Just 1.2 Percent of Earth's Land Could Prevent Imminent Extinctions

Humanity is ‘mutilating’ the tree of life, severing entire branches one after another at a rate of ecological pruning the planet has never previously known.

Yet there is still cause for hope.

In late 2022, the United Nations launched a landmark ‘peace pact with nature’ to protect plant and animal diversity from the ongoing mass extinction. Under the agreement, nations committed to designating 30 percent of the world as protected areas by 2030.

Protecting the most vital places for biodiversity

The world remains a long way from meeting that target. However, a hopeful new study says that, during the crucial years ahead, conservation should place less emphasis on the overall area of nature reserves and more on the amount of life they support.

Scientists representing more than 20 organisations around the world have concluded that leaving only 1.2 percent of Earth’s land undisturbed could “head off” the most probable and immediate extinctions ahead.

“Most species on Earth are rare, meaning that species either have very narrow ranges or they occur at very low densities or both,” explains lead author Eric Dinerstein, a conservation biologist at Resolve, a non-governmental organisation working on sustainable solutions to environmental issues.

“And rarity is very concentrated.”

This is fortunate, as concentrating conservation work in the right places could save several birds with one stone.

Nevertheless, Dinerstein and his colleagues warn that the chance to act is rapidly closing, while current conservation measures are not as strategically targeted as they could be.

From 2018 to 2023, countries collectively protected 1.2 million square kilometres of land. Yet the new assessment found that these refuges encompass just 7 percent of “irreplaceable sites harboring rare and endangered biodiversity”.

Dinerstein and his co-authors contend that, to make conservation both affordable and practical, these areas should receive the greatest focus and be classified as ‘Conservation Imperatives’.

Conservation Imperatives and threatened species

Drawing on published global biodiversity data, the international research group - including scientists from the US, UK, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil, Indonesia and numerous other countries - estimated where the planet’s most threatened species live.

They identified more than 16,000 unprotected terrestrial locations. Although this may appear substantial, together these places account for just 1.2 percent of Earth’s land surface.

Half are found in the tropics, while many lie close to existing nature reserves.

“Efforts and investments to address the climate crisis have overshadowed the attention governments and intergovernmental processes have paid to the biodiversity crisis,” argue Dinerstein and colleagues.

This has been a significant omission, holding back conservation action. Habitat loss now affects roughly 88 percent of all threatened species.

Of the land protected between 2018 and 2023, only 2.4 percent was in tropical or subtropical forest, even though the researchers identified these environments as containing the largest numbers of Conservation Imperatives.

In contrast, almost 70 percent of newly designated protected land consisted of temperate broadleaf and mixed forest habitats, which have few Conservation Imperatives.

“Our analysis estimated that protecting the Conservation Imperatives in the tropics would cost approximately $34 billion per year over the next five years,” says co-author Andy Lee, an environmental scientist at Resolve.

“This represents less than 0.2 percent of the United States' GDP, less than 9 percent of the annual subsidies benefiting the global fossil fuel industry, and a fraction of the revenue generated from the mining and agroforestry industries each year.”

Preserving the remaining intact wild areas

Restoring damaged habitats would now take too long to rescue many of the planet’s most endangered species. Protecting what remains wild is essential.

Under some comparatively strict assessments, only around 2.8 percent of Earth’s land ecosystems, distributed across the globe, are still completely intact.

In 2021, only 11 percent of these areas were within protected zones. That would appear to be an appropriate starting point.

The study was published in Frontiers in Science.