Roughly a sixth of the planet's land and freshwater area now lies within protected or conservation areas, according to a United Nations report released on 19 May.
Next comes the hard part. The world needs to ensure that those regions are actually effectively managed to stabilise the climate and to curb biodiversity loss while also increasing the total area of protected places, scientists say.
Also read: Global leaders pledge to protect nature at the UN Biodiversity Summit
“Protected and conserved areas play a crucial role in tackling biodiversity loss,” said Neville Ash, director of the U.N. Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, which produced the report. But simply drawing lines on a map isn't enough. Conservation areas “need to be effectively managed and equitably governed,” he said.
The “Protected Planet ” report also found that about 8 per cent of coastal and ocean waters are within protected areas. The report also revealed some hard facts. A third of key biodiversity areas globally still lack any form of protection or conservation coverage, an AFP report adds, and less than 8 per cent of land is both protected and connected.
“There has been a substantial increase in the protection of marine ecosystems in the past decade. But the protection of land areas hasn't increased as much in that time,” said Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University, who was not involved in the report.
“What we really need to know about is the quality of the protected areas — not just the quantity of square miles,” Pimm added.
“It is nowhere near enough,” said Charles Barber, senior biodiversity advisor for the World Resources Institute, who was not involved in the report. “We need to conserve half of the Earth if we are going to maintain the basic biological operating system'” of the planet.
Also read: Biodiversity 'hot spots' will be hit hardest in warming world
Several scientific and environmental groups are now calling for 30 per cent or 50 per cent of the planet to be protected. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden set a goal of conserving at least 30 per cent of US lands and waters by 2030.
“There's plenty of scientific evidence that protected areas are the cornerstone of biodiversity protection and climate stabilization,” said Eric Dinerstein, a conservation biologist at RESOLVE, a nonprofit group.
“Humanity is heading for an environmental cliff — so we have to do a U-turn," he told the Associated Press. "We know that the creation of more protected areas is absolutely vital. The questions are: How much, where, and how fast?”
(With inputs from AP and AFP)
