Chapter 5 of State of Protected Areas of Central Africa 2020 [Etat des Aires Protegees d'Afrique Centrale 2020 (EDAP)]
Biodiversity conservation is a major challenge for policymakers in Central African countries. In a context of chronic underfunding, information plays a crucial role in ensuring effectiveness of interventions and investments. The use of information is vital for a number of reasons: information supports all decisions related to planning and management, it helps to target and calibrate the efforts that need to be made, and it allows measuring the impact of the actions undertaken. Nonetheless, all too little attention and resources are devoted to information collection and information management.
The very usefulness of having priority information for the management and governance of protected areas is sometimes questioned. Many managers continue to consider data collection as an unnecessary activity that diverts resources from more important actions. Yet, insufficient information negatively impacts the quality of planning, the identification of intervention priorities and, ultimately, the outcomes of actions undertaken.
This situation is mainly due to two factors. On the one hand, there is a vicious circle in protected areas. A lack of information makes management more complicated, leading managers to work in a reactive mode, responding to problems as they arise rather than taking a proactive approach with a long-term perspective. On the other hand, we still have in the frame of support projects in Central Africa, insufficient lack of dialogue between protected area managers and information producers (experts, groups of specialists, biodiversity observatories, networks, etc.). The former are not always able to clearly identify their information needs. The latter, in the absence of guidance from managers and real benchmarks, are unable to focus their efforts on producing information that could be directly useful in achieving targeted results in the field.
This undermines planning, monitoring, and evaluation capacities, reduces the ability to identify management objectives and complicates decision-making. A clear vision of conservation objectives makes it possible to better develop the rationale behind an intervention and to formulate sound medium and long-term work programs, whether at the scale of a specific site or that of a network of protected areas. The more management is proactive and adaptive, the more information needs will be targeted and reduced, and the more resources can be directed towards achieving conservation objectives rather than resolving short-term problems.
Adopting a proactive approach imposes mobilization and use of data. It is therefore essential to invest in training protected area managers in the processes of collection, production, management and use of data and information, using new technologies, statistics, analysis, interpretation, etc., directly or with the support of partners.
This chapter proposes a set of possible solutions for both information producers and users (protected area managers and policymakers) to strengthen their capacities and levels of interaction and to improve the production, interpretation and use of information.
ROGGERI Paolo;
DEGUIGNET Marine;
PAOLINI Carlo;
JOMHA DJOSSI Donald;
MAYEN Bertille;
LAZARO Cristina;
VINCENT Claire;
2025-12-09
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
JRC123604
978-2-87489-597-5 (online)(ENG),
978-2-87489-596-8 (online)(FRE),
https://www.observatoire-comifac.net/publications/edap?lang=en,
https://www.observatoire-comifac.net/publications/edap?lang=fr,
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC123604,
