Global Efforts in Wildlife Protection? Another Urban Myth

"Other nations look at what's happening in Australia and the United States [in the protection of wildlife preserves], and they say, 'Why should we bother'?"
"[Governments tend to boast about their virtuous protection of sensitive natural geographic areas but do nothing practical to protect them; they are] selling a myth."
"We show that governments are significantly overestimating the space they have made available for nature. Governments are claiming these places are protected for the sake of nature when in reality they aren't. It is a major reason why biodiversity is still in a catastrophic decline, despite more and more land being protected."
"If you only counted the lands in protected areas that are not degraded, 77 of those [111 convention signatory] nations don't meet the bar."
"Helping them succeed requires more sustained and dedicated effort and we are undertaking research to identify those intact, biologically important places around the world that still need protection and the mechanisms that will best ensure they are protected."
Dr. E.M. Watson, conservation scientist, University of Queensland, Australia

"If we are going to take natural history seriously, and all the things our communities and our economies depend on from natural areas, we have to start putting parks in the right places."
"In Canada, we value our natural environment but we also put a lot of value on natural resource extraction." 
"There's a commitment from the federal government to protect 700,000 square kilometres of land. That's an area the size of Alberta."

"One of the first places we have to look is our recreational parks and how do we balance the recreational opportunities we provide in those areas with the conservation values we have."
Dr. Oscar Venter, conservation scientist, University of Northern British Columbia

Marriott Basin, British Columbia   Photo: JSR

No fewer than 168 nations signed on to the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity, pledging to conserve 17 percent of terrestrial and ten percent marine protected areas by the year 2020. Governments are well aware of the need to protect their geological land mass hosting wildlife species specific to their areas of the world, as well as marine life in the waters they hold territorial claims to. As a result, since the early 1990s, various nations have extended their protected natural areas, covering close to 14 percent of the terrestrial Earth, and a rough five percent of the oceans, set aside for wildlife protection.

When governments in various nations inform their populations of the initiatives undertaken in the protection of natural areas and their inhabitants, it leaves the desired impression that these are governments cognizant of the vital importance in securing these natural resources for posterity. The impression is left that these are areas that are protected from industrial scale mining, logging or any other disruptive activities harmful to natural ecology and the biosphere. It's one thing to designate an area protected, however, and quite another to commit to measures that will ensure these are protected areas.

Chilliwack, B.C.  Photo: JSR

Dr. Watson of University of Queensland in Australia, senior author of the new report recently published in the journal Science, resulting from an examination of 50,000 protected wildlife areas and reserves both terrestrial and aquatic throughout the world, points in particular to the Barrow Island Marine Park in Australia, home to rare mammals, reptiles, birds and invertebrates, many of which are found nowhere else on the planet. Despite its protected status, government gave permission for construction and expansion of an energy complex supplied by over 450 oil and natural gas wells.

He points out that no natural sites are particularly protected from that other imperative -- development for economic purposes --  where even World Heritage sites recognized by UNESCO are often treated closer to farmland to be exploited, than to wilderness areas requiring protection. Tanzania saw UNESCO willing to approve a uranium mine in its Selous Game Reserve, home to a large elephant population once, and the Selous was subsequently moved to the list of endangered World Heritage sites.

Target issues in the Convention on Biodiversity appear straightforward and easily achieved, yet governments ignore the admonition inherent in the convention to protect areas "of particular importance to biodiversity", preferring to focus on size of the area concerned in isolation of the more important issue of where those protected areas are identified, according to a recent study in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Remote regions are chosen to designate as protected areas where inconvenience is at a minimum, placing protected areas in regions with fewer endangered species.

As an example, Brazil designated marine protected areas of sizeable dimensions, ignoring the better option of near-shore areas with a greater diversity of vulnerable wildlife threatened more immediately from human activity. The country gets Brownie points for designating great swaths of territory as protected while bypassing the greater priority of selecting areas that truly are in need of protection. Cost, convenience, and avoidance of disrupting human activity seems paramount to the alternate option of the greater good.

According to the authors of the Nature Ecology and Evolution study, the pretense of protecting species based on optics alone in the number of hectares placed under protection is faulty and designed to fail its purpose. Studying the home ranges of over 4,000 threatened species globally for a study in 2014, it was found that protected areas tend to miss 85 percent of regions truly in need of protection, so that should all 168 convention signatories meet 2020 protected area targets they would still miss 84 percent of threatened species because of the focus on size, not targeting urgent areas.

The result being, that despite meaning well, the human tendency is to slip up under the influence of a country's priorities turning to economic development. This at the sacrifice of biodiversity leaving species and subspecies to continue on their extinction trajectories as the world loses important members of the global animal kingdom: mammals, aquatic creatures, insects, birds -- of an endless, irreplaceable array of loss.