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Planet’s Protected Areas
Crucial progress is being made towards conserving the world’s most spectacular habitats and wildlife, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the IUCN-World Conservation Union shows. More than 100,000 protected areas, some 90 per cent of which have been listed over the past 40 years, have been established across the developed and developing world.
Between ten and thirty per cent of some of the planet’s vital natural features such as the Amazonian rainforests, the Arctic tundra and the tropical savannah grasslands are now held in these protected areas.
However, progress towards conserving other biologically and ecologically important landscapes is proving more sluggish.
Less than 10 per cent of the world’s large lakes are protected, and temperate grasslands typical of Central Asia and the North American prairies, are similarly poorly protected.
The rate at which the planet’s marine world is gaining protection causes even greater concern. Less than 0.5 per cent of the world’s seas and oceans are within protected areas. This is despite the importance of fisheries and habitats such as coral reefs as sources of protein and employment for billions of people across the developed and developing world. These are just some of the findings from the 2003 United Nations List of Protected Areas.
The report lists World Heritage Sites, Biosphere Reserves and other protected areas ranging from the vast Greenland National Park, which at over 97 million hectares is the globe’s biggest, to, for the first time, thousands of sites smaller than ten square kilometres, many of which are in private hands.
Much of the growth has occurred in the last half of the 20th Century. Between 1872, when Yellowstone National Park was established in the United States, and the early 1960s, some 10,000 protected areas were created. The total now stands at over 100,000.
Stuart Chape, the lead author of the UN List, said: “It may seem as if protected areas are a historically recent phenomenon. However, human enthusiasm to protect and conserve special resource areas and “sacred” sites goes back millennia. In 252 BC the Emperor Asoka of India set up protected areas for mammals, birds, fish and forests — the earliest recorded examples of government-backed protection.”
Highlights of the 2003 United Nations List of Protected Areas
The extent of Protected Areas
The report lists 102,102 sites covering an area of 18.8 million square kilometres of which 17 million square kilometres, representing 11.5 per cent of the Earth’s land surface, is terrestrial.
The area of the world’s protected areas is now far bigger than the land surface of India and China. It is also larger than the area of land under permanent, arable, crops.
What is currently protected?
The report lists 14 so-called land or terrestrial “biomes”. Biomes are defined as “the world’s major communities, classified according to the predominant vegetation and characterized by adaptations of organisms to that particular environment.”
Essentially they are locations, areas or regions where a certain type of habitat, for example tropical humid forests, dominates.
The IVth IUCN World Parks Congress in 1992 set a target calling for at least 10 per cent of each of these to be protected. Currently, the target for nine out of the 14 has been met.
Where are they?
Europe leads the way in terms of the numbers of protected areas with over 43,000 listed followed by North Eurasia, nearly 18,000; North America, over 13,000 and Australia and New Zealand with close to 9,000. The Pacific, with around 320, has the fewest. There are nearly 4,390 in Eastern and Southern Africa with a further 2,600 in Western and Central Africa.
However, in terms of size, it is Central America and South America which have the largest protected areas estates, covering almost 25 per cent of each of these regions. North America also does well with 4.5 million square kilometres or just over 18 per cent of the region’s land surface.
Protected areas cover 1.6 million square kilometres or over 14.5 per cent of Eastern and Southern Africa and over 1.1 million square kilometres or over 10.5 per cent of land in Western and Central Africa.
The Pacific has over 20,000 square kilometres of protected areas representing about 1.5 per cent of its land area.
Marine
The report lists an estimated 4,116 marine protected areas covering over 1.6 million square kilometres. However, this represents less than 0.5 per cent of the seas and oceans.
Most of these sites, including for example Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, have been designated since the 1970s. Australia and New Zealand have the largest area of marine protection, covering over 420,000 sq km. Although Europe has the largest number of marine protected areas, over 800, these are small and many offer only limited levels of protection. The coastlines of Southern and Eastern Africa and of South Asia are some of the least protected, making the Indian Ocean, with its wealth of coral reefs, sea grasses, and mangrove forests, perhaps the most poorly protected ocean.
The ten largest Protected Areas
Greenland’s 97.2 million hectare National Park is the world’s biggest followed by the 64 million hectare Ar-Rub’al-Khali wildlife management area in Saudi Arabia.
The third biggest is the 34.5 million hectare Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia followed by the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands’ coral reef ecosystem reserve of the United States at over 34 million hectares.
The fifth largest is the more than 32 million hectare Amazonia forest reserve in Colombia and the sixth, the Qiang Tang nature reserve in China, almost 25 million hectares.
The seventh biggest is the Cape Churchill wildlife management area in northern Canada covering just under 14 million hectares followed by the Northern Wildlife Management Zone in Saudi Arabia, 10 million hectares.
This is followed by the Alto Orinoco-Casiquiare biosphere reserve in Venezuela and Bolivia, over eight million hectares and the Valo do Javari indigenous area in Brazil, again at just over eight million hectares.
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