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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$.

More: WWF Living Planet Report 2014

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