3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
fossil fuels. The immense economic growth has come with the cost of unleashing catastrophic
threats of climate destabilization. This, in turn, has generated a revival in mass production of
bioenergy, threatening a far greater consumption of the Earth’s remaining Net Primary
Production. The risks to biodiversity and ecosystem services becomes clear when we recognize
that satisfying the world consumption of fossil fuels with bioenergy substitutes would consume
more than 400 times the planet’s entire NPP. 313
World-renown biodiversity scientist, Harvard Professor E.O. Wilson, exhorts humanity in his
recent book, Half Earth, Our Planet’s Fight for Life:
If biodiversity is to be returned to the baseline level of extinction that existed before the
spread of humanity, and thus saved for future generations, the conservation effort must
be raised to a new level. The only solution to the “Sixth Extinction” is to increase the area
of inviolable natural reserves to half the surface of the Earth or greater.
It has taken more than a century to set aside about 13% of Earth’s land surface into wilderness
reserves, nature parks, and protected areas. 314 Oceans and coastlines, already suffering some
of the most damaging consequences (40% of the planet’s coral reefs are dead, including 80% in
the Caribbean, and over 50% of the Great Barrier Reef now dead with 95% threatened with
permanent loss), have not received as much protection. Just 3.3% of the world’s oceans and 7%
of coastal areas are protected areas. 315 Some nations have pursued protection of significantly
higher percentages of land surface. The ten top nations have set aside 40 to 60+ percent of
their lands in bioreserves and conservation. 316 A large fraction of the nature parks
unfortunately are not well protected; half of them are being exploited due to lax or absent
enforcement. 317 Most problematic is the fact that nine out of ten of the planet’s classified
threatened floral and faunal species are located mainly outside existing protected zones. 318
313 Dukes, Jeffrey S. (2003) Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of Ancient Solar Energy, Climate Change,
61: 31–44, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
314 Dudley, Nigel, Liza Higgins-Zogib, Marc Hockings, Kathy MacKinnon, Trevor Sandwith, Sue Stolton (2011)
National Parks with Benefits: How Protecting the Planet's Biodiversity Also Provides Ecosystem Services,
Solutions, vol 2, issue 6, http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/1008.
315 Boonzaier, Lisa and Daniel Pauley (2016) Marine protection targets: an updated assessment of global progress,
Oryx, 50(1), 27–35, Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605315000848.
316 World Atlas (2013) Countries With The Most Protected Lands (Percentage Of Area As Reserves),
http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-highest-percentage-of-protected-reserve-lands.html.
317 Laurence, William, D. Carolina Useche, Julio Rendeiro, Margareta Kalka, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Sean P. Sloan,
Susan G. Laurance, Mason Campbell et al. (2012) Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas,
Nature, vol. 488, September 13, 2012.
318 Nigel Dudley and Jeffrey Parish (2006) Closing the Gap. Creating Ecologically Representative Protected Area
Systems: A Guide to Conducting the Gap Assessments of Protected Area Systems for the Convention on
Biological Diversity. Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Montreal, Technical Series no. 24.
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