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Protected Areas for Wildlife Expand to Size of Russia

Scientific American - Posted: September 7th, 2012, 2:04pm EDT

pOSLO (Reuters) - Protected areas for wildlife have expanded worldwide to cover a land area the size of Russia in the past two decades, but far more parks and reserves are needed to meet a 2020 target, a study showed on Friday./ppThe sharp growth, as governments expanded existing areas and declared new ones, was needed to help slow a loss of animal and plant species and to conserve eco-systems which serve vital functions such as purifying water and storing greenhouse gases, it said./ppThese rich natural areas are very important for people, who rely on them for food and clean water, climate regulation and reducing the impacts of natural disasters, said Julia Marton-Lefevre, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)./ppThe IUCN report, issued during a meeting of the organization in South Korea, said the areas protected had risen to 12.7 percent of the worlds terrestrial area in 2010, or 17 million sq km (6.6 million sq miles), from 8.8 percent in 1990./ppThe United Nations has set a goal of protected areas reaching 17 percent of land area by 2020 - that would mean adding at least 6 million sq km (2.3 million sq miles) or an area about twice the size of Argentina or India, it said./ppThe area of the sea protected within national jurisdictions has risen more than four-fold to 4 percent, from 0.9 percent in 1990, but is also far short of a U.N. a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=protected-areas-for-wildlife-expand[More]/a

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