What percentage of the planet is still virgin or wild today?

Contributor • Lex Comber Professor of Spatial Data Analytics, University of Leeds Disclosure statement The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Partners The Conversation UK receives funding from these organisations View the full list Languages • • English There aren’t many corners of the world left untouched by humanity. Recent research has highlighted that just 23% of the planet’s Researchers from the US and Australia recently produced The data used to map wilderness is often collected in different ways for different parts of the world. For example, some datasets map roads all the way down to farm and forest tracks, while others may only record primary road networks. The definition of how far land has to be from these roads to be classified as wilderness can also vary. Meanwhile, knitting all this data into a single map often leads to compromises that reduce its usefulness, such as not including any blocks of wilderness below a certain size. So while global maps are useful for drawing attention to the attrition of wilderness areas, only the greater detail of national and local maps can really help us understand and respond to the threats that face our remaining wild areas. Scotland’s wilderness. Steve Carver, Author provided Scotland is perhaps the country with the Early maps showed most wildern...

1 2 Global Analysis Finds Nearly Half The Earth Is Still Wilderness Date: December 5, 2002 Source: Conservation International Summary: According to the most comprehensive global analysis ever conducted, wilderness areas still cover close to half the Earth's land, but contain only a tiny percentage of the world's population. More than 200 international scientists contributed to the analysis, which will be published in the book, Wilderness: Earth's Last Wild Places, (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Share: December 4, 2002 (Washington, DC) – According to the most comprehensive global analysis ever conducted, wilderness areas still cover close to half the Earth's land, but contain only a tiny percentage of the world's population. More than 200 international scientists contributed to the analysis, which will be published in the book, Wilderness: Earth's Last Wild Places, (University of Chicago Press, 2003). The 37 wilderness areas identified in the book represent 46 percent of the Earth's land surface, but are occupied by just 2.4 percent of the world's population, excluding urban centers. Nine of the wilderness areas fall, at least in part, within the United States. Although the wilderness areas are still largely intact, they are increasingly threatened by population growth, encroaching agriculture and resource extraction activities. Barely 7 percent of the areas currently enjoy some form of protection. Nineteen of the wilderness areas have remarkably low population densit...

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon – one of the few fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities. Photograph: Florian Plaucheur/AFP/Getty Images Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon – one of the few fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities. Photograph: Florian Plaucheur/AFP/Getty Images Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat, a study suggests. These fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities are mainly in parts of the Amazon and Congo tropical forests, east Siberian and northern Canadian forests and tundra, and the Sahara. Invasive alien species including cats, foxes, rabbits, goats and camels have had a major impact on native species in Australia, with the study finding no intact areas left. According to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity there are 1.For terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, land-use change has had the largest relative negative impact on nature since 1970.More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.Alongside a doubling of urban area since 1992, things such as wetlands, scrubland and woodlands – which wildlife relies on – are ironed out from the landscape. 2. The direct exploitation of organisms and non-living materials,including logging, hunting and fishing and the extraction of soils and water are all negatively affecting ecosys...

Summary Shortly after the end of the last great ice age – 10,000 years ago – 57% of the world’s habitable land was covered by forest. In the millennia since then a growing demand for agricultural land means we’ve lost one-third of global forests – an area twice the size of the United States. Half of this loss occurred in the last century alone. But it’s possible to end our long history of deforestation: increased crop yields, improved livestock productivity, and technological innovations that allow us to shift away from land-intensive food products gives us the opportunity to bring deforestation to an end and restore some of the forest we have lost. Update: In February 2022, this article was updated with an improved version of the long-run chart on global forest loss. You can find the previous version Many people think of environmental concerns as a modern issue: humanity’s destruction of nature and ecosystems as a result of very recent How much forest has the world lost? When in history did we lose it? In the chart we see how the cover of the earth’s surface has changed over the past 10,000 years. This is shortly after the end of the last great ice age, through to the present day. 1 Let’s start at the top. You see that of the 14.9 billion hectares of land on the planet, only 71% of it is habitable – the other 29% is either covered by ice and glaciers, or is barren land such as deserts, salt flats, or dunes. I have therefore excluded these categories so we can focus on how...

