In Chile, locos are prized above any other shellfish. The molluscs – a delicacy renowned worldwide as Chilean abalone – are served with green onion sauce, in seafood stews or with empanadas.
So when loco stocks collapsed in the 1980s due to overfishing, Chile’s government implemented a groundbreaking scheme, Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries (Turfs), which gave fishing communities exclusive rights over their local areas in exchange for managing stocks of abalone shellfish responsibly.
Turfs was seen as a major success, lauded by international wildlife organisations, yet new estimates show that 22% of the fishing areas it covered are no longer managed. Although that means the majority are still being maintained, it is one of a growing number of conservation projects that have effectively been downgraded, downsized or even abandoned, according to new research.
At least 3,749 government-led conservation projects in 73 countries have been downgraded, downsized or had their official status revoked, according to a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, and scientists say that uncounted numbers of other, community-led projects have been similarly abandoned. Around two thirds of these cases were linked to industrial resource extraction.
“Our research shows that many conservation initiatives are being abandoned, either by officially removing the protection or by whoever was responsible for that protection neglecting management responsibilities,” said Dr Morena Mills of Imperial College London Centre for Environmental Policy and co-author of the study.
Conservation projects are usually abandoned or downgraded because of pressure to mine ores or drill for oil, or because local communities believe they are causing them to lose out, the researchers said.
That issue is being addressed at the Cop30 climate conference, which opened last week in Belem, Brazil. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility aims to raise $125bn (£95bn) for bonds that would pay communities that successfully conserved their forests.
The lack of long-term investments presents a problem for climate mitigation and biodiversity protection
Dr Morena Mills, Imperial College London Centre for Environmental Policy
Yet last week the UK decided that, like the US, it would not invest in the fund at Cop30. So far Brazil, Norway, Indonesia and France have made pledges amounting to $5.5bn. The lack of long-term investment presents a problem for climate mitigation and biodiversity protection, Mills said. In 2019, the UN estimated that more than one million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction, so at a UN conference in 2022, 196 countries adopted the 30 by 30 Global Biodiversity Framework, pledging to protect 30% of the Earth from mining and industrial fishing by 2030.
Arabian Oryx are seen at the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Umm Al-Zamool
The abandonment of conservation projects means these goals are being undermined, according to Mills. “[Conservation abandonment] is a major problem,” she said. “These areas are generally still counted towards global conservation goals. But much of the time, they’re not actually helping to protect nature any more.”
“Community-led conservation initiatives are critical to solving the biodiversity crisis,” she said. “These conservation initiatives need to be built to last, so they need to have long-term funding and deliver tangible local benefits.”
Chile’s Turfs programme is one of many conservation areas that have been downgraded, downsized or degazetted in the past 10 years.
The Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman became the first park to be stripped of Unesco World Heritage status after it was downsized in 2007 to make way for oil and gas production. Other Unesco parks under threat include Virunga, one of four sites in the Democratic Republic of Congo and home to 20,000 hippopotamuses and hundreds of mountain gorillas, as well as tropical rainforest in Sumatra and even Everglades in Florida.
Yasuni national park in Ecuador was made a Unesco biosphere reserve in 1989 and its hill forests and swamps are home to a third of all amphibian and reptile species found in the Amazon basin. But it also sits on 40% of Ecuador’s oil reserves, and drilling began in 2016. Ecuadorians voted to stop the 246 oil wells in a 2023 referendum, but according to Amazon Watch, many sites are still operating.
Dr Michael Mascia of Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, North Carolina, and another of the study’s authors, said that community-led conservation projects are powerful schemes and therefore should not be ignored.
“In reality, if one takes a bottom up and holistic look at all the land management systems in place across the Amazon that have conservation intent or potential, as of 2020, the actual reach of these conservation systems is 62.4% of the Amazonian biome – far greater than governments and the UN recognise and report,” he said.
Mills said that initiatives such as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility were essential for ensuring the 30 by 30 biodiversity target was met. “It’s [for the] long term,” she said. “It’s not a two-year project here or a three-year project there. We need to provide tangible benefits for the communities that are doing the protection.”
Photographs by Brent Stirton/Getty Images, Karim Sahib/AFP via Getty