World Conservation Monitoring Center said: “There’s a huge push to create more marine protected areas.” In recent years, he noted, the most growth in protected areas has occurred in the ocean.

One of the relatively new additions is the Phoenix Islands Protected Area around Kiribati, a Pacific island nation. The protected area, which is a tract of ocean nearly the size of Sweden, was formally designated by the Kiribati government last year.

George W. Bush, the former U.S. president, won strong plaudits from environmental groups for his actions to protect the ocean.

Shortly before leaving office, Mr. Bush designated a huge area of the Pacific Ocean, near islands under U.S. control and including the deepwater Marianas Trench, as a national monument. That built on an earlier conservation effort in 2006, when Mr. Bush established a giant marine reserve near Hawaii.

For park advocates, however, the open ocean — far from any landmass — remains the largest challenge. The trouble is that the open ocean is essentially a free-for-all: no one owns it, though countries can control their “exclusive economic zones,” as many as 200 nautical miles off their coasts.

“Finding the legal authorities to create protected areas is complicated both by the legal issues and by the political issues,” said Mr. Eichbaum, talking about the ocean. Fishing lobbies, unsurprisingly, generally oppose restrictions on their activities.

Mr. Eichbaum and other conservationists are pushing a pioneering effort to establish a protected area in the North Atlantic. This ocean tract, known as the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone, is important for deepwater sharks, whales and other marine species.

But even if conservationists are successful in creating protected areas in the North Atlantic and elsewhere, it will hardly be the end of the story. Monitoring and enforcing open-ocean agreements will bring special challenges.

“There’s no one stationed out there,” noted Mr. Besançon. “You can’t post guards in the high seas.”