A Third of the World’s ‘Protected’ Areas Are Under Threat

The world map is peppered with patches of protected land, ostensibly ringed by clear borders that seem to safely shield our few remaining wild areas from human encroachment. But the reality on the ground is much messier. New satellite data show that across huge swaths of the planet—including America—the neatly cordoned “protected” areas are so exposed to pollution, industrial exploitation, and land degradation that they are virtually unprotected from anything.

The Valley of the Gods at the Bears Ears
National Monument in southeastern Utah. 

An international team of researchers parsed global satellite data to reveal that many legally designated “protected” natural areas are directly threatened by expanding habitat destruction, displacement and destruction of local biodiversity. Researchers found that, worldwide, “6 million square kilometers (32.8%) of protected land is under intense human pressure.” Western Europe and Southern Asia were particularly under threat; satellite imaging revealed that “[o]nly 42 percent of protected land was found to be free of measurable human pressure.” That means in many of the world’s most densely populated and fastest developing regions, the majority of supposedly protected lands are besieged by the march of human progress—through our farming increasingly depleted terrains, hunting their endangered wildlife, or extracting resources from the ground.

Read the story by Michelle Chen from The Nation - “A Third of the World’s ‘Protected’ Areas Are Under Threat.”

Frequency of extreme weather events warrants climate change epithet

E

xtreme weather events rarely warrant the epithet of climate change when considered in isolation.




Dorothea Mackellar - many
 climate change doubters
escape to and draw comfort
from her 1906
 poem, "My Country".

The attribution for responsibility is quickly pinned on climate change immediately frequency and severity are entered into the equation.

This century, not yet even 15-years-old yet, has seen Australia peppered with extreme weather events, including devastating bushfires, floods and cyclones, and yet we have government that invariably seeks comfort in the Dorothea Mackellar poem, “My Country”.

Mackellar, who was not climate scientist and during a bout of homesickness in England early last century wrote:
 

“I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.”

That simple, but moving poem is often trotted out to explain, or justify, why Australia is being repeatedly assaulted by extreme weather events, almost as if a lonely and homesick poet of 19 new more early in 20^th Century than our highly trained scientists of the 21^st Century.

Just as we have seen a preview of the extreme weather ahead, it’s now argued in a Huffington Post story that “Texas Flooding Could Be A Preview Of Future Extreme Weather Events”.