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Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s landwas inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as “natural,” “intact,” and “wild” generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural. The current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Recognizing this deep cultural connection with biodiversity will therefore be essential to resolve the crisis.

International agreements aim to conserve 17% of Earth's land area by 2020 but include no area‐based conservation targets within the working landscapes that support human needs through farming, ranching, and forestry. Through a review of country‐level legislation, we found that just 38% of countries have minimum area requirements for conserving native habitats within working landscapes. We argue for increasing native habitats to at least 20% of working landscape area where it is below this minimum. Such target has benefits for food security, nature's contributions to people, and the connectivity and effectiveness of protected area networks in biomes in which protected areas are underrepresented. We also argue for maintaining native habitat at higher levels where it currently exceeds the 20% minimum, and performed a literature review that shows that even more than 50% native habitat restoration is needed in particular landscapes. The post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework is an opportune moment to include a minimum habitat restoration target for working landscapes that contributes to, but does not compete with, initiatives for expanding protected areas, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Anthropogenic land use change is a major driver of zoonotic pathogen spillover from wildlife to humans. According to the land use‐induced spillover model, land use change alters environmental conditions that in turn alter the dynamics between zoonotic pathogens and their wildlife hosts. Thus, in response to the global spread of the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus (the agent of COVID‐19 disease), there have been renewed calls for landscape conservation as a disease preventive measure, including by the G7 Ministers responsible for Climate and the Environment. Landscape immunity, as a new construct, points to four paradigm shifts the world must favor to effectively mitigate pandemic risks. We provide a landscape immunity primer for policy makers and make the case for “world views” that place Homo sapiens within ecological systems, regard human health as an ecological service, prioritize investments in prevention, and apply ecological restoration to human health goals. Crisis is a conversation starter for reimagining and recommitting ourselves to what is most vital and generative. We urge world leaders to make the move to a nature‐positive world.

Founded in 1993, the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) vision was one of the earliest large‐landscape conservation visions. Despite growing recognition of large‐landscