Laura Lundquist

(Missoula Current) A new report shows how human activity has caused wildlife populations to shrink worldwide by an average of 73% over the past 50 years.

On Wednesday, the World Wildlife Federation released its 2024 Living Planet Report, which based its devastating conclusion on an index of more than 5,000 bird, mammal, amphibian, reptile and fish population counts over five decades, ending in 2020.

The report found the degradation and loss of habitat was the biggest threat to wildlife, followed by overexploitation, invasive species, disease, climate change and pollution. The steepest declines were recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and freshwater ecosystems.

Lead author and WWF chief scientific adviser Mike Barrett said human activity, "particularly the way that we produce and consume our food,” is increasingly destroying natural habitat.

Also on Wednesday, the Missoula-based Cinnabar Foundation hosted a discussion along a similar vein on how people can better coexist with carnivores, particularly in Montana. Cinnabar Program Officer Beverly Dupree said conflict prevention needs to go hand-in-hand with conserving lands that allow connectivity so grizzlies and other animals can travel across the landscape safely.

Author and biologist Doug Chadwick, who had given a talk earlier in the day at the Missoula Public Library for the Center for Large Landscape Conservation, said a lot of conservation groups focus on this or that issue but those issues somehow need to be tied into the bigger picture that nature is a process, not just a collection of species.

In his lifetime, the human population has grown to 8 billion from 2 billion to the point that less than 4% of the living biomass of mammals on the planet is not related to humans, either people or their livestock. As he traveled the world doing research for his books, he’s seen how protected areas keep getting smaller as people fill the areas in between.

“Animals need movement options, need adaptation options especially in a changing climate. Everywhere I’ve worked, whether it’s with snow leopards or chimpanzees or gorillas, there isn’t very much room left for them,” Chadwick said. “When we were looking at the Yellowstone to Yukon region, where we live, I think we’re looking at the best place that can hold up over time. It’s the best intact mountain ecosystem that still has as many of its species.”

In Montana

Montana can still boast that it’s home to many wild species because of restoration efforts and the fact that few people lived here until the end of the 20th century. There have been some successes as far as recovering species, but many species now face an uncertain future as more people move to Montana and buy up property, particularly former timber company land, that animals once used for migration.

Many new out-of-state landowners and even some established ones need education to prevent wildlife conflict so wildlife, particularly grizzly bears, can move and interbreed.

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Chadwick said grizzly bears are the ideal keystone species because they’re long-lived, far-ranging and they have large home ranges. So if their habitat is protected, the habitat of many other species is too.

“My basic premise is where a place is good enough, wild enough, free enough, healthy enough for grizzly bears to survive, it’s good enough to keep all those qualities not only for us but also for a whole community of wildlife,” Chadwick said.

Hilary Cooley, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator, said the agency set up recovery areas where the majority of land was owned by the federal government so the habitat could have some protection. Even so, “the vast majority of mortality is due to humans” and “the vast majority of these mortalities are preventable” with education and conflict prevention tools, Cooley said.

But now, bears are trying to move outside the recovery areas where their survival is even more at risk. Researcher Sarah Sells has modeled the most likely routes that grizzly bears would travel between recovery areas and much of the area is private land where some people have less tolerance for wild species, particularly carnivores.

“We need a different strategy; we can’t regulate private lands,” Cooley said. “We need people to be able to tolerate grizzly bears on their property. We have zero connectivity so far between the NCDE and GYE. We haven’t had a bear walk across. We also have two big empty ecosystems. If we want connectivity, if we want bears to walk from one ecosystem to another, if we want bears to move into the Bitterroot, they’re going to have to walk across private land.”

Nate Owens of the Heart of the Rockies Initiative said his organization has surveyed landowners starting in 2001 to learn what is needed to reduce conflict and the main thing is funding. Funding is necessary for carcass pickup, range rider and electric fencing programs that keep bears away from livestock.

Because of the information the institute gathered, the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service has started offering cost-share programs to help livestock producers with conflict prevention efforts. But much of that can’t be done on an individual basis - it takes regional organizations like the Blackfoot Challenge that can coordinate the programs and keep them running. And some areas don’t have that.

“One of the things we’re trying to do is develop a statewide conflict prevention needs map. The map will visually demonstrate where the local needs are and areas of opportunity for increased investment,” Owens said. “

The Heart of the Rockies Initiative is a partnership of land trusts from northern Utah to southern Canada that works on conflict prevention along with collaboration, compensation for livestock loss and lethal control where necessary.

One last piece of the puzzle is road crossing structures to help animals move from one region to another. But again, that takes money and leadership. For the most part, the Gianforte administration has not supported building crossing structures.

But in September, the Montana Department of Transportation applied for a federal Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program grant to help fund a $26-million project to build a new wildlife overpass, upgrade an existing underpass, and retrofit a bridge to allow wildlife to safely cross US Highway 191 along the Gallatin River south of Bozeman. The Center for Large Landscape Conservation has pledged to help raise the matching funds if the grant comes through.

Kylie Paul, Center for Large Landscape Conservation road ecologist, said more wildlife crossings are needed in Montana, and time is short.

“You need to get into the small-scale, detail-oriented stuff. Because you can have intact connections, but you need to work at the tiny spots to help them move,” Paul said Wednesday. “Gary Burnett of the Heart of the Rockies Initiative said we have 10 to 20 years to keep our landscape connected if development and private land purchasing keeps going the way it is. We have a short time to really do it.”

The World Wildlife Federation report also warns climate change combined with the loss of natural areas are rapidly pushing the world towards irreversible tipping points, including the potential collapse of the Amazon rainforest, such that it can no longer absorb carbon emissions to temper the impacts of climate change.

One of the examples in the report focuses on western North America, where a combination of bark beetle infestation and more frequent and ferocious forest fires, exacerbated by climate change, is pushing pine forests to a tipping point where they will be replaced by shrubland and grassland.

Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.