Suitability for Certification System of Protected Area Network in Blacksea Region's National Parks

At the present time, protected areas are one of the most important elements of in-situ nature protection attempts. These areas also perform such functions as the protection of natural and cultural resources and biological diversity; the provision of opportunities for touristic-recreational activities; and the support for the rural development. This paper covers the Altindere Valley, Hatilla Valley, Ilgaz Mountain, The Kackar Mountains, The Karagol-Sahara, The Kure Mountains and The Yedigoller (Seven Lakes) National Park as protected forest areas. The Paper emphasizes the necessity of assessing the above mentioned protected areas in line with the international status and with the certification systems; and the paper, then, investigates the compliance of the current characteristics with the certification criteria. By this way, the adoption of internationally-recognized sustainable management approaches for the activities to be carried out in the protection areas will be possible; and this will also make it possible to share and disseminate the knowledge and the experiences of the other areas in the network of protected areas. The legal, managerial and economic problems being encountered in these areas are discussed in the paper. The training of the local people and the visitors, the management of the visitors, the protection of the nature, theadvertisement of the areas and the problems related to recreation-tourism are among the issues to be discussed in the paper. When seven of the current protected-forest areas which are recognized as national parks are investigated, the main problem rests in the lack of cooperation between the local people, the government institutions, the universities and the NGO's. This lack of cooperation causes problems during the planning and application processes. For the solution of these problems, a sustainable management planning is brought to focus by protecting the national parks with a holistic approach taking ecological, archeological, social and cultural aspects into consideration, and by having a protection-use balance. In order to find solutions for these problems of the national parks and to achieve an effective/sustainable protection-use balance of these areas, international certification programs should be made use of as a means. When evaluated by PAN Parks criteria-the only certification system in practice for the protection of the nature in protected areas, it is seen that the National Park of Kackar and Kastamonu-Bartin Kure Mountains can be evaluated with respect to PAN Parks' criteria, but the other five of the National Parks in the Black Sea Region cannot be evaluated by PAN Parks with respect to their size (PAN Parks criteria: Principle 1: Natural Values: the size of the area).