We’ve Destroyed 10 Percent of Earth’s Wilderness Since 1992

According to a new study published last week in Cell, humans have managed to destroy 10 percent of Earth's wilderness since 1992, providing further proof that our species is really bad at having nice things.

As the researchers from Australia's University of Queensland detail in their study, the earth has lost nearly 1.3 million square miles of wilderness (defined as areas that are largely free of human development) since the early 1990s, with most of this loss occurring in South America. This leaves approximately 11.6 million square miles of wilderness left on Earth (accounting for about 23 percent of Earth's land area), but if the researchers are right, this too will mostly have disappeared by 2050.

"The world's large intact landscapes are incredibly important for biodiversity," said James Watson, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Science and Research Initiative and the lead author of the study. "Not only are they important for wildlife, they're incredibly important for people. A lot of indigenous communities around the world rely on large, intact landscapes to maintain their ways of life."

As the researchers note in their paper, the "trajectory of wilderness loss in the Amazon is particularly concerning" given that this area lost 30 percent of its wilderness in the last two decades, despite Amazon deforestation rates dropping significantly from 2005-2013.

As a result of this destruction three of the Earth's 14 major ecological communities, or biomes, now no longer have any remaining wilderness areas that are considered "globally significant" (meaning swathes of land with over 10,000 square kilometers). Moreover, another five of Earth's biomes have less than 10 percent wilderness area remaining.

Despite this "catastrophic" decline in global wilderness area, the researchers also note that the amount of protected wilderness has also grown significantly during the same two decades. There is now almost 1 million square miles of newly protected, but unfortunately "the increase in protection of wilderness has lagged significantly behind losses over the past two decades."

As the researchers noted, this loss of wilderness threatens the existence of hundreds of animal species, many of which are already in critical danger of extinction. According to the study, the habitats of a full one-third of terrestrial mammals overlap with wilderness areas. The rapid destruction of these landscapes could account for the distinction of 12 percent of endangered mammals—over 140 unique species.

And because the report isn't already bleak enough, the researchers also pointed out that, despite this distressingly fast loss of wilderness area over the last two decades, almost nothing is being done about it today.

As the researchers write, the major climate agreements, including the most recent Paris accord, "do not acknowledge the special qualities and benefits that flow from ecosystem processes operating at large scales." In other words, although conservation is mentioned in the accords, none of them specifically acknowledge the need to maintain globally significant areas of wilderness.

In order to change the pace of wilderness destruction, the researchers call for national frameworks that prioritize the maintenance of globally significant areas of wilderness. In addition to explicitly stating national plans to save the remaining wilderness, the report's authors also recognize the need to halt the activities that led to the wilderness destruction in the first place, such as road expansion and industrial mining/forestry operations.

"We argue that immediate action to protect the world's remaining wilderness areas on a large scale is now necessary," the researchers write. "The continued loss of wilderness areas is a globally significant problem with largely irreversible outcomes for both humans and nature: if these trends continue, there could be no globally significant wilderness areas left in less than a century."