Where Mining and Energy Projects Will Hurt Wildlife the Most

The world faces an incredibly tricky land crunch over the coming decades. On the one hand, we want to protect more wildlife, having realized the critical role nature plays in limiting climate change and sustaining human life. On the other hand, we want to generate more energy than ever before for fast-developing countries in the Global South, and transition the entire world to renewables. That’s going to require a lot of new power plants and mines, which can be devastating for wildlife. A study published today in the journal Biological Conservation highlights that mammoth clash of interests. Researchers looked at a list of 15,150 areas of land that conservation groups have classed as the world’s most important for protecting biodiversity. They compared those areas with a map of all the mining and energy projects that exist or are planned globally. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Already, 5% of the key biodiversity sites contain mines, 14% contain oil and gas infrastructure, and 2% contain power plants. If all the planned projects came to pass, that would increase to 20%, 24%, and 11% respectively. The overlap will be particularly bad in biodiversity hotspots like Brazil, central Africa, and parts of east and south Asia. That creates an enormous challenge for policymakers in those areas as they balance global conservation goals with the economic opportunity of energy generation and resource extraction. Fossil fuel projects, present and future, have t...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change Conservation embargoed study healthscienceclimate Source Type: news