Monarch butterflies were once so numerous in North America that it took little effort to go outside and spot them. Now the United States government says they’re at risk of extinction.
Years ago, hundreds of thousands of monarch butterflies gathered at winter sanctuaries in California and Mexico. Today, the US Fish and Wildlife Service wants to put this iconic butterfly species on a list of protected threatened species. USFWS says the population of western migratory monarch butterflies has fallen by 95% since the 1980s. The agency gives the monarch a 99% chance of extinction by 2080 if the trend doesn’t let up.
“During this same period, the probability of extinction for eastern monarchs ranges from 56 to 74%, according to the Service’s most recent species status assessment,” FWS stated.
A forthcoming listing of the monarch butterfly under the US Endangered Species Act of 1973 should be ringing alarm bells. Yet governments everywhere have been slow to act on a global biodiversity crisis that’s been raging for some time.
The list of endangered and threatened species is quickly getting longer.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is now warning that a third of shark and ray species face possible extinction. That alarming news came after IUCN released a 2,000-page assessment covering 158 jurisdictions.
40% of all species of coral are also threatened with possible annihilation, IUCN warned in an earlier assessment.
Illegal fishing, overfishing, and bycatch are killing scores of sharks, pushing multiple shark species to the brink of extinction. These species may be critical to ocean and coral reef health. “Sharks and rays [are] now among the most threatened vertebrates on the planet,” explained IUCN program officer Alexandra Morata in an overview.
An emergency on land and sea
Marine and terrestrial species alike are being pushed to the brink like never before.
An earlier report issued by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London estimates that average population sizes of 5,000 key species of land vertebrates have plummeted by 73% from 1970 to 2020. In Latin America and the Caribbean biodiversity losses are put at a staggering 95%.
These species are being decimated by habitat losses, mainly from expanding agriculture to feed a ballooning human population, which now stands at over 8 billion people.
Despite the grim statistics, conservationists argue that there’s still time to turn this situation around. The key, they say, is to place more lands and waters under strict conservation regimes, creating protected areas designed with the explicit aim of biodiversity protection in mind.“I find myself optimistic for many reasons,” Ryan Finchum, co-director of the Center for Protected Area Management at Colorado State University, told Public Parks in an interview. “I think we’re going about landscape protection in a better way, in a more holistic way than we’ve done in the past.”
Is ”30 by 30” attainable?
The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has long been criticized as a largely ineffective, at best symbolic multilateral environmental treaty that encouraged lofty visions without any real action.
The language written into the CBD is largely aspirational. Governments are left to manage the biodiversity found within their borders as they see fit. An early 2000s assessment by the United Nations led to the conclusion that most CBD signatories were completely ignoring the treaty and any obligations written into it, though those expectations are weak and non-binding.
Today, CBD signatories are out to prove that they can act to halt the alarming decline in species and species’ population numbers.
CBD treaty members have adopted the “30 by 30” goal, which means that they’ve pledged to protect 30% of the world’s land and 30% of its ocean area for wildlife by 2030. Thus far, they are well short of that goal, and with only five years left to fulfill it.
The IUCN says there’s still time to meet the 30 by 30 target, but that countries must pick up the pace.
IUCN’s Protected Planet Report 2024 was unveiled last October. It showed that the world has thus far only placed 17.6% of Earth’s land and 8.4% of the oceans under some kind of species protection regime.
“The increase in coverage since 2020, equivalent to more than twice the size of Colombia, is to be celebrated,” IUCN said. “But it is a rise of less than 0.5 percentage points in both realms. This leaves a land area roughly the size of Brazil and Australia combined, and at sea an area larger than the Indian Ocean, to be designated by 2030.”
Though far from the goal, IUCN insists that the 30 by 30 target for protected areas and biodiversity protections can be reached.
“Great efforts are being made at the national level and we are seeing some progress,” UN Environment Program Director Inger Anderson in her response to the IUCN’s findings.
Finchum is less confident governments will be conserving 30% of the world’s surface by 2030. However, he told Public Parks that the 30 by 30 goal could be reached to an extent if governments and the public are willing to embrace a more flexible definition of “protections.”
“To get to 30 by 30 it’s my opinion that the vast majority of the newly created areas that are going to have to be established are going to be areas that are established one for multiple uses, not just for strict protection,” he said. “They’re going to be established with a variety of different governance structures. And I think much of them are going to be managed at the sub-national level or at the local community or indigenous community level.”
Eyeing a flexible approach
Finchum has traveled the world looking at the governance structure of various national parks. He and others argue that the strict “usage restrictions” model common in the United States, dubbed “fortress protection” by some critics, is an exception, not the norm.
As an example, he pointed to Manu National Park in Peru where he’s active in studying and consulting on conservation practices.
Manu is one of the world’s largest and most biodiverse national parks. Unlike in the US where national parks are mostly federal land, Finchum described how Manu National Park is more of a patchwork of public and private lands and indigenous holdings all under the same governance structure.
Manu National Park has a permanent population. The people living there are still allowed to extract resources from the park, but they also earn a living from hosting visitors and arranging ecotourism activities.
This looser governance arrangement gives stakeholders an incentive to protect the park and its wildlife, Finchum argued.
“It’s over two times the size of Yellowstone, you know, it’s like something like four 4.5 million acres,” he said. “There are quite a few communities that live in that in that protected area, including indigenous communities that are living in voluntary isolation.”
“Governments in South America, both Brazil and Peru, specifically, have created very strict policies about permitting these communities to continue to live as they’ve chosen to live,” Finchum added.
Finchum, IUCN, and the parties to the CBD seem to agree that flexible arrangements are fine as long as they lead to the same goal: an end to the ongoing extinction crisis.
National parks in the western United States are almost entirely comprised of lands owned by the federal government. You find this, too, in Japan’s far northern island of Hokkaido, but other Japanese national parks are a patchwork of private and public lands. In some cases, the area of private holdings is larger than the public lands, but the land and its wildlife are regulated under easement-like rules.
China is famously trying to establish the world’s largest national park network. People watching this process have voiced concerns given the fact that the areas China’s government is targeting for conservation are already home to hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of members of ethnic minorities.
In Kenya, the national government is busy transferring one of the world’s most biodiverse preserves to local control. Amboseli National Park, which Public Parks toured years ago, will be handed over to a local county government for administration.
Finchum even pointed to an emerging example of flexible shared national park management in the United States: Badlands National Park in South Dakota.
The northern section of Badlands National Park is administered exclusively by the US National Park Service. The southern section, however, is supposed to be jointly administered by the Park Service and the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe.
Finchum said the relationship between the tribe and the park service has been strained for years, but he’s hopeful the situation could improve. One day, he said, it may be possible to see the park effectively split into two, with the Oglala Lakota entrusted to manage the southern half exclusively on their own.
He said the picture of land and ocean conservation is one of a spectrum from strict access restrictions and controls to looser arrangements, co-management, and even cases where an ostensibly “national park” is turned over to local or indigenous control.
“It’s so varied um across the board in terms of what’s worked, which kind of, I guess, makes it exciting,” he said.
Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity recently met in Colombia for their 16th Conference of Parties. Treaty members again pledged to hit the 30 by 30 target. Many delegates announced new conservation initiatives and the establishment of more terrestrial and marine protected areas.
“I’m inherently positive,” Finchum told us. “I think we’ve purposely set the goal high, the bar high, so that we can reach for higher goals than we would have achieved otherwise.”©2024 Public Parks
