If We Want a Whole Earth, Nature Needs Half’. A reply to ‘Half-Earth or Whole Earth? Radical ideas for conservation, and their implications

Preserving global biodiversity depends upon designating many more large terrestrial and marine areas as strictly protected areas. Yet recent calls for addressing biodiversity loss by setting aside more protected areas have been met with hostility from some social scientists and even some conservation biologists. The main objections against the so-called 'nature needs half' movement include the following. First, setting aside protected areas implies that some vulnerable human communities will be displaced to make space for wildlife. Second, separating humans from their environment ignores the fact that humans have always been part of the environments around them, and creates a false dichotomy between nature and culture. Third, conservationists are said to put the blame for biodiversity loss on all humanity, rather than on those who are doing most of the damage. Fourth, many social justice proponents argue that human population growth is not related to biodiversity loss or other sustainability challenges. This article critically addresses these four objections, exposing their robust anthropo-centric bias. Protected area critics reliably demand fairness for human beings at the expense of nonhuman beings, who they treat as morally inconsequential. But justice is not only about just us. Conservation properly understood implies a fair division of Earth's resources between human and nonhuman beings. Justice demands setting aside at least half Earth's lands and seas for nature, free from intensive economic activities.

Frontiers in Conservation Science, 2021

The unfolding crises of mass extinction and climate change call for urgent action in response. To limit biodiversity losses and avert the worst effects of climate disruption, we must greatly expand nature protection while simultaneously downsizing and transforming human systems. The conservation initiative Nature Needs Half (or Half Earth), calling for the conservation of half the Earth's land and seas, is commensurate with the enormous challenges we face. Critics have objected to this initiative as harboring hardship for people near protected areas and for failing to confront the growth economy as the main engine of global ecological destruction. In response to the first criticism, we affirm that conservation policies must be designed and implemented in collaboration with Indigenous and local communities. In response to the second criticism, we argue that protecting half the Earth needs to be complemented by downscaling and reforming economic life, humanely and gradually reduci...

It is theoretically possible to protect large fractions of species in relatively small regions. For plants, 85% of species occur entirely within just over a third of the Earth's land surface, carefully optimized to maximize the species captured. Well-known vertebrate taxa show similar patterns. Protecting half of Earth might not be necessary, but would it be sufficient given the current trends of protection? The predilection of national governments is to protect areas that are " wild, " that is, typically remote, cold, or arid. Unfortunately, those areas often hold relatively few species. Wild places likely afford the easier opportunities for the future expansion of protected areas, with the expansion into human-dominated landscapes the greater challenge. We identify regions that are not currently protected, but that are wild, and consider which of them hold substantial numbers of especially small-ranged vertebrate species. We assess how successful the strategy of protecting the wilder half of Earth might be in conserving biodiversity. It is far from sufficient. (Protecting large wild places for reasons other than biodiversity protection , such as carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services, might still have importance.) Unexpectedly, we also show that, despite the bias in establishing large protected areas in wild places to date, numerous small protected areas are in biodiverse places. They at least partially protect significant fractions of especially small-ranged species. So, while a preoccupation with protecting large areas for the sake of getting half of Earth might achieve little for biodiversity, there is more progress in protecting high-biodiversity areas than currently appreciated. Continuing to prioritize the right parts of Earth, not just the total area protected, is what matters for biodiversity.

Biological Conservation, 2017

The Future of Conservation survey, launched in March 2017, has proposed a framework to help with interpreting the array of ethical stances underpinning the motivations for biological conservation. In this article we highlight what is missing in this debate to date. Our overall aim is to explore what an acceptance of ecocentric ethics would mean for how conservation is practised and how its policies are developed. We start by discussing the shortcomings of the survey and present a more convincing and accurate categorization of the conservation debate. Conceiving the future of conservation as nothing less than an attempt to preserve abundant life on earth, we illustrate the strategic and ethical advantage of ecocentric over anthropocentric approaches to conservation. After examining key areas of the current debate we endorse and defend the Nature Needs Half and bio-proportionality proposals. These proposals show how the acceptance of an ecocentric framework would aid both practices and policies aimed at promoting successful conservation. We conclude that these proposals bring a radically different and more effective approach to conservation than anthropocentric approaches, even though the latter purport to be pragmatic.

Oryx, 2004

Nature Sustainability, 2018

Amid widespread concerns about biodiversity loss, a single clear conservation message is engaging leading conservationists: the proposal to give half the surface of the Earth back to nature. Depending on the landscape conservation strategy, we find that, globally, 15–31% of cropland, 10–45% of pasture land, 23–25% of non-food calories and 3–29% of food calories from crops could be lost if half of Earth’s terrestrial ecoregions were given back to nature.

BioScience, 2011

Animal Sentience, 2019

For interspecies justice, animal welfare, and animal rights, the planet needs to be divided on the basis of species' natural resource requirements. The Half-Earth View is that to maintain viable populations of the Earth's remaining species, half of landscapes and seascapes need protection from intensive economic activity. This protection is needed outside the nature preserve system, such as in agricultural areas or cities, so nature can co-exist with local communities.

2021

ABSTRACTHumanity is on a pathway of unsustainable loss of the natural systems upon which we, and all life, rely. To date, global efforts to achieve internationally-agreed goals to reduce carbon emissions, halt biodiversity loss, and retain essential ecosystem services, have been poorly integrated. However, these different goals all rely on preserving natural ecosystems. Here, we show how to unify these goals by empirically deriving spatially-explicit, quantitative area-based targets for the retention of natural terrestrial ecosystems. We found that at least 67 million km2of Earth’s natural terrestrial ecosystems (~79% of the area remaining) require retention – via a combination of strict protection but more prominently through sustainably managed land use regimes complemented by restoration actions – to contribute to biodiversity, climate, soil and freshwater objectives under four United Nations’ Resolutions. This equates to retaining natural ecosystems across ~50% of the total terr...

Democracies can do better than to give into the mirage of " Wilsonian Enclosures " , which envision half of the planet or more in nature reserves. The excessive focus on such areas detracts attention from developing alternative conservation strategies. Renowned biologist E.O. Wilson advocates setting aside " half the planet in reserve, or more " exclusively for the goal of nature conservation. There can be no doubt about the need to counter the ongoing assault on earth's ecosystems. In my two decades of engagements with natural resource management and conservation, I have worked on and studied various aspects of the intersection of conservation, local development and community rights. In this blog I refer to my research about cross-national variations in the designation of protected areas to draw attention to one of the several fundamental flaws in the proposals for a massive network of exclusionary protected areas, which I name the " Wilsonian enclosures " (to place E.O. Wilson's proposal within the context of the British enclosures). The overwhelming focus on setting aside ever larger areas as protected areas hides a puzzling trend in international conservation. Globally, the area of land set aside as protected areas nearly doubled between 1980 and 2000 (8.7 to 16.1 million square kilometers) and increased four-fold to 32 million square kilometers by 2014. The global protected area targets agreed on at the World Parks Congress meetings since the late 1980s have often been met ahead of the target years. More importantly, despite the rapid economic growth in some of the largest forested countries since 1990, followed by the tumultuous recession of the past decade and a half, most countries in the world have seen significant increases, while none has witnessed a net reduction of the area under protection. What explains such significant and consistent expansion of protected areas globally?