One way to combat climate change and declines in biodiversity is to create more wilderness under the World Heritage Convention, according to leading conservationists from around the world.

Their call, contained in a letter pubished in the journal Conservation Letters, maintains that conserving large, intact wilderness areas "that are free from industrial infrastructure is critical for the future survival of a wide range of plant and animal species, and essential to the livelihoods of local communities and indigenous cultures."

A new approach is needed to ensure that the World Heritage List includes Earth’s most exceptional wilderness areas to improve its balance, representativeness and credibility, and to protect and manage the integrity of existing sites more effectively. We argue that a wilderness approach under the Convention would involve expanding the List by adding new sites to better represent wilderness areas with outstanding universal value, improving the integrity of existing sites by expanding or buffering them, and promoting connectivity between World Heritage sites, between World Heritage sites and other protected areas, or both.

“The World Heritage Convention is a powerful international instrument and it can provide the leadership required for wilderness and large-landscape conservation,” explains the paper’s lead author, Cyril Kormos, vice chair for International Union for Conservation of Nature's World Commission on Protected Areas. “Protecting intact nature at large scales helps stabilize the climate and allow species to move and adapt to changes in the environment, so protecting them is a high-priority response to climate change.”

The authors state that while protecting large parks and heritage areas is a "highly" effective strategy for preserving intact ecosystems and biodiversity, many World Heritage sites are experiencing biodiversity shrinkage "due to a lack of connectivity for wide-ranging species, such as grizzly bears, which require vast protected landscapes in order to survive."

In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, for example, Pronghorn migrations, which are included in Yellowstone National Park’s World Heritage values, have dropped by up to 75 percent.

The report’s authors include experts from the IUCN, which is the official advisory body on natural World Heritage, as well as Conservation International, Wildlife Conservation Society and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.

“The World Heritage Convention is in a unique position to offer guidance for innovation and strategic conservation, ensuring listed sites benefit from the highest standards of protection,” says Tim Badman, director of IUCN’s World Heritage Programme. “Increasing the coverage and connectivity of well-managed wilderness areas within the World Heritage List can only contribute to its strength and relevance.”

To provide technical guidance for this new approach, IUCN is currently undertaking a study to identify wilderness gaps on the World Heritage List and candidate sites for potential inscriptions.