A recent study suggests that designating an additional 1.2% of the world’s land as protected areas could avert the majority of predicted plant and animal extinctions, with an estimated cost of $263 billion.
The global community is striving to achieve a target of protecting 30% of the planet by 2030, addressing the threats posed by climate change, pollution, and habitat loss. Policymakers will gather at a United Nations summit in Colombia this October to discuss strategies for this goal.
Carlos Peres, co-author of the study and conservation ecology expert at the University of East Anglia, emphasized the importance of focusing on high-value areas for preservation. “Most countries do not actually have a strategy,” Peres noted.
The proposed protections would span an additional 1.6 million square kilometers (633,000 square miles) across 16,825 global sites, hosting rare and threatened species. This expansion complements the nearly 16% of land already under some form of protection.
The study estimates the $263 billion cost is primarily for acquiring new protected areas, many of which are privately owned. “Time is not on our side because it will become increasingly more expensive and more difficult to set aside additional protected areas,” Peres said.
Tropical forests, known for their biodiversity, comprise about three-quarters of the targeted sites. Notably, the Philippines, Brazil, and Indonesia host over half of these critical areas. Russia leads with 138,436 square kilometers of high-value conservation land, an area equivalent to Greece. Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo are also significant, with extensive areas earmarked for conservation.
The United States stands out as the only developed nation in the top 30, with protected sites covering 0.6% of its land, an area double the size of Delaware.
The research focused on land and freshwater ecosystems, excluding marine environments and invertebrates due to insufficient mapping of their distributions.