Ongoing global biodiversity loss unstoppable with protected areas alone
Diane Chang
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
07/28/2011
Continuing international reliance on a strategy of setting aside land and marine territories as “protected areas” is insufficient to stem global biodiversity loss, according to a comprehensive assessment published today in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.
Authors of the research paper are Dr. Camilo Mora of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s Geography Department, and Dr. Peter F. Sale of the United Nations University’s Canadian-based International Network on Water, Environment and Health.
The authors based their study on existing literature and global data on human threats and biodiversity loss. They found that, despite impressively rapid growth of protected land and marine areas worldwide—today totaling over 100,000 in number and covering 17 million square kilometers of land and 2 million square kilometers of oceans—biodiversity is in steep decline.
Expected scenarios of human population growth and consumption levels indicate that cumulative human demands will impose an unsustainable toll on the Earth’s ecological resources and services, accelerating the rate at which biodiversity is being lost.
Current and future human requirements will also exacerbate the challenge of effectively implementing protected areas while suggesting that effective biodiversity conservation requires new approaches that address underlying causes of biodiversity loss, including the growth of both human population and resource consumption.
Said lead author Mora of UH Mānoa, “Biodiversity is humanity’s life-support system, delivering everything from food, to clean water and air, to recreation and tourism, to novel chemicals that drive our advanced civilization. Yet there is an increasingly well-documented global trend in biodiversity loss, triggered by a host of human activities.”
