Earth’s protected areas are being destroyed

Turns out a large chunk of what should be the world’s most protected areas are anything but.

A new study reports that human activities — such as city sprawl, road construction and farming — are wreaking havoc on some 2.3 million square miles of protected land worldwide, an area about twice the size of Alaska.

Forests, parks and conservation areas around the globe are all seeing human impacts, with protected areas in Asia, Europe and Africa — places with massive human populations — seeing some of the worst effects, according to the research, which appeared Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

Study co-author James Watson of the University of Queensland in Australia called it “a stunning reality check” for the world’s nations.

“Governments are claiming these places are protected for the sake of nature when in reality they aren’t,” Watson said. “It is a major reason why biodiversity is still in catastrophic decline, despite more and more land being protected over the past few decades.”

Kendall Jones, the study lead author, said that “we found major road infrastructure such as highways, industrial agriculture, and even entire cities occurring inside the boundaries of places supposed to be set aside for nature conservation.” He said more than 90% of national parks and nature reserves showed some signs of damaging human activities.

Countries are their own worst enemies, Watson told the BBC. He said that although most of the world has signed the Convention on Biological Diversity, which commits countries to conservation of species, the convention has very little leadership.