Current targets to protect environment not enough

According to a recent study, the current targets set to protect the environment are really not enough.

An environmental science Professor Martine Maron said that humanity demands a lot from the natural world which is why it needs to be protected at any cost.

"We need it to purify our water and air, to maintain our soils and to regulate our climate," Marion said.

She said the current target of protecting 17 per cent of terrestrial systems isn't enough to protect all species as well as provide the benefits humanity requires.

"We keep increasing the extent of protected areas - and we need to - but that hasn't stopped the ongoing loss of natural systems," said Marion.

"We need to retain enough of the Earth's natural systems in the right places to preserve healthy watersheds, to store carbon, to protect the last wilderness areas and to maintain human-nature interactions, but at the moment we don't have specific, area-based targets for all these goals," she said.

Another Professor, Jeremy Simmonds said the researchers want to see urgent reforms to be made to protect the environment.

"The alteration of many natural systems is often irreversible, and continuing down this path with no end point is utterly irresponsible," Dr Simmonds said.

"When we add these targets up, we're likely to find that we need much more nature to safeguard both humanity and all the other species that live on the planet," he added.

The study appears in Nature Ecology and Evolution Journal.