To protect and conserve: the freezing of time in Australia’s protected area regime

The Australian protected area estate aims to address the biodiversity crisis by managing landscapes within clearly defined geographical boundaries. However, by focusing on the spatial aspects of landscapes, the temporal dimension of protected area management is often overlooked. In this study, we examine terrestrial protected areas in Australian environmental legislation and consider how time is accounted for in biodiversity management. When protected area legislation is informed by recent, short timeframes, the management of ecological communities can be confined by an imperfect reference, leading to ineffective and unsustainable conservation outcomes. We find that many protected area laws are stuck in a procedural present, where the present is prioritised through a focus on administrative procedures with no reference to time-bound outcomes. When legislation referenced future goals, it was in the context of an anthropocentric focus on the future human use of resources. Conversely, the past-oriented references we identified often referenced goals based on colonial notions of wilderness as an unpeopled, pristine state. Our analysis indicates that past and future considerations are not integrated holistically into Australia’s contemporary protected area regime. We suggest this has adverse impacts on environmental management, effectively freezing landscapes in a static state and potentially hindering overarching conservation objectives.