Expansion and consolidation of the Protected Areas

At the Frankfurt Zoological Society, our motto is “More wilderness – for a planet worth living on”. 

Humanity faces two mutually reinforcing crises that threaten our continued survival: biodiversity loss and climate change. A key solution to both is the protection and enhancement of wilderness.  By this, we mean large, intact areas that are home to mixes of plants and animals at near-natural abundance, can sustain nature over evolutionary timescales, and are free from the threat of impacts from human development.  Such wilderness areas are a fundamental component in the conservation of biodiversity and the fight against climate change.

The transboundary Carpathian Mountains are an important hotspot of European biodiversity and the Ukrainian Carpathians are home to some of the largest and best-preserved fragments of the once great central European forests. Some of these areas remain without sufficient formal protection. Others, whilst technically within protected areas, are subject to continued land use practices, such as commercial forestry and other unsustainable enterprise activities, that are not in line with conservation objectives – the primary function of protected areas. In many cases nature parks are also highly fragmented, however their function can be improved by strategic adjustments to their borders.  

Within our expansion and consolidation portfolio, we assist protected areas to address these issues through land transfers and correct delineation and documentation of their boundaries.  In so doing, we seek to support nature parks in meeting all associated International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) criteria.