Environment

Biodiversity Under Pressure

In what's being called a "stunning reality check," a new study published in the journal Science reveals that despite global efforts to safeguard biodiversity by establishing nature reserves, nearly a third of the world's "protected land is under intense human pressure."

While more than 90 percent of protected land worldwide has been degraded to some degree due to human activity, 32.8 percent—more than 2.3 million square miles—has been significantly impacted by human activity, according to the report.

"What we found was massive amounts of high-level human infrastructure, for example mining activity, industrial logging activity, industrial agriculture, townships, roads, and energy," lead author James Watson, a conservation scientist at the University of Queensland in Australia, told the Guardian.

"These are the places that nations have said they are setting aside for nature's needs not human needs," he added. "So for us to find such a significant amount of human infrastructure in places governments have set aside for safeguarding biodiversity is staggering."

Although the damage was most common in densely populated parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe, researchers emphasized that it is a global issue. Their findings bolster concerns generated from other recent reports that have shown that human activity—most notably, anthropogenic climate change—is causing "a major biodiversity crisis."

One example of a protected area that has been degraded by human activity is Barrow Island in Western Australia.