Because you have other things to worry about besides the upcoming presidential election and whether Britney Spears is happy, writes a study published in Current Biology Since the early 1990s, even as the world Despite conservation efforts, one-tenth of the world's wilderness has been lost. Earth.
At present, humans have occupied most of the earth, but large areas of unexplored land still exist. According to the National Park Service, wilderness areas are “places where the earth and its living communities are unfettered by humans, themselves a visitor who does not stay.” In other words, they are areas unexplored by humans and intended to stay that way. The park service notes that this wilderness enjoys the highest level of protection in the United States. Needless to say, these lands are ecologically important, providing homes to many endangered species and regulating the local climate.
Unfortunately, they are shrinking dramatically. In a study published in early September, researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York wrote that wilderness areas have experienced a "catastrophic decline" over the past two decades, which they defined in the study as "a decline in biological activity." and ecologically speaking” Landscapes around the world are largely intact and largely undisturbed by humans. "
Researchers claim that unlike endangered species, wilderness areas are understudied in conservation efforts because of their remoteness, Science Daily reported. To learn more about these areas, they compared global maps of wilderness areas from the 1990s to maps created using similar methods today, and the results were not good. Research shows that while there are still about 30 million square kilometers of wilderness today, more than 3 million square kilometers have been destroyed since the early 1990s, a reduction of nearly 10%. The Amazon basin has suffered the most, with more than 30% of its area wiped out despite efforts to combat deforestation.
In fact, researchers found that this trend can be seen around the world. While conservation efforts are certainly making a difference — giant pandas were removed from the endangered species list just last week — research points to a gap between the loss of wilderness and the steps being taken to protect them. Although the latter has increased overall, particularly since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, conservation policies do not appear to have kept pace with this decline: 2.5 million square kilometers of wilderness areas, the researchers note in their paper New protection was given, but 3.3 million square kilometers were destroyed.
“The amount of wilderness lost in just two decades is staggering,” said Dr. Oscar Venter of the University of Northern British Columbia, according to Science Daily . “The only option is to proactively protect what remains.”
Researcher Dr. James Watson noted that in addition to hosting endangered species and storing large amounts of carbon to prevent it from becoming a "greenhouse" gas, wilderness areas are home to some of the world's "most politically and economically marginalized [human] communities." . Whether you live in the Amazon or under the lights of New York City, environmental protection affects everyone—and maybe it’s time to focus less on the state of the country and more on the state of the planet as a whole.
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