Five Countries Hold World's Most Remaining Wilderness: Map Reveals

The international team recently mapped intact ocean ecosystems and finds five countries hold 70% of the world’s remaining untouched wilderness areas where the five nations are responsible for the disaster.
The report shows that the world’s last wilderness areas are rapidly disappearing and remaining wilderness needs urgent international action to protect them. Researchers from the University of Queensland and the Wildlife Conversation Society produced global map that finds which countries are responsible for destroying the nature by the industrial activity.
The researchers called “wilderness” as territory free of “human pressures” which includes settlements, farmland and transportation infrastructure with an uninterrupted range of 10,000 sq. km.
The authors note that marine regions “free of industrial fishing, pollution and shipping are almost completely confined to the polar regions,” though the Antarctica and the open seas were not in the survey.
Different research reveal that wilderness areas provide increasingly important refuges for species that are declining in landscapes dominated by people. The seas contain viable populations of top predators, such as tuna, marlins and sharks. The wilderness areas are also places where enormous amounts of carbon is stored and sequestered with intact ecosystems being at least twice important than similar degraded habitats when it comes carbon mitigation.
“One obvious intervention these nations can prioritise is establishing protected areas in ways that would slow the impacts of industrial activity on the larger landscape or seascape,” said Professor Watson.
“We have lost so much already, so we must grasp this opportunity to secure the last remaining before it disappears forever.”
“Wilderness will only be secured globally if these nations take a leadership role. Right now, across the board, this type of leadership is missing. Already we have lost so much. We must grasp these opportunities to secure the wilderness before it disappears forever.” said John Robinson, WCS Executive Vice President for Global Conservation at WCS.
The report comes ahead of the Convention on Biological Diversity this month.
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