A Protected Area with Sustainable Use of Natural Resources is a protected area that conserves ecosystems and habitats together with associated cultural values and traditional natural resource management systems. Such areas are generally large, mainly in a natural condition, with a proportion under sustainable natural resource management, and where low-level non-industrial natural resource use compatible with nature conservation is seen as one of the main aims. Under IUCN guidance, the primary management objective should apply to at least three quarters of the protected area, often referred to as the 75 per cent rule.
Category VI areas are usually extensive and ecologically substantial, often including forests, marine areas, drylands, wetlands, savannas, river basins, or mixed landscapes where ecosystems remain broadly intact. They are not open-ended multi-use areas and are not meant to legitimize intensive industrial extraction under a conservation label. Their defining feature is that conservation and sustainable use are deliberately linked, usually through practices that are small-scale, traditional, community-based, or otherwise demonstrably compatible with maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function over the long term. These areas often carry strong social and cultural dimensions, especially where local communities or indigenous peoples have long histories of stewardship tied to natural resource use.
Management in Category VI requires balancing conservation outcomes with clearly bounded and ecologically compatible use. This often means zoning, harvest rules, customary governance, community agreements, species and habitat monitoring, restoration where needed, and limits on activities that would exceed ecological thresholds. Managers may support traditional livelihoods, non-timber forest product collection, small-scale fisheries, extensive pastoralism, or other locally adapted uses where these do not undermine the area's conservation purpose. The category demands active judgment and governance rather than simple permissiveness: sustainable use must remain subordinate to the area's primary conservation objective, and industrial-scale or ecologically damaging exploitation is inconsistent with the category.
The purpose of Category VI is to conserve large natural areas and their biodiversity while recognizing that carefully governed, low-level, sustainable resource use can in some places contribute to long-term conservation, local stewardship, and social legitimacy.
Typical objectives include maintaining ecosystems in a largely natural condition, conserving biodiversity and ecological processes at scale, supporting traditional and compatible natural resource management systems, preventing industrial or ecologically destructive uses, strengthening community and indigenous stewardship where appropriate, aligning livelihoods with conservation goals, applying zoning and monitoring to keep use within ecological limits, and ensuring that the protected area's primary function remains long-term nature conservation.
