Tatsuya Amano (Tatsuya Amano) and his colleagues from the University of Cambridge explored global data on biodiversity, collected since 1990. Their analysis showed that the low efficiency of the government serves as an accurate indicator of the rate of extinction of species on the territory of the country. At the same time, biodiversity is rapidly declining even in officially protected areas, in reserves and national parks. About this scientists write in an article published by the journal Nature.
The authors summarized data on the diversity of water birds, from ducks to flamingos, a total of 2.4 million records made in 26 thousand. points around the world since 1990. and relating to 461 species. Their habitats cover about 1.3 billion hectares, from the tropical coasts to the tundra, and they seem to be suitable indicators of the state of almost all of the planet's ecosystems.
This huge set was divided by country and compared with the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), which summarizes statistics on levels of violence and corruption, GDP, life expectancy and. Reducing biodiversity is a global problem, but, as Amano and his colleagues have shown, in countries with a low WGI index, it on average develops faster. Positive correlation was revealed with the level of GDP: the faster the economy of the country grows, the faster the extinction.
First of all, this applies to the countries of Western and Central Asia, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Antirecords established South America, where the rate of decline of biodiversity reaches 0.
95 percent per year, which gives 21 percent over the past 25 years. Conversely, the best biodiversity indicators were typical for countries with high WGI, in continental and northern Europe.
"Although the total area of ??protected land continues to increase, our work shows that an inefficient government can negate all attempts to conserve biodiversity," says Tatsua Amano. According to scientists, the WGI index is the most reliable indicator of changes in the nature of the country.