According to a new analysis by a group of conservationists and researchers, expanding another 1.2% of Earth’s land-based protected areas would stop the extinction of most threatened animal and plant species.

The coalition of experts identified 16,825 potential conservation sites that need to be prioritized in the next five years in order to save thousands of rare species.

“Most species on Earth are rare, meaning that species either have very narrow ranges or they occur at very low densities or both,” said Dr. Eric Dinerstein, the study’s lead author and senior biodiversity expert at NGO RESOLVE, in a press release from Frontiers in Science. “And rarity is very concentrated. In our study, zooming in on this rarity, we found that we need only about 1.2% of the Earth’s surface to head off the sixth great extinction of life on Earth.”

Between 2018 and 2023, an additional 1.2 million square kilometers were protected to meet the world’s conservation targets. However, the research team asked whether the new conservation areas were adequately protecting essential biodiversity.

The scientists estimated that the new protected lands only covered a small portion of the habitat of threatened and range-limited species — 0.11 million square kilometers. They emphasized the importance of planning protected areas so that resources and conservation efforts are targeted as effectively as possible.

The team mapped the entire planet using six levels of biodiversity data. They identified the remaining rare and threatened species habitat using satellite images and combined them with maps of existing conservation areas. They termed current unprotected biodiversity hotspots Conservation Imperatives. These serve as the world’s blueprint to assist regions and countries with planning locally based conservation efforts.

If adequately protected, the sites they identified — covering roughly 405.25 million acres — could prevent all projected extinctions. Protecting only sites located in the tropics could avert most of them.

The research team found that 38 percent of Conservation Imperatives are near areas that are already protected, making it easier to make them part of current conservation sites or find additional means of protecting them.

“These sites are home to over 4,700 threatened species in some of the world’s most biodiverse yet threatened ecosystems,” said co-author of the study Andy Lee, a senior program associate and enterprise development manager at RESOLVE, in the press release. “These include not only mammals and birds that rely on large intact habitats, like the tamaraw in the Philippines and the Celebes crested macaque in Sulawesi, Indonesia, but also range-restricted amphibians and rare plant species.”

In calculating the cost of these protections, the scientists used data from 14 years of land protection projects, as well as accounted for the amount and type of land acquired and country-specific economic factors.

Professor Neil Burgess, head of the science program at the United Nations Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, said the paper was a reminder “that achieving 30% coverage by protected and conserved areas on its own is not enough, and that it is the location, quality and effectiveness of these protected and conserved areas that will determine whether they fulfil their role in contributing to halting biodiversity loss,” as The Guardian reported.

Indigenous Peoples and communities with jurisdiction over the Conservation Imperative sites, along with worldwide stakeholders and other civil society members, will need to give their input on what is most effective for them.

“Our analysis estimated that protecting the Conservation Imperatives in the tropics would cost approximately $34 billion per year over the next five years,” Lee said. “This represents less than 0.2% of the United States’ GDP, less than 9% of the annual subsidies benefiting the global fossil fuel industry, and a fraction of the revenue generated from the mining and agroforestry industries each year.”

Protecting biodiversity is essential to tackling the climate crisis. In order to do so, the scientists underscored the importance of keeping the planet’s forests intact, as they are not only home to abundant wildlife, but act as vital carbon sinks.

“What will we bequeath to future generations? A healthy, vibrant Earth is critical for us to pass on,” Dinerstein said. “So we’ve got to get going. We’ve got to head off the extinction crisis. Conservation Imperatives drive us to do that.”

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