Crisis Without Transformation: Protected Areas and the Missed Lessons of COVID-19

More than 289,000 protected areas cover over 16% of the planet’s land and marine environments. The Covid-19 pandemic offered a unique opportunity to understand how this key institution for biodiversity conservation responded to a global shock and what it learned. Using a resilience lens, we investigated whether the scale and duration of the pandemic pushed protected areas beyond coping and toward deeper transformative changes, interviewing managers of 50 terrestrial protected areas across 17 Sub-Saharan African countries. Resilience thinking suggests that while short-term strategies help institutions “bounce back” from minor disturbances, high-intensity, long-term shocks require more profound adjustments, including governance shifts to mitigate similar risks. Impacts were multiple and varied, from staff absenteeism due to health issues or unpaid salaries, to reduced donor funding, increased illegal poaching because of minimal patrolling, and the collapse of local land-use governance. Intended social and ecological outcomes were compromised in 72% of cases, yet these impacts were largely unaddressed or deemed insufficient to justify major governance changes. Most responses involved reallocating budgets, mobilizing extra resources to fill funding gaps, and managing emergent needs. Few protected areas adopted transformative shifts, such as reducing reliance on tourism revenues, diversifying donors, or strengthening partnerships with local communities. This limited response is notable given that many conservationists, including ourselves, saw the pandemic as a chance to forge new funding models and forms of coexistence in which local communities participate more actively in, and benefit more directly from, protected-area governance. To face future crises, conservation institutions should consider relational approaches to build general resilience. The pandemic unfolded amid mounting regional pressures, including geopolitical and economic instability, escalating biodiversity threats, and climate impacts. At stake is the ability of protected areas to sustain biodiversity and human wellbeing amid complex human–non-human relations and a growing need for conviviality.