The Future of Wilderness Protection

The Central Suriname Nature Reserve forms an important step in the protection of large blocks of undisturbed tropical wilderness. But it is only a first step. The challenge for Suriname and its partners is to continue these efforts to protect the ecological viability of the world's last remaining tropical wilderness areas.

To meet this challenge Conservation International has created the Global Conservation Fund (GCF), which started out as the Tropical Wilderness Protection Fund (TWPF). This fund will require further refinement of conservation priorities through assessment of the scope of threat to these areas, economic assessments that will highlight areas where conservation can best compete with more destructive land uses, appraisal of potential funding sources and current investment climates, further biological assessments of unknown areas and institutional assessments of the feasibility of wilderness protection in certain strategic countries.