Researchers have identified key areas of the Earth that need to be protected in order to safeguard the majority of the endangered species on our planet.
These sites, numbering 16,825, make up around 1.22 percent of the land surface of the Earth, with their protection being critical to preventing "the sixth great extinction of life on Earth," according to a new paper in the journal Frontiers in Science.
The researchers hope that protecting these key havens of biodiversity may be an affordable and achievable way of preserving species on our planet.
"We are in the midst of the sixth major extinction crisis in the history of Earth, but the first attributed to human activities," study author Eric Dinerstein, a senior expert in biodiversity at NGO RESOLVE, told Newsweek. "Our new study offers an affordable, achievable blueprint for preventing more species extinctions by targeting 1.2 percent of the Earth's terrestrial area where rare species are concentrated but their habitats remain unprotected."
"We call these sites Conservation Imperatives. This strategy can be the first critical step taken by the countries that have agreed to implement the Global Biodiversity Framework, a pledge to protect 30 percent of the Earth by 2030," he said. "Conservation Imperatives should be the next 1.2 percent we add to safeguard rare species from going extinct."
The paper is the result of a collaboration of conservationists and researchers around the world, who mapped the land surface of our planet using biodiversity data. They discovered that, as most species that are rare have quite narrow local ranges, only a small area of the planet needs to be preserved to prevent a large number of species from going extinct.
"We used six widely cited global data sets that map out the distributions of rare and threatened vertebrates (birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and plants), and overlaid their distributions with the current extent of protected areas to determine how much remained unprotected (2.3 percent of the Earth's terrestrial surface). We then removed areas of non-habitat from these unprotected polygons using a filter based on satellite data," Dinerstein said.
"We found that we need only about 1.2 percent of the Earth's surface to head off the sixth great extinction of life on Earth," Dinerstein explained in a statement.
Tropical rainforests are home to 76 percent of the sites and these are concentrated in five countries: Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, Madagascar and Colombia.
"Of the species that have been evaluated by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), over 4,700 species that we know about and have named can be saved," Dinerstein said. "But there are perhaps more than a million species about which we know little that occur in the same unprotected habitats that would be protected as well."
Some of the species found at these sites include the tamaraw in the Philippines and the Celebes crested macaque in Indonesia's Sulawesi.
The researchers note that protecting the sites is financially viable at this moment in time, but there is a limited time frame in which to protect these areas.
"There is a dwindling window of opportunity to protect what is left of the wild across Earth's ecoregions," paper co-author Carlos Peres, a professor of conservation ecology at UEA, said in a statement. "Our analysis shows that setting aside a critical threshold of only 1.2 percent of all terrestrial areas—identified as nearly 17,000 sites—to ensure the persistence of endemic, threatened and rare species is a financially viable proposition, but I'm afraid this viability will rapidly decline over time."
Between 2018 and 2023, 1.2 million square kilometers of land were protected, but only 0.11 million square kilometers of this land was actually home to threatened species. The latest study therefore highlights the importance of targeting protected areas efficiently to protect species most at risk.
The cost of protecting the land suggested in this research was predicted using data from other land protection projects
"Our analysis estimated that protecting the Conservation Imperatives in the tropics would cost approximately $34 billion per year over the next five years," co-author Andy Lee, a Senior Program Associate at RESOLVE, said in the statement. "This represents less than 0.2 percent of the United States' GDP, less than 9 percent of the annual subsidies benefiting the global fossil fuel industry, and a fraction of the revenue generated from the mining and agroforestry industries each year."
The researchers hope that protecting these sites will be the first step toward protecting 30 percent of the planet, which will also safeguard areas that are crucial to slowing the effects of climate change, such as rainforests.
"What will we bequeath to future generations? A healthy, vibrant Earth is critical for us to pass on," said Dinerstein. "So we've got to get going. We've got to head off the extinction crisis. Conservation Imperatives drive us to do that."
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