Share and Follow
“We currently lack a clear understanding of where and when conservation initiatives are being halted across the globe,” stated Matt Clark, a research fellow at the University of Sydney’s Thriving Oceans Hub and co-lead author of a recent study.
Beginning Monday, global leaders will gather in Brazil for COP30, this year’s pivotal climate summit. It is touted as the most important in a decade, with nations facing increasing pressure to expedite their climate action commitments.
“This lack of visibility may hinder the progress reported at events like COP, as genuine ecological recovery can take decades,” Clark emphasized.
In Chile, an analysis of data from 1998 to 2021 revealed that about 20% of community-managed fishing projects, originally established to combat overfishing, were eventually abandoned.
A 2019 study highlighted that legal protections for conservation areas were weakened more than 3,700 times globally between 1892 and 2018, reducing environmental safeguards in an area approximately the size of Greenland.
Legal protections for conservation areas were downgraded more than 3,700 times globally between 1892 and 2018, according to a 2019 study, loosening environmental protections from an area roughly the size of Greenland.
Australia’s record ‘quite poor’
Her research focuses on the ways protections are removed or diminished from protected areas. In Australia, she’s identified more than 1,000 examples.
“We’ve opened up fishing in the green zones within marine parks, or we’ve allowed horse riding in national parks where that wasn’t allowed before, or firewood collection across different areas, and in some cases, we’ve taken sections that were part of a protected area and have removed them altogether,” she said.
Even Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is “not immune,” Cook said, pointing to a period when protections were downgraded to allow dumping of dredge spoil in part of the marine park. Source: Getty / Francesco Riccardo Iacomino
She called for long-term funding and management to ensure short-term gains from conservation efforts aren’t eroded or reversed, as well as greater monitoring of project outcomes.
Announcements ‘don’t necessarily translate’
Cook said these are exciting goals, but it’s important to be cognisant that “new announcements don’t necessarily translate into outcomes” that support them if initiatives aren’t followed through, or if protected areas are established without adequate ongoing management and funding.
“We’ve got to do a lot to actually reach those goals, but if … we expand the area that we’re protecting, and we don’t provide additional resources, then those areas aren’t necessarily going to be managed, and then they become parks on paper but not in practice.”
