Wilderness areas on Earth have experienced alarming losses in the past two decades, a new study suggests. By comparing global maps from the present day and the early 1990s, researchers have concluded that a 10th of all the world’s wilderness has been lost in just 20 years.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, finds that about 11.5 million square miles of wilderness remains on Earth, composing nearly a quarter of the planet’s terrestrial area. On the other hand, 2.05 million square miles have been lost since the early 1990s.
The losses were more pronounced in some areas than in others. South America lost nearly 30 percent of its wilderness area, and Africa lost about 14 percent. Overall, most of the remaining wilderness is concentrated in North America, North Asia, North Africa and Australia, the researchers note.
“Wilderness was defined as any area on Earth which didn’t have a human footprint,” explained James Watson , an associate professor at the University of Queensland, director of science and research at the Wildlife Conservation Society and the new study’s lead author. “Wilderness” has no minimum size threshold – but scientists do often consider areas greater than 10,000 square kilometers to be “globally significant.” 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.
And it’s the loss of these globally significant wilderness areas that has the authors of the new study most concerned. Out of the 3.3 million square kilometers of wilderness lost, 2.7 million of them came from globally significant wilderness blocks.
In the early 1990s, there were 350 blocks of wilderness large enough to fit the globally significant criteria. The study suggests that 37 of them have fallen below the threshold since then, and 74 percent of all of them experienced some sort of loss. In fact, some types of ecosystems on Earth – these include tropical and subtropical coniferous forests, tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests and mangrove forests – now have no globally significant wilderness area left at all, the study finds.
