Tsavo 6-lane highway plan raises eyebrows

Some 6 million square kilometers of protected land — equivalent to two-thirds the size of China — are unlikely to conserve endangered biodiversity.

“Most nations are doing the first step, and gazetting protected areas but not doing the harder, and more important, second step of funding the management of those protected areas and ensuring they are secured against large-scale human interference,” Watson said.

Barrow Island National Park in Western Australia — home to endangered mammal species such as the spectacled hare-wallaby, burrowing bettong, golden bandicoot and black-flanked rock-wallaby — also house major oil and gas extraction activities.

In the Indonesian island of Sumatra, more than 100,000 people have illegally settled in Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park — home to the critically endangered Sumatran tiger, orangutan and rhinoceros — and converted around 15 percent of the park area for coffee plantations.

US national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone also suffer due to “the increasingly sophisticated tourism infrastructure being built inside their borders,” he said.

“We found major road infrastructure such as highways, industrial agriculture, and even entire cities occurring inside the boundaries of places supposed to be set aside for nature conservation,” said co-author Kendall Jones, a researcher at Queensland University in Australia.

“More than 90 percent of protected areas, such as national parks and nature reserves, showed some signs of damaging human activities.”

Researchers said solutions include making sure governments set aside the funds to manage preserves strictly for biodiversity.

Some of the success stories in this realm include Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia, Madidi National Park in Bolivia, and Yasuni Biosphere Reserve in Ecuador, Watson said.