Excerpt from this Grist story:

The practice of downsizing, degrading, or eliminating protected lands and waters has been accelerating worldwide, and especially in the United States, a study published Thursday in Science has found.

Just how accelerated? Ninety percent of all proposals the U.S. has ever made to reduce or eliminate protected areas have taken place since 2000. And 99 percent of those proposed rollbacks were associated with industrial-scale development projects, including oil and gas extraction.

And it’s not just America. Globally, 78 percent of downsizing protected areas has happened since 2000, and industrial development was responsible for 62 percent of all rollbacks, according to the study.

America’s reputation as an international conservation leader is eroding in the wake of its recent unprecedented rollbacks of protected areas. The report specifically calls out President Trump for his cuts to Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante, the largest protected area reductions in U.S. history, and repeated attempts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, saying protected areas in America have a “increasingly uncertain future.”

“The U.S is recognized as a global leader in conservation. And when the U.S take steps to scale back the protection of its lands and waters, other countries take notice,” said Michael Mascia, senior vice president of the Moore Center for Science at Conservation International and co-author of the study.

Protect Our Wild Open Spaces, at What Ever Cost To Those Who Threaten Them!

The world’s governments will this year negotiate a series of targets in response to the global biodiversity crisis that has already led to a massive loss of the planet’s wildlife. While none of the previous round of targets agreed in 2010 have been met, the one that gained the most publicity, and arguably the one we got closest to achieving was target 11. Its aim was that:

By 2020, at least 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10% of coastal and marine areas … are conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas.

These “protected areas” can range from enormous, strictly-protected areas like US national parks, through the heavily-used landscapes of UK national parks, to tiny urban nature reserves. Protected areas can stop or slow many of the forces threatening biodiversity such as habitat loss, hunting and pollution, and have been a mainstay of global conservation for decades.

By August 2020, some 15% of the world’s land had been protected. This was below the target, but there were enough specific commitments in place to drag the world over the line slightly late. In many ways this is an incredible achievement and perhaps the largest and fastest coordinated change in land management ever.