<
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/02/conservation-in-wealthy-nations-may-worsen-global-biodiversity-loss-study-finds/>
"Efforts to rewild landscapes across Europe and North America could be making
global biodiversity loss worse by shifting environmental destruction to poorer,
more biodiverse regions, a new study warns.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge, U.K., found that when farming and
resource extraction move abroad to accommodate conservation in wealthy
countries, it can result in agricultural expansion in areas more crucial for
nature, inadvertently resulting in more overall ecological damage.
“Areas of much greater importance for nature are likely to pay the price for
conservation efforts in wealthy nations unless we work to fix this leak,” lead
author Andrew Balmford, a conservation scientist at Cambridge, said in a
written statement.
“At its worst, we could see some conservation actions cause net global harm,”
Balmford added.
The researchers found where conservation happens makes a big difference. For
example, rewilding U.K. farmland could result in five times more ecological
harm, globally, by shifting food production to more fragile ecosystems. But
reforesting a soy farm in Brazil could have five times the ecological
benefits if that farming then moves to less biodiverse regions like the U.S.
or Argentina.
This phenomenon has been observed before. When the U.S. protected old-growth
forests in the Pacific Northwest, timber production increased elsewhere in
North America, shifting the environmental burden rather than reducing it. Now,
scientists say, large-scale conservation efforts in Europe and China could be
fueling deforestation in the Global South as both regions import more of what
they no longer produce.
While the EU’s antideforestation law may help, loopholes weaken its impact,
Balmford told
Mongabay by email. Producers can bypass it by rerouting
deforested land’s output to non-EU markets while sending older farm products to
the EU, among other tactics. “A stronger approach is to seek to increase EU
self-sufficiency and so reduce imports,” Balmford wrote.
Conservation interventions are vulnerable to this kind of leak because most
threats to biodiversity come from farming, fishing, hunting or logging."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
