IUCN protected area categories
Human impacts on strict nature reserves are increasingly difficult to prevent because climate and air pollution and newly emerging diseases do not stop at the boundaries of protected areas.
These areas are a protected domain in which biodiversity and ecosystem processes (including evolution) are allowed to flourish or experience restoration if previously disturbed by human activity.
Wilderness areas can be classified as such only if they are devoid of modern infrastructure, though they allow human activity to the level of sustaining indigenous groups and their cultural and spiritual values within their wilderness-based lifestyles.
Category II areas are managed in a way that may contribute to local economies through promoting educational and recreational tourism on a scale that will not reduce the effectiveness of conservation efforts.
They have a high cultural or spiritual value that can be utilised to gain support of conservation challenges by allowing higher visitation or recreational rights, therefore offering an incentive for the preservation of the site.
Landscapes and seascapes that fall into this category should represent an integral balance between people and nature and can sustain activities such as traditional agricultural and forestry systems on conditions that ensure the continued protection or ecological restoration of the area.
As a result, protected landscapes and seascapes may be able to accommodate contemporary developments, such as ecotourism, at the same time as maintaining the historical management practices that may procure the sustainability of agrobiodiversity and aquatic biodiversity.
Category VI may be particularly suitable to vast areas that already have a low level of human occupation or in which local communities and their traditional practices have had little permanent impact on the environmental health of the region.
