America’s reputation as an international conservation leader is under threat in the wake of unprecedented rollbacks, according to the most comprehensive effort yet to track the erosion of protected wilderness areas and national parks around the world.
The report, published on Thursday in the journal Science, found that the pace of proposed rollbacks in the US has accelerated, with 90% having taken place since 2000. Nearly all of those proposals (99%) were associated with industrial-scale development projects, including infrastructure construction and oil and gas extraction. The report specifically calls out Donald Trump’s downsizing of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, the largest protected area reductions in US history, as highlighting “the increasingly uncertain future of US PAs [protected areas]”.