International Nature Conservation

When one says “nature conservation”, many people recall various boards with a notice “protected area”. It is no surprise. Not only in the Czech Republic territorial protection or area-base conservation is among the oldest and at the same time most common approaches in protection, conservation and management of natural and landscape heritage. Moreover, there have been recently appearing various opinions whether protected areas really fulfil their mandate and whether area-based conservationdeserves at least a significant renovation (BHOLA et al. 2020, FENG et al. 2021, WALSH 2021, JONES et al. 2022, RAYMOND et al. 2022, ROBSON et al. 2022, WAUCHOPE et al. 2022, WILLIAMS et al. 2022, ZENG et al. 2022). This prompts the question about the current state of the art in global protected area network and in particularly what we have known on its real effectiveness. 

The trade in wildlife, its parts and products is at least as old as recorded humankind´s history. Without wishing to start thoughtful intellectual considerations we would like to stress that it had initially been a swap or a barter, later accompanied by monetary trade which consequently mostly replaced the former. Wildlife trade has recently been moving increasingly to the Internet. 

The European Union has been aware of the specific geopolitical status of Africa and its extraordinary importance for protection and conservation of biodiversity including natural ecosystems as well as of need to support sustainable economic prosperity there. The European Green Deal states: “The EU will launch a “NaturAfrica” initiative to tackle biodiversity loss by creating a network of protected areas to protect wildlife and offer opportunities in green sectors for local populations.” The article aims at proposing possible measures to meet the above high ambition.

One of the significant preconditions for enhancing and improving nature conservation, biodiversity protection respectively in protected areas is ecotourism development, undoubtedly strengthening job opportunity/employment and economic prosperity in the countryside and at the same time also local community involvement in nature conservation (Eagles et al. 2002).

As students, we read Zdeněk Veselovský's book ‘Voices of the Jungle’ describing his stay in Kaziranga National Park. In addition to numerous interesting facts about wildlife bionomics, the reader will find a number of notes on nature conservation half a century ago. A very valuable article on the simplest problems of biodiversity management in this Assam park was published by Douglas Chadwick in National Geographic (2010). With some worries but also hopes, we visited this area in March 2019. However, the experience exceeded our expectations, despite many problems that persist in the national park. After all, over a hundred of the symbolic Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) have been poached in Kaziranga in the last ten years, and the population around the park has grown by a third.

In Bolivia, both life-form and habitat diversity includes Amazonian lowlands as well as the high Andes, cloud forests (yungas) as well as the puna, a high elevation montane grassland.

For the first time in Czech nature conservation history, the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic in co-operation with the Krkonoše/Giant Mts.

The Isle of Vilm is a marvellous example of the North German coastal landscape, situated near the Island of Rügen and extending over 2.5 km with a size of 94 hectares.

The article presents experience from water ecosystem management in Finland and Denmark.

One of the finest bird parks in the world, the Keoladeo Ghana National Park located in Bharatpur, eastern Rajasthan was established in March 1982, covering 28 km².