Efforts to rewild landscapes across Europe and North America could be making global biodiversity loss worse by shifting environmental destruction to poorer, more biodiverse regions, a new study warns. Scientists from the University of Cambridge, U.K., found that when farming and resource extraction move abroad to accommodate conservation in wealthy countries, it can result in agricultural expansion in areas more crucial for nature, inadvertently resulting in more overall ecological damage. “Areas of much greater importance for nature are likely to pay the price for conservation efforts in wealthy nations unless we work to fix this leak,” lead author Andrew Balmford, a conservation scientist at Cambridge, said in a written statement. “At its worst, we could see some conservation actions cause net global harm,” Balmford added. The researchers found where conservation happens makes a big difference. For example, rewilding U.K. farmland could result in five times more ecological harm, globally, by shifting food production to more fragile ecosystems. But reforesting a soy farm in Brazil could have five times the ecological benefits if that farming then moves to less biodiverse regions like the U.S. or Argentina. This phenomenon has been observed before. When the U.S. protected old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, timber production increased elsewhere in North America, shifting the environmental burden rather than reducing it. Now, scientists say, large-scale conservation efforts in Europe and China could be fueling deforestation in the Global South as both regions import more of what they no longer produce. While the EU’s antideforestation law…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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