Protected areas

ISSUES

Protected areas

The state of things
Over the past forty years, the United Nations has identified ten times more protected areas. The UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) World Conservation Monitoring Centre counted over 102 000 land and marine sites covering almost 19 million km2, that is to say 4% of the planet and more than the surface area of China and India put together. However, less than 1 % of the surface of seas and oceans is protected. (1)
The Greenland park is still the largest in the world (970 000 Km2), followed by the Ar-Rub’al Khali area in Saudi Arabia (640 000 km2) then the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia (345 000 km2).
Europe is the continent with the most protected areas (43 000); Asia has 18 000; North America; Australia 9000 and Africa 6990. But, proportionally, Central America and South America are the most protected parts of the world. (2)

NEWS

Guyanese tribe maps Connecticut-sized rainforest for land rights

EUROPE-DEVELOPMENT Mapping Out the EU’s Harmful Projects

Russia Allows Ski Resort in Caucasus World Heritage Site

Univers GoodPlanet par Netvibes

DEBATES

Brainforest helps to protect gabonese natural ressources

Marc Ona Essangui

Marc Ona Essangui, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2009 for his fight to preserve the Ivindo National Park in Gabon,...

A giant step for protecting ocean life

On the first of April, the UK Government took a decision to...

Seeing REDD in the Amazon: a win for people, trees and climate

Tucked away in a tangle of Brazilian rainforest, a quiet...

FOCUS

An encounter with Douglas Tompkins, philanthropist and ecologist

As he was coming back from the United Nations biodiversity Conference in Nagoya, Douglas Tompkins stopped over in Paris to go to the World Fencing Championships at the Grand Palais. This billionaire American philanthropic environmentalist now lives in Chile and took...

VIDEOS

09/08/2011	Sustainable tourism in Kenya	08/02/2011	As part of the Spain-UNEP Partnership for Protected Areas, this project...
13/10/2010	A video camera trap installed by WWF and partners has captured footage...	22/09/2010	IUCN video about the crisis of biodiversity and species extinction, and...

GREEN TIPS

Marine Protected Areas in Senegal

Since the end of the 1980s, the oceanarium in Dakar and the environmentalist Haidar El Ali have been...

INDICATORS

Biocapacity
National biodiversity index
Threatened ecosystems
Protected areas

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