Affiliation:
1. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Geografia, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
2. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia, Instituto de Biologia, Centro de Ciências da Saúde, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Grupo de Pesquisa em Serviços Ecossistêmicos e Sistemas Socioecológicos, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Desenvolvimento Regional e Urbano, Universidade Salvador, Brazil
3. Departamento de Geografia, Instituto de Geociências, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
Abstract
Achieving conservation targets for sustainable development has been one of society’s greatest challenges. In this context, environmental conservation approaches such as Systematic Conservation Planning (SCP) and ecosystem services (ES) have become increasingly popular as feasible solutions for the allocation, delimitation, and management of protected areas. These approaches, often used to drive public policies based on payment for environmental services, have highlighted the intrinsic relationships between the paradigms of geography and spatial analysis (SA), as they rely on space-time processes and multidisciplinary concepts for the analysis of the biophysical, social, and economic variables. In this context, this manuscript aimed to outline the relevance of SA as a geographic perspective for the progress of environmental conservation. The arguments were here aligned in the following steps: (i) concepts around protected areas and the factors that impact them; (ii) environmental conservation approaches used to allocate and delimit protected areas, and their respective features, limitations, and related definitions; and (iii) correlations between SA and the use of ES and SCP (paradigms, advances, and contributions). As major findings, it was indicated that the SCP and ES work in a space-time dimension to measure and describe patterns of abstract phenomena using spatial analysis techniques. Moreover, we identified that conceptual mismatches and the absence of a common language to environmental conservation approaches reduces the expressive participation of geography that has its focus on determination the abstract features of observed objects or phenomena. It is important, however, that its paradigms become an essential methodological component in environmental approaches to the quantification and delimitation of the elements and natural processes.
Funder
Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo
Subject
General Earth and Planetary Sciences,Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous),Geography, Planning and Development