Nature Needs (at least) Half: A Necessary New Agenda for Protected Areas

Abstract

I ARGUE THAT CONSERVATION TARGETS should be based on what is necessary to protect nature in all its expressions. When in 1987 the Brundtland Report called for tripling the world's protected area estate (which was then at 3–4 percent of the land area) there was a strong belief that sustainable development would ensure the proper care for nature on the rest of the unprotected Earth. This has proven wrong. We therefore must materially shift our protected areas target to protect at least half of the world—land and seas—in an interconnected way to conform with what conservation biologists have learned about the needs of nature. Instead, we have set goals that are politically determined, with arbitrary percentages that rest on an unarticulated hope that such nonscientific goals are a good first step toward some undefined, better, future outcome. This has been a destructive form of self-censorship. It is time for conservationists to reset the debate based on scientific findings and assert nature's needs fearlessly.