TRENDING SCIENCE: About 97 % of land areas have been destroyed, research claims

How many pristine places are left undisturbed by oil, gas and mining activities, as well as land development? What is the extent of this damage to habitats?

According to a study published in the journal ‘Frontiers in Forests and Global Change’, nearly 3 % of the world’s land remains ecologically intact. These areas include Canada’s boreal forests, Greenland’s tundra, Amazon and Congo tropical forests, and the Sahara Desert. Only 11 % of the areas identified by the international research team are under protection.“I was particularly surprised to see how low it really is,” lead author Andrew Plumptre, a conservation biologist at the University of Cambridge, told ‘Reuters’. “It shows how rare such intact places are. It’s scary just how little the world looks like what it was just 500 years ago.”

Using satellites, previous estimates claimed that 20-40 % of the Earth’s land surface remained unblemished by humans. Why such a discrepancy? The new findings include the loss of species from intact habitat and reduced populations. As a benchmark date, the researchers chose the year 1500 CE and considered only areas larger than 10 000 km2. They combined maps indicating human damage to habitat with those showing where animals have disappeared from their original ranges or are too few in numbers to sustain a healthy ecosystem.

The researchers identified three factors to assess the ecological integrity and the intactness of Earth’s ecosystems. The first is the extent to which humans have changed the land. The second is how many animal species have disappeared because of habitat loss. The last factor is the number of animals in a species that is still present.The findings provide a glimmer of hope. By introducing specific species, 20 % of land could be restored. “Putting efforts into conserving these [intact] places is very important,” Dr Plumptre commented in ‘The Guardian’. “They are so rare and special, and show what the world was like before humans had any major impact, helping us measure how much we’ve lost.”

He added: “Much of what we consider as intact habitat is missing species that have been hunted [and poached] by people, or lost because of invasive species or disease. It’s fairly scary, because it shows how unique places like the Serengeti are, which actually have functioning and fully intact ecosystems. We’re in the UN decade of ecosystem restoration now, but it is focusing on degraded habitat. Let’s also think about restoring species so that we can try and build up these areas where we’ve got ecologically intact ecosystems.”

Dr Plumptre further emphasised the importance of restoring degraded habitats in an article submitted to ‘The Conversation’. “Repairing the world’s most damaged habitats is undoubtedly important, but there’s an opportunity to restore relatively intact habitats to something resembling their former glory. Instead of just conserving them, let’s be ambitious and try to expand these rare and pristine patches by reintroducing long-lost animals. If successful, these intact sites can serve as an invaluable reminder of what the rest of the world has lost, and a useful benchmark from which to measure what is truly wild.”