Not
so long ago the blog highlighted the weakening Australia's commitment
to conservation areas for commercial reasons. The United States is
going down the same road.
A
report,
authored by 21 international scientists, published in the journal
Science,
found
that the pace of proposed rollbacks in the US has accelerated, with
90% having taken place since 2000. Nearly all of those proposals
(99%) were associated with industrial-scale development projects,
including infrastructure construction and oil and gas extraction. The
report specifically calls out Donald Trump’s downsizing of Bears
Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, the largest
protected area reductions in US history, as highlighting “the
increasingly uncertain future of US PAs [protected areas]”.
“The
recent legal changes that have scaled back protections in the US are
just unprecedented,” said Mike Mascia, a senior vice-president at
Conservation
International and the report’s senior author. “And they send a
dangerous message to the rest of the world.”
The
report placed the US within an international picture, tracking
attempts to diminish protected areas in 73 countries between 1892 and
2018, and
found
that
the
majority (78%) were enacted since 2000. Many of those policy changes
were proposed to make way for industry, such as the construction of
hydro-powered dams in Amazonian countries including Brazil.
Around
the world, protected areas appear to be facing increasing threats
from industrial-scale developers, said Lisa Naughton-Treves, a
geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
“When
I started, the threats were largely from the uncontrolled expansion
of agriculture or hunting,” explained Naughton-Treves, who has
worked on protected areas for nearly 30 years. “Now it’s more
about dams, mining, natural gas exploration – these
high-investment, industrial threats.”
Mark
Lubell, an environmental scientist at the University of California,
Davis, who was not involved in the research, said, that opening up
wilderness areas to industry can cause long-term ecological damage
and risk their ability to be protected in the future. “When you
open up roadless, wilderness areas to oil and gas extraction,” he
said, “those areas can lose the qualities that made them eligible
for wilderness designations and protections in the first place.”
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