Design and Management Planning For Antarctic Protected Areas; Chapter 3.6 Summary and Conclusions

Under the "Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Fauna and Flora", protected areas were required to be the minimum size necessary to achieve the required protection. There was general agreement that this was no longer a valid concept and that an opposite approach was needed, to protect the maximum areas practicable to guarantee the required protection. This immediately led to a discussion of buffer zones to protect the core of the protected area. An example given was the protection of the foraging range of an animal whose breeding area on land was protected. However, it was pointed out that this might be unrealistic in the case of a bird species, such as the giant petrel, with a foraging range along the length of the Antarctic Peninsula and up to several hundred kilometres offshore. In this respect, the concept of proposing a protected area to protect a process received general agreement. For example, the foraging area itself should not necessarily be protected but the process of foraging should be protected; similarly, protection of some areas of vegetation may be of lesser importance than protection of the process of plant growth.