Frontiers for conservation: targeting European borders as conservation areas

Abstract

It has been long recognized that political borders should not hamper wildlife, and that conservation actions involving several countries are known to bring large scale benefits to nature while helping to resolve social and political conflicts. While many neighboring countries have lived a considerable long peace time, namely the European western countries, several eastern countries were isolated from the west regions due to the so called "iron curtain". More recently, in the former Yugoslavia and currently along the border of Ukraine-Russia, devastating conflicts are also isolating regions and countries.

On the other hand, human development, and particularly transportation networks, are serious threats to biodiversity. For example, roads inflict serious mortality rates due to animal-vehicle collisions, can obstruct the animal movement, or represent important pathways for the spread of invasive species. It is normal for conflict zones to have a lower density of roads and populations.

We suggest that former isolation and conflict areas can be regarded as opportunities for biodiversity conservation and to strength cross country relations. In fact, as already shown with the German Green Belt project, border areas can become important areas for conservation due to higher habitat quality, namely forest cover and reduced density of infrastructures.

Here we provide an assessment of the potential for political European borders to function as key conservation and connectivity areas by evaluating and comparing the number and size of roadless areas within countries and along their borders.

The northern and eastern countries have the highest cover in roadless areas, together with Spain. However, Borders of eastern countries have significantly higher cover of roadless areas, namely from Belarus down to Croatia and Greece. Moreover, all European border with Russian Federation has also much higher cover of roadless areas. Interestingly, the borders of the northern countries, Norway, Sweden and Finland have also a higher cover of roadless areas.

We further discuss how focusing on conservation action at borders can become a "win-win" outcome with advantages for both biodiversity and human peace. In particular, conservation of flag species, as bear and lynx, at borders of main geo-political blocks can be used to increase the cooperation between such regions and with that ensure long last peaceful coexistence.