WWF Living Planet Report 2014 – protected areas act as Noahs Arc

The 2014 ‚Living Planet Report’ study by WWF reveals a most concerning result:

Within the past 40 years more than half of all species wordwide were in decline.
Good news only: in protected areas ‚just’ half the number of species versus in unprotected areas were affected.
Worldwide, 100.000 protected areas cover 14% of the landmass, while only less than 1% of the world’s oceans are protected, but heavily threatened by environmental damage.
The worst decline happened in fresh water ecosystems, where three quaters of the species deminish btw 1970 and 2010.
Tropical regions are more affected, in Latin America 83% of the species shrunk by their numbers.
Ocean life collapsed by 40%.
Worldwide, cost caused by environmental damage is estimated at 6.000 Billion Euro or 11% of the global gross income.
Most affected by abbating environmental quality and climate change are the poorest countries.
The richest countries actually do have an increase in biodiversity, because they mainly transfer their ressource extractions to the poorer countries and hence statisticly reduce their own ecological footprint .
Still, the per capita ecologic foot print of high income countries is about 5 times as high as in low income countries.
Austria’s per capita ecological footprint for example ranks at 17th out of 152 studied countries. So if everybody would live like Austrians do, we would need 3 planests to sustain our way of living.
The overall value of all ecosystems worldwide is estimated to be up to 145.000 Billions US$.