from al jazeera:
huge losses in biodiversity, and ‘protected areas’ such as national parks aren’t working.
The size and number of protected areas on land and sea has increased dramatically since the 1980s, now totaling over 100,000 in number and covering 17 million square kilometres of land and two million square kilometres of oceans, a new study reported Thursday.
Dealing with failure
But impressive as those numbers look, all indicators reveal species going extinct faster than ever before, despite all the additions of new parks,
reserves and other conservation measures, according to the study published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.
“It is amazing to me that we haven’t dealt with this failure of protected areas to slow biodiversity losses,” said lead author Camilo Mora of University of Hawaii at Manoa.
“We were surprised the evidence from the past 30 years was so clear,” Mora said.
The ability of protected areas to address the problem of biodiversity loss – the decline in diversity and numbers of all living species – has long been overestimated, the study reported. The reality is that most protected areas are not truly protected. Many are “paper parks”, protected in name only. Up to 70 per cent of marine protected areas are paper parks, Mora said.
The study shows global expenditures on protected areas today are estimated at $6bn per year, and many areas are insufficiently funded for effective management. Effectively managing existing protected areas requires an estimated $24bn per year – four times the current expenditure.
False hopes
“Ongoing biodiversity loss and its consequences for humanity’s welfare are of great concern and have prompted strong calls for expanding the use of protected areas as a remedy,” said co-author Peter Sale, a marine biologist and assistant director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health.
“Protected areas are a false hope in terms of preventing the loss of biodiversity,” Sale said.
The authors based their study on existing literature and global data on human threats and biodiversity loss.
When asked about the 2010 global biodiversity protection agreement in Nagoya, Japan to put 17 per cent of land and 10 per cent of oceans on the planet under protection by 2020, Sale said it was “very unlikely those targets will be reached” due to conflicts between growing needs for food and other resources.
“Even if those targets were achieved, it is not going to stop the decline in biodiversity,” he said.
One reason for this is “leakage”. Fence off one forest and the logging pressure increases in another. Make one coral reef off limits to fishing and the fishing boats go the next reef.
Another reason protected areas aren’t the answer is that fences or patrol boats can’t keep out the impacts of pollution or climate change.
Finally, the pressures on the planet’s resources are escalating so quickly that “the problem is running away from the solution”, he said.
The loss of biodiversity is a major issue because it is humanity’s only life-support system, delivering everything from food, to clean water and air, to recreation and tourism, to novel chemicals that drive our advanced civilisation, said Mora. Right now the dominant strategy to halt the loss of biodiversity is with protected areas.
“That’s putting all our eggs in one basket,” he said. “A major shift is needed to deal with the roots of the problem.”
We have to reduce the population by steralization else we will be shoulder to shoulder in a short time. HAVE TO REDUCE THE POPULATION PEROID.