They may be legally protected on paper, but one-third of the world’s protected areas are under intense pressure from human activities such as road construction, grazing for livestock and urbanisation, said a study published in Science .
A team of scientists used global “human footprint” maps to quantify the intensity of human pressure in 41,927 protected areas (natural spaces that are legally protected to conserve nature and biodiversity) in 213 countries. Their results show that 32.8% of protected land worldwide is highly degraded. 55% of protected areas created before the ratification of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD, a multilateral treaty with 196 countries as signatories) in 1992 have experienced increases in pressure from human activities.
The study also finds that the most affected regions are those with large human populations such as Europe, Africa and Asia; more than half of all protected areas in south Asia and western Europe contain only land with such pressures.
In Eurasia, 33 countries have protected areas of which at least 50% is under intense pressure. India also falls in this list, according to the scientists.
“We found that 80% of protected land in India has been heavily modified by human activity,” the study’s co-author Sean Maxwell of the University of Queensland (Australia) said in an e-mail to The Hindu . The scientists used data from 323 of the more than 720 protected areas in India to draw this conclusion.
Governments across the world could therefore be overestimating the space available for nature even inside protected areas, the study points out. The authors warn that CBD goals — such as the Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 which mandates including at least 17% of terrestrial areas of a country as protected by 2020 — will be undermined if widespread human pressure continues inside protected areas.
