Protecting key areas could stave off extinction crisis

By targeting a few key areas, avoiding an extinction crisis may not be as hard as it seems.

An international coalition of conservationists laid out a plan to protect some of the world’s most threatened species by focusing on a few biodiversity havens that host rare wildlife.

“Most species on Earth are rare,” said researcher Eric Dinerstein, lead author of the paper published in Frontiers in Science,  and conservation actions can pinpoint specific areas where most rare species are located.

“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,” Dinerstein said.

The authors targeted over 16,000 “Conservation Imperatives” around the world—mostly in tropical areas.

“Our analysis estimated that protecting the Conservation Imperatives in the tropics would cost approximately $34 billion per year over the next five years,” said coauthor Andy Lee, with the NGO Resolve.