Sixth Mass Extinction Can Be Averted by Protecting Certain Areas – New Study Reveals

In a new study published in Frontiers in Science, conservationists and scientists demonstrate that preserving biodiversity hotspots, which comprise only 1.22 percent of the Earth’s surface, could protect the remaining biodiversity and prevent a sixth mass extinction. This strategy could save endangered species from extinction and secure the planet’s wildlife for future generations.

“Most species on Earth are rare, meaning that species either have very narrow ranges or they occur at very low densities or both,” said Eric Dinerstein of the NGO Resolve and lead author of the study, to SciTechDaily. “And rarity is very concentrated. In our study, zooming in on this rarity, 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.”

Between 2018 and 2023, an additional 1.2 million square kilometers of land was placed under protection. But do these new protected areas actually safeguard critical biodiversity? Dinerstein and his team are critical, indicating that the 1.2 million square kilometers of land covered only 0.11 million square kilometers of land with species-rich and endangered species. Intensive planning of protected areas is therefore crucial to use efforts and resources as effectively as possible.

Conservation imperatives: Necessary actions to preserve nature

For their study, scientists mapped the entire world using global biodiversity data. By combining these data with maps of existing protected areas, they identified the most biologically important and currently unprotected biodiversity areas, termed Conservation Imperatives. These can serve as anchor points for designing regional conservation plans.

The Conservation imperatives identified in this study are highly concentrated and require only about 164 million hectares, or 16,825 sites worldwide, to prevent extinctions and a sixth mass extinction. This represents only 1.22 percent of the Earth’s total land surface and 0.74 percent of the land in the tropics.

Appropriate protection could prevent all predicted extinction events. Protecting sites in the tropical region alone could prevent most extinctions. Thirty-eight percent of the Conservation Imperatives are very close to already protected areas, which could make it easier to integrate them into protected areas or find other ways to preserve them.

“These sites are home to over 4,700 threatened species in some of the world’s most biodiverse yet threatened ecosystems,” says Andy Lee, a co-author of the study. “These include not only mammals and birds that rely on large intact habitats, like the tamaraw in the Philippines and the Celebes crested macaque in Sulawesi Indonesia, but also range-restricted amphibians and rare plant species.”

Protecting wildlife as key to addressing the climate crisis

Scientists estimate the cost of this protection method at about $34 billion per year over five years. “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,” Lee says. Protecting biodiversity hotspots is thus considered a particularly cost-effective measure compared to other global expenditures.

Protecting wildlife is crucial to stopping and reversing the climate crisis. Preserving biodiversity means protecting the Earth’s forest cover, which acts as a carbon sink: by protecting carbon-rich, species-rich forested regions, both endangered species and humans are safeguarded. While securing the Conservation Imperatives is only part of the work – for example, land purchase alone will not prevent poaching – it is the first important step to be taken.

“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.”

There is an urgent need to prioritize the protection of habitats for rare and endangered species as part of a broader global biodiversity strategy. Conservation Imperatives offer a solution to preserving the last unprotected areas that harbor rare, spatially limited, and endangered species, and should be a central component of the goals to protect at least 30 percent of the Earth’s surface by 2030.