Upbeat697 seed collectors, 9,200 park jobs: the protected lands that pay the people who guard them
A new World Bank report, presented at the COP17 biodiversity meeting in Yerevan, pulls together what is actually working in protected areas around the world — and the pattern is simple: conservation lasts when the people living beside it earn from it. In South Africa, the iSimangaliso Wetland Park mixes community co-ownership, tourism investment and small-business support, and has created more than 9,200 jobs and backed 612 local enterprises in five years. Around China's Sanjiangyuan National Park, about 17,000 local households work as rangers and co-managers, paid to protect the land they live on. In Brazil's Amazon, the RESEBA native-seed network grew from 12 collectors in 2021 to 697 in 2025 — 56% of them women — selling $672,000 of native seed a year to restore worn-out land, with individual collectors earning up to $950. And in Peru, paying communities to protect their watersheds has channelled more than $40 million into conservation and restoration since 2014. The report's advice to governments: count jobs and incomes alongside hectares and species, and a park stops being a fence and becomes a livelihood.
SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: institutional program