The world’s last great wildernesses are shrinking at an alarming rate. In the past two decades, 10 percent of the Earth’s wilderness has been lost due to human pressure, a mapping study by the University of Queensland (UQ) found.
Over the course of human history, there has been a major degradation of 52 percent of the Earth’s ecosystems, while the remaining 48 percent is being increasingly eroded. Since 1992, when the UN signed the Rio convention on biological diversity, 3 million square kilometers of wilderness have been lost.
“If this rate continues, we will have lost all wildernesses within the next 50 years,” said UQ professor and conservationist James Watson, a senior author on the study.
This wilderness degradation is endangering biodiversity, as well as the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle and pollination.
Once they have been damaged or cleared, the wildernesses are gone for good, Watson said, adding that there is no scientific evidence that degraded ecosystems could ever return to their original condition.
These pristine wild places exist in inhospitable locations: the deserts of central Australia, the Amazon rainforest in South America, Africa, the Tibetan plateau in central Asia, and the boreal forests of Canada and Russia.
They are being encroached on by logging, oil and gas exploration, mining, roads and agriculture.
“It is death by a thousand cuts,” said doctoral student James Allan, who also worked on the study. “The moment you put a road in, you get people moving in to farm, hunt, and [that] undermines the wilderness.”
“The risk is that a lot of these systems could collapse,” Allan said. “The Amazon is the best example of where you need the whole forest, or a huge portion of the forest, protected for the hydrological cycle to function.”
One-third of the Amazon wilderness region has been lost since 1992.
“What we are showing is that the degradation of intact ecosystems affects the ability around cloud formation, so it means that literally the ability to create rain is affected,” Watson said. “We are seeing the dramatic impacts on water, in terms of the water flow in rivers.”
Loss of wilderness affects the migratory species that depend on large intact wilderness areas, and the large carnivores — charismatic megafauna such as lions, which cannot live in a human landscape when their habitat disappears.
According to the study, Australia has not suffered the worst of global wilderness loss.
“Central and northern Australia have very little large-scale infrastructure at present,” Watson said. “We are very lucky, we have a very low population density and the vast majority of our population is on the coast.”
“This does not mean these areas are not threatened — they still have very serious issues with invasive species and non-natural fire regimes,” Watson said.
However, the irrigation and mining projects in western and southern Australia scattered within the wilderness regions, Australia Conservation Foundation policy analyst James Trezise said.
Australia urgently needs to address the major drivers of habitat loss, invasive species and fire regimes, Trezise said.
“We have some of the biggest intact tropical savannas, we have got amazing desert country [but] we have this immense challenge in how we adapt and protect nature going into the future,” Trezise said. “Otherwise, we will see a significant ramp-up in extinction.”
“We will also see a huge loss in ecosystem function, which could ultimately cascade onto us,” Trezise added.
The UQ study found that conservation efforts are being rapidly outpaced by the acceleration of the decline due to massive global population growth and the associated economic growth that demands ever-increasing natural resources.
The problem is profound.
“Intact functioning ecosystems are critical not only for biodiversity, but for the huge amounts of carbon that they store and sequester,” Watson said. “They provide a direct defense against climate-related hazards like storms, floods, fires and cyclones.”
“They are the most resilient and effective defense against ongoing climate change,” Watson added.
Yet, only 20 percent of the Earth’s surface now survives as wilderness.
“Within a century it could all be gone, and with it, uninfluenced evolution and natural carbon storage,” Watson said. “When we started seeing the numbers, we had to double-check them because they were so large in terms of the loss.”
Loss of wilderness also affects Aboriginal communities.
“You have got people living in the Amazon, Congo and New Guinea who have been there for thousands of years subsisting through hunting — just sustainable use of the resources,” Allan said. “Loss of wilderness will have huge ramifications for local people and their livelihoods.”
While Trezise said the UQ research is “sound,” it is part of a bigger picture.
“It doesn’t account for impacts such as climate change,” Trezise said. “In Canada you have climate change impacts to those boreal forests.”
“You need to take this analysis and look at other bits of work and bring it all together to tell a holistic story,” Trezise added.
The UQ research shifts conservation thinking, which has historically targeted funding toward really threatened areas where there are a lot of human activity-harming species.
“What we realized was that we were not really thinking about the other end of the spectrum, which is those amazing intact systems that are still functioning like they were meant to be functioning, by evolutionary and ecological processes,” Watson said. “If you looked around, there were no maps, no discussion of how these places were changing — or what was being lost.”
“We realized that we should start looking at humanity’s influence on that end of the spectrum, the last great wildernesses on the planet,” Watson said.
Watson and his team last year released maps of the global human footprint, using eight data layers: roads, agriculture, grazing land, human population density, urbanization and navigable waterways.
“The environmental footprint of humanity is truly massive,” Watson wrote of his findings in Time. “No other species has ever come close to us in terms of consuming so much of the world’s energy, resources and land area.”
He added: “In this Anthropocene era, where the human footprint is now altering many of the Earth systems processes, wilderness areas serve as natural observatories where we can study the ecological and evolutionary impacts of global change.”
It is hoped that the maps and research will influence global policy.
Watson has had “multiple” requests from policymakers around the world, including the UN, he said, adding that it is a call to action.
“We have got to turn the corner, we have got to bend the curve, we have got to change this and save the last brilliant irreplaceable places,” Watson said.
What we need is “strong environmental law,” Trezise said. “We need big investments from government and the private sector, otherwise we will continue on a very sad trajectory.”
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