Page 6 - Eric Dinerstein News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Share In Bali, Aboriginal people grow crops in the midst of a diverse tropical forest. Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Just 19% of Earth’s land is still ‘wild,’ analysis suggests Apr. 19, 2021 , 3:00 PM Since the 1960s, conservationists have had a standard solution for saving biodiversity: Protect natural areas from human influence. But a new analysis of Earth’s land use going back 12,000 years suggests that even in the time of mammoths and giant sloths, just one-quarter of the planet was untouched by humans, compared with 19% today. Because some of th...

Right now, in the conservation movement, a lot of people are fixated on a single number: 30. The US and more than 50 other countries have pledged to conserve 30 percent of their land and water by 2030 as a means to help thwart the biodiversity crisis. Biodiversity tends to increase with the area of land or water conserved, yet just 16 percent of global land is in protected areas today (in the US, it’s closer to 12 percent), according to the World Database on Protected Areas. Intact ecosystems also play a major role in mitigating climate change. As conservationists have recognized the impor...

Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals/naturepl THE Great Barrier Reef is already in a critical state. Rising sea temperatures are killing corals faster than they can recover. As temperatures continue to increase, more and more of the reef will die, along with the rich variety of life and the AUS$6 billion tourism industry that depend on it. It is one headline-grabbing example among many. The continued rapid warming of the planet would wipe out many species, even if it were the only change happening. As it is, a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is already under way as farms replace forests and...