COP30 has come and gone, leaving behind a familiar mix of new commitments and renewed political promises. But amid the declarations of progress, one issue that received almost backhanded attention is the quiet abandonment of conservation projects after their high-profile launches. New research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a team co-led by Matthew Clark at the University of Sydney’s Thriving Oceans Research Hub shows just how widespread the problem is. Across nine major community-based conservation programs studied in Africa, roughly one-third of participating groups stopped carrying out their conservation responsibilities because implementation simply fell apart. Clark warns that this figure is likely an underestimate, representing only a sliver of a much larger and largely undocumented global pattern. The scale of this problem is staggering. Between 1892 and 2018, governments around the world collectively undermined legal protections for conservation areas through 3,749 documented events, known as Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing and Degazettement (PADDD), affecting approximately 2 million square kilometers (more than 772,000 square miles) across 73 countries. To put this in a perspective, the total area stripped of protections is equivalent to the size of Greenland. Nearly two-thirds of these rollbacks were directly linked to industrial-scale resource extraction, including mining, oil exploration, and large infrastructure projects. But besides the formal and informal withdrawals, one thing that has remained consistent is the existence of these efforts as being “ongoing” if only on paper. Conservationists in the field must often make quick decisions, and reflecting on those decisions later can increase…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via this RSS feed