At the rate humans have encroached on the habitats of wildlife– forcing wild animals to live side by side within the limits designed by humans– half of the wildlife land would be taken over resulting in the disappearance or extinction of 22,374 species.
A story published last August 21 by the Natural History Museum said that “by 2070, this overlap will have grown across more than half of the world’s land surface, forcing us to develop new approaches to our relationship with nature.”
In 2022, the global population surpassed 8 billion and will rise by another 2 billion over the next 60 years. “Demand for space is therefore on the rise, and as humans move into new areas they’re more likely than ever to come into contact with wild animals,” the story written by James Ashworth said.
New research, published in the journal Science Advances , suggests that this situation will become prevalent by 2070 as it predicts that the overlap between humans and wildlife will grow across 57 percent of the world, and decline across only 12 percent.
“As demand for space rises, it will become increasingly difficult to set aside unpopulated land as protected areas. Instead, as the study’s co-author Dr Neil Carter (an associate professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Michigan) explained, it will mean changing how conservation is done.”
“Our study suggests that with more areas of the world expected to be shared both by people and wildlife, conservation planning will have to get more creative and inclusive,” where in some places it’s going to be really hard to do everything at once: to grow crops and have urban areas and protect these species and their habitats.”
It’s thought that around half of land on Earth is used directly or indirectly by humans for housing, food production, resource extraction or otherwise. This area is only going to grow in the coming years, with some estimating that it could rise to 70% by the 2060s .”
“As the area of land used by humans grows, it’s inevitable that people and wildlife will end up sharing more of the same space . It’s also something that’s likely to be exacerbated by climate change, which will cause many species to alter where they live as they adjust to rising temperatures,” the report noted.
Finding out exactly which species humans will be running into, and where, is vital to plan for the future. New encounters between humans and wildlife can raise the risk of new diseases spreading , or might bring venomous snakes or big cats closer to urban areas.
To try and get an idea of where this overlap might occur, the researchers used existing research to predict where over 22,000 species of amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles might live in the year 2070, and compared it to forecasts of where humans will be living.
They found that in over half of the world’s lands, the overlap between humans and wildlife will double by 2070, Said Dr Deqiang Ma , the lead author of the study as he explained that this is mostly being driven by the changing number of humans, rather than wildlife.
“We found that changes in human-wildlife overlap are mainly driven by changes in human population density, as the magnitude of these changes is greater than that of changes in species richness,” Dr. Ma (a post doctoral researcher in environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan) said.
The increasing overlap would lead to all sorts of novel interactions, good and bad, between people and wildlife in the near future.
The study also found that median species richness, the variety of species in a given area, will likely decrease in most African and South American forests.
In South America, mammal richness will drop by 33%, amphibian richness by 45%, reptile richness by 40%, and bird richness by 37%. In Africa, bird richness is set to decrease by 26% and mammal richness by 21%.
Of concern is that these crossovers increase most in the biodiverse continents of Africa and South America, where the overlap between humans and wildlife is currently relatively low. It’s set to rise across two-thirds of the continents by 2070, especially in species-rich forests.
In the forests of South America for instance the average number of reptile and amphibian species are set to decrease by over 40% while in the African woodlands bird and mammal species richness will fall by around a fifth.
As this overlap grows in biodiversity hotspots, it will be more important than ever to protect these habitats for the benefit of both people and wildlife. Conserving areas of mangroves inside urban environments can give young fish a shelter while protecting houses from flooding, the study noted.
Other potential steps could include temporarily closing off certain areas during important times of the year, such as an animal’s breeding season, and providing more wildlife corridors to link up protected areas.
At the same time, humanity will need to get used to having animals once seen as ‘undesirable,’ like hyaenas, living alongside them.
“Hyenas and other scavengers, like vultures , are often vilified or persecuted because they’re seen as a threat,” Carter said.
“But they provide a lot of benefits, like removing waste and clearing an area of carcasses, that reduce the risk of the disease,” he added.
Engagement between conservationists, local communities and Indigenous Peoples will become more important than ever as the world becomes busier. Being flexible to the needs of wildlife and people is crucial to ensure that both can be given the opportunity to thrive in the twenty-first century.
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