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Protecting 1.2% of Earth Would Prevent Most Extinctions, Study Says 

Mexican gray wolves, an endangered native species, are seen resting in their enclosure at the Museo del Desierto in Saltillo, Mexico July 1, 2020. Picture taken July 1, 2020. (Reuters)
Mexican gray wolves, an endangered native species, are seen resting in their enclosure at the Museo del Desierto in Saltillo, Mexico July 1, 2020. Picture taken July 1, 2020. (Reuters)
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Protecting 1.2% of Earth Would Prevent Most Extinctions, Study Says 

Mexican gray wolves, an endangered native species, are seen resting in their enclosure at the Museo del Desierto in Saltillo, Mexico July 1, 2020. Picture taken July 1, 2020. (Reuters)
Mexican gray wolves, an endangered native species, are seen resting in their enclosure at the Museo del Desierto in Saltillo, Mexico July 1, 2020. Picture taken July 1, 2020. (Reuters)

Setting aside an additional 1.2% of the world's land as nature preserves would prevent the majority of predicted plant and animal extinctions and cost about $263 billion, according to a study published on Tuesday.

The world is racing to meet a goal to protect 30% of the world by 2030 to protect wildlife that is being decimated by climate change, pollution and habitat destruction.

Global policymakers will meet at a United Nations summit in Colombia in October to discuss plans for reaching that goal.

The study in the journal Frontiers in Science aimed to identify the highest value areas in hope that they be included in those protection plans, said Carlos Peres, a study co-author and conservation ecology expert at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

"Most countries do not actually have a strategy," Peres said.

"The 30-by-30 targets still lack a lot of details because it doesn't actually say what 30 percent should be protected."

The study's proposed protections would cover an additional 1.6 million square km (633,000 square miles) - an area about a fifth the size of the United States - across 16,825 sites globally that are home to rare and threatened species.

That's on top of the nearly 16% of the world that already have some level of protection.

The study estimated the $263 billion bill is how much it would cost to acquire the new areas, many of which include private property, at current value over the next five years.

"Time is not on our side because it will become increasingly more expensive and more difficult to set aside additional protected areas," Peres said.

Land acquisition makes up most of the cost of creating protected areas, and the study did not consider the upkeep costs for policing the reserves.

About three-quarters of the sites are tropical forests, as those are the world's most biodiverse ecosystems. The Phillipines, Brazil and Indonesia are home to more than half of the high-value sites.

Russia is the single country with the most high-valued area ripe for conservation with 138,436 square km identified in the study, an area the size of Greece.

Several African countries also topped the list with Madagascar having the fourth-highest number of sites overall while the Democratic Republic of Congo had the largest area targeted for conservation on the continent.

The United States is the only developed nation among the top 30 countries in the analysis, with 0.6% of the sites or an area twice the size of Delaware.

The researchers only considered land and freshwater ecosystems but not oceans or marine protected areas. Researchers did not include invertebrates in the study, as the geographical distributions insects and other such animals are not well mapped.

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In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
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In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)

We watch video after video, consuming the world on our handheld devices in bites of two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, 15. We turn to moving pictures — “film” — because it comes the closest to approximating the world that we see and experience. This is, after all, 2024, and video in our pocket — ours, others', everyone's — has become our birthright.
But sometimes — even in this era of live video always rolling, always recording, always capturing — sometimes the frozen moment can enter the eye like nothing else. And in the process, it can tell a larger story that echoes long after the moment was captured. That's what happened this past week in Beirut, through the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and the photographs he captured.
When Hussein set up his camera outside an evacuated Beirut apartment building Tuesday after Israel announced it would be targeted as part of military operations against Hezbollah, he had one goal in mind — only one. "All I thought of," he says, “was photographing the missile while it was coming down.”
He found a safe spot. He ensured a good angle. He wasn't stressed, he said; like many photographers who work in such environments, he had been in situations like this one before. He was ready.
When the attack came — a bomb, not a missile in the end — Hussein swung into action. And, unsurprisingly for a professional who has been doing this work for two decades, he did exactly what he set out to do.
Time slowed down
The sequence of images he made bursts with the explosive energy of its subject matter.
In one frame, the bomb hangs there, a weird and obtrusive interloper in the scene. It is not yet noticed by anyone around it, ready to bring its destruction to a building that, in moments, will no longer exist. The building's balconies, a split-second from nonexistence, are devoid of people as the bomb finds its mark.
These are the kind of moments that video, rolling at the speed of life or even in slow motion, cannot capture in the same way. A photo holds us in the scene, stops time, invites a viewer to take the most chaotic of events and break it down, looking around and noticing things in a strangely silent way that actual life could not.
In another frame, one that happened micro moments after the first, the building is in the process of exploding. Let's repeat that for effect, since even as recently as a couple generations ago photographs like this were rare: in the process of exploding.
Pieces of building are shooting out in all directions, in high velocity — in real life. But in the image they are frozen, outward bound, hanging in space awaiting the next seconds of their dissolution — just like the bomb that displaced them was doing milliseconds before. And in that, a contemplation of the destruction — and the people it was visited upon — becomes possible.
Tech gives us new prisms to see the world
The technology to grab so many images in the course of little more than one second — and do it in such clarity and high resolution — is barely a generation old.
So to see these “stills,” as journalists call them, come together to paint a picture of an event is a combination of artistry, intrepidity and technology — an exercise in freezing time, and in giving people the opportunity to contemplate for minutes, even hours, what took place in mere seconds. This holds true for positive things that the camera captures — and for visitations of violence like this one as well.
Photography is random access. We, the viewers of it, choose how to see it, process it, digest it. We go backward and forward in time, at will. We control the pace and the speed at which dizzying images hurtle at us. And in that process, something unusual for this era emerges: a bit of time to think.
That, among many other things, is the enduring power of the still image in a moving-picture world — and the power of what Bilal Hussein captured on that clear, sunny day in Beirut.