The comparison showed that now around 20% of the world’s land area – roughly 18.5 million square miles – is comprised of wilderness, with the majority located in North Asia, North Africa, North America, and Australia. South America lost almost 30 percent of its wilderness area, and Africa lost about 14 percent. In Central Africa, 14 percent of the totalwilderness area has vanished. Their findings are reported in the journal Current Biology. “Once it is gone, it is gone”, lead study author James Watson told AFP. “You can not restore wilderness, once it is gone, and the ecological process that underpin these ecosystems. It will come back as something else, but you are losing a system that has evolved for millions of years”. The researchers then compared their current map of wilderness to one produced by the same methods in the early 1990s. Global conventions and agreements should recognize and prioritize the ecosystem services provided by intact wilderness areas.
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Wilderness is defined as largely intact landscapes that are mostly free of human disturbance.
Meanwhile, the geographic ranges of one-third of all land mammals overlap with remaining significant wilderness areas.
About 23 percent of the world’s landmass remains as wilderness, and about four-fifths of that lies in contiguous areas larger than 6,200 square miles, which are considered “globally significant wilderness blocks”.
In the early 1990s, there were 350 blocks of wilderness large enough to fit the globally significant criteria.
Around the world, conservationists are desperately fighting the biodiversity crisis, zeroing in on species whose populations are nearing extinction and trying to restore and protect already threatened habitats.
“Globally important wilderness areas – despite being strongholds for endangered biodiversity, for buffering and regulating local climates, and for supporting numerous world’s most politically and economically marginalised communities – are completely ignored in environmental policy”, said Dr James Watson of the University of Queensland and the Wildlife Conservation Society.
At this rate of decline, the Amazon and other wilderness regions could be gone altogether by the end of the century, Watson says.
“If we don’t act soon, it will be all gone, and this is a disaster for conservation, for climate change, and for some of the most vulnerable human communities on the planet”, Watson says. “It’s costly, way too late”.
“To lose 10 percent of all wilderness in just 20 years is just unbelievable, because if you follow that logic through, there will be no wilderness left in 50 years”, he said. The answer, he says, is not one or the other. As the researchers point out, this is the size threshold for sites containing intact ecological communities, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The congress, which is being held in the US for the first time in IUCN’s 68-year history, is the world’s largest environmental and nature conservation event and is often referred to as the Olympics of conservation. Most of the world’s still-vital biomes seem to be in remote areas humanity simply hasn’t gotten around to exploiting, such as deserts, the Arctic tundra, and the sprawling boreal forests of Russian Federation and Canada.
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“Once they are gone, they are gone, and this has shocking implications for biodiversity, for climate change and for the most imperiled biodiversity on the planet”, said conservationist James Watson of the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in NY.
