Report: Just 23% of Earth’s wilderness remains

Author: Evan Fleischer / Source: Big Think

“77% of land (excluding Antarctica) and 87% of the ocean has been modified by the direct effects of human activities,” states a new paper in Nature.
Just 5 countries—Russia, Canada, Australia, the U.S., and Brazil—contain 70% of the world’s wilderness (excluding Antarctica).
The paper emphasizes the urgent need to protect large-scale ecosystems, calling them a buffer against the Anthropocene.

Image: Springer Nature, Vol. 563, Nov 2018.

Human exploration and activity has transformed the natural world, and a paper recently published in Nature gives us some numbers to accompany our sense of that ever-snowballing change. The Wildlife Conservation Society summarizes it in a news release: “23 percent of the world’s landmass can now be considered wilderness, with the rest—excluding Antarctica—lost to the direct effects of human activities.”

The criteria by which the Nature paper examined Earth included a focus on built environments, crop and pasture lands, population density, night-time lights, roadways, railways, and navigable waterways, and the scale of the details found using that criteria are shocking, as the authors, James E. M. Watson, James R. Allan and colleagues, write:

Between 1993 and 2009, an area of terrestrial wilderness larger than India—a staggering 3.3 million square kilometres—was lost to human settlement, farming, mining and other pressures. In the ocean, areas that are free of industrial fishing, pollution and shipping are almost completely confined to the polar regions.

Such a large impact seems to be relegated to comparably few actors as well. Twenty nations hold control over 94% of the marine and terrestrial earth. Five nations—Russia, Canada, Australia, the U.S., and Brazil—control 70%.