Most Asian countries behind biodiversity targets for protected areas: Study
Most countries in Asia have failed to achieve a global minimum target of protecting at least 17 per cent of land by 2020, according to a study based on data from 40 countries.
Under current trends, the outlook for achieving the UN Global Biodiversity Framework's 2030 target to protect at least 30 per cent of land is bleak, with Asia set to miss this by an even greater margin, the researchers said.
To counter the global biodiversity crisis, at the 2010 UN Convention on Biological Diversity, almost 200 countries pledged to protect at least 17 per cent of their terrestrial environments by 2020 (known as Aichi Target).
To investigate whether they achieved this, researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, with collaborators in Asia, analysed data from official reports submitted to the World Database on Protected Areas.
The study, published in the journal Communications Biology, found that only 40 per cent of Asian countries achieved the target of a minimum of 17