Mass soyabean harvesting in Campo Verde, Brazil. Intensive agriculture has contributed to the collapse of many animal populations. Photograph: Alffoto/WWF Mass soyabean harvesting in Campo Verde, Brazil. Intensive agriculture has contributed to the collapse of many animal populations. Photograph: Alffoto/WWF Wildlife populations are in freefall around the world, driven by human overconsumption, population growth and intensive agriculture, according to a major new assessment of the abundance of life on Earth. On average, global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles plunged by 68% between 1970 and 2016, according to the WWF and Zoological Society of London (ZSL)’s biennial The research is one of the most comprehensive assessments of global biodiversity available and was complied by 134 experts from around the world. It found that from the rainforests of central America to the Pacific Ocean, nature is being exploited and destroyed by humans on a scale never previously recorded. The analysis tracked global data on 20,811 populations of 4,392 vertebrate species. Those monitored include high-profile threatened animals such as pandas and polar bears as well as lesser known amphibians and fish. The figures, the latest available, showed that in all regions of the world, vertebrate wildlife populations are collapsing, falling on average by more than two-thirds since 1970. Biodiversity – short for biological diversity – is the variety of life on Earth, from the...

In 1987, the government in Bhutan banned climbing Gangkhar Puensum because powerful spirits are said to inhabit the mountain's peak. Some cite Undeterred by the rumors, a Japanese group of climbers got permission from the Chinese Mountaineering Association to climb the unclimbable mountain from the Tibetan approach. The Bhutanese side Planet Earth is riddled with caves, a good proportion of which have spent a few dozen millennia submerged underwater. Until very recently, that meant they were inaccessible to anyone but the suicidally insane, plus Aquaman. And Aquaman is way too busy starring in a sinking movie universe to search every cave. Which is why what's been happening this past decade is so fascinating. Utilizing state of the art diving equipment, adventurers have started exploring Earth's drowned caves (via adventure magazine Outside). What they've found is already rewriting history. From Africa, to the Americas, to Europe, underwater caves have been found filled with perfectly preserved skeletons of animals we haven't seen for ages. These finds are helping scientists better understand how certain species evolved, and exactly what the planet used to look like. The best part is humanity has still explored only a fraction of the underwater caves out there. Star Trek was wrong. The final frontier is really here on Earth. The trench was created when one tectonic plate topped with oceanic crust slid under another. It Challenger II, which is why the deepest point is calle...

The critically endangered Hainan gibbon lost about 80 percent of its total population over the past 50 years. It's now considered the rarest ape on Earth, with just 28 living in a single nature preserve. (Photo: Jessica Bryant/ZSL) 1. Wild Vertebrate Populations Are Declining Earth's population of wild vertebrates — all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish — experienced an overall decline of 60 percent from 1970 to 2014, the most recent year with available data. (By comparison, the 2016 and 2014 editions reported a 58 percent and 52 percent decline since 1970, respectively.) 3. Habitat Loss Is the Biggest Threat to Vertebrates The No. 1 cause of the decline is habitat loss and degradation, which accounts for nearly half of all threats within each taxonomic group, except fish (28 percent). Common threats to wildlife habitat include "unsustainable agriculture, logging, transportation, residential or commercial development, energy production and mining," the report notes, adding that "fragmentation of rivers and streams and abstraction of water" are also prevalent causes in freshwater ecosystems. Dead trees stand in a recently deforested section of the Amazon rainforest near Abunã, Brazil, in 2017. The past half century has seen about 20 percent of the Amazon vanish, according to the WWF. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images) 4. Ecosystems Are Being Destroyed This phenomenon is shrinking some of Earth's most iconic ecosystems — roughly 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest ...