14th September 2016

A tenth of the world's wilderness lost since the 1990s

A tenth of the world's wilderness is reported to have disappeared in the last 20 years – an area twice the size of Alaska – with the Amazon and Central Africa being the hardest hit regions. If trends continue, there will be few areas of wilderness left untouched by human activity by 2050.

Scientists in the latest issue of Current Biology have reported catastrophic declines in wilderness areas around the planet over the last two decades. Their study describes alarming losses comprising one-tenth of global wilderness since the 1990s – an area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon. Their findings underscore an immediate need for international policies to recognise the value of wilderness areas and to address the unprecedented threats they will face in the future, the researchers say.

"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 marginalised communities – are completely ignored in environmental policy," says Dr James Watson of the University of Queensland in Australia, and Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. "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 recognise the actions needed to maintain wilderness areas before it is too late."

Watson says much policy attention has been paid to loss of species, but comparatively little is known about larger-scale losses of entire ecosystems, especially wilderness areas which tend to be relatively understudied. To fill that gap, he and his colleagues mapped wilderness areas around the globe, with "wilderness" being defined as biologically and ecologically intact landscapes free of any significant human disturbance. The researchers then compared their current map of wilderness to one produced by the same methods in the early 1990s.



Credit: Watson et al.

This comparison showed that a total of 30.1 million km² (around 23% of the world's total land area) now remains as wilderness, with the majority being located in North America, North Asia, North Africa, and the Australian continent. However, comparisons between the two maps show that an estimated 3.3 million km² (almost 10%) of wilderness area has been lost in the intervening years. Those losses have occurred mostly in South America, which has experienced a 30% decline in wilderness, and Africa, which has experienced a 14% loss.

"The amount of wilderness loss in just two decades is staggering" says Dr Oscar Venter of the University of Northern British Colombia. "We need to recognise that wilderness areas, which we've foolishly considered to be de facto protected due to their remoteness, are 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 processes 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."

The UN and others have ignored globally significant wilderness areas in key multilateral environmental agreements, says Watson, and this must change: "If we don't act soon, there will only be tiny remnants of wilderness around the planet, and this is a disaster for conservation, for climate change, and for some of the most vulnerable human communities on the planet. We have a duty to act for our children and their children."

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