Valuation and management of protected areas in Venezuela

The establishment and management of protected areas is a crucial way of ensuring the conservation of global natural resources for present and future human needs (McNeely, 1989). The key lies in the appropriate and effective design and management of these protected areas so that they can provide major sustainable benefits to society: they must guard against activities (so often witnessed outside of protected lands) that exhaust the resource base. This issue merits special concern in developing countries of the tropics, where much of the planet’s biological diversity is concentrated (Wilson, 1988), but also where global human demands for natural resource extraction and use are focused.