Tenth of world’s wilderness lost in past two decades, study
Courtesy: Brenda Widdess -- Port Alberni, British Columbia
Digital Reporter
Friday, September 9, 2016, 8:02 PM - A new study shows a shocking decline in wilderness areas around the globe over the last 20 years.
The findings published in Current Biology, indicate one-tenth (3.3 million square kilometres) of global wilderness has been lost since the 1990s, which is an area twice the size of Alaska. In Canadian terms, that's the span of five Albertas, CBC reports.
Researchers say the Amazon and Central Africa have been hit the hardest.
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"Globally important wilderness areas —despite being strongholds for endangered biodiversity, for buffering and regulating local climates, and for supporting many of the world's most politically and economically marginalized communities —are completely ignored in environmental policy," Dr. James Watson of the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York says in a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) press release. "Without any policies to protect these areas, they are falling victim to widespread development. We probably have one to two decades to turn this around. International policy mechanisms must recognize the actions needed to maintain wilderness areas before it is too late."
Most of policy attention has been focused on declining species of the planet, rather than larger-scale losses of entire ecosystems, the study notes.
The researchers define wilderness as “biologically and ecologically intact landscapes free of any significant human disturbance." To calculate the total area lost, the team mapped wilderness areas around the globe and compared their findings to a map produced by the same methods 17 years ago.
They found 23 per cent of the world's land area currently remains as wilderness, in comparison to 33 per cent two decades ago.
The biggest losses have occurred in South America, which has experienced a 30 per cent decline in wilderness and Africa, which shows a 14 per cent loss.
“The amount of wilderness loss in just two decades is staggering,” Dr Oscar Venter of the University of Northern British Colombia says in the release. “We need to recognize that wilderness areas, which we’ve foolishly considered to be de-facto protected due to their remoteness, is actually being dramatically lost around the world. Without proactive global interventions we could lose the last jewels in nature’s crown. You cannot restore wilderness, once it is gone, and the ecological process that underpin these ecosystems are gone, and it never comes back to the state it was. The only option is to proactively protect what is left”.
