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Protected areas are undoubtedly the world’s most important conservation success story, and recent research shows that protected areas are effective—housing more biodiversity and greater abundances of species inside rather than out. But, despite this, progress on protected areas is stalling and in some cases even falling behind. According to a sobering new paper today in Nature, only 20-50 percent of the world’s land and marine protected areas are meeting their goals, while the rest are hampered by lack of funding, poor management, and government ambivalence. The paper arrives just a few days before the opening of the IUCN World Parks Congress 2014, a global event that happens once a decade.
“Protected areas offer us solutions to some of today’s most pressing challenges, but by continuing with ‘business as usual,’ we are setting them up for failure,” said lead author James Watson of the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Queensland. “A step-change in the way we value, fund, govern and manage those areas is neither impossible nor unrealistic and would only represent a fraction of what the world spends annually on defense.”
Nations under the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) have pledged to protect 17 percent of the world’s land area and 10 percent of the oceans by 2020. Today, 12-15 percent of the world’s land is protected—creeping closer to the goal—and comprising an area larger than Central and South America combined. But protection of the oceans has long lagged behind. Currently, only three percent of marine waters are protected.
Yet even land-based parks are not adequately safeguarding the world’s many ecosystems. For example, over 60 percent of the 300 identified terrestrial ecoregions do not have 17 percent coverage. The numbers are even worse in the oceans: here, only 20 percent of ecoregions have 10 percent or more of total coverage and nearly half have less than one percent. Such lack of equal coverage means many species are left out.
“A recent global analysis of all threatened birds, amphibians and mammals found that 17 percent are not found in a single protected area and 85 percent do not have sufficiently large populations in protected areas to give them a reasonable chance of long-term survival,” reads the paper.
Continue reading at ENN affiliate, MONGABAY.COM.
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