Globally important wilderness areas are strongholds for biodiversity, for regulating local climates, and for supporting the world’s most politically and economically marginalized communities. A new study finds that since the early 1990s mankind has destroyed 10 percent of the world’s wilderness – an area adding up to about 1.27 million square miles, an area twice the size of Alaska. Only 23% of the Earth’s land surface contains now contains wilderness and some biomes have almost none left.
 
The findings of the study underscore an immediate need for international policies to recognize the vital values of wilderness and the unprecedented threats they face and to underscore urgent large-scale, multifaceted actions needed to maintain them.

Read the paper in Current Biology HERE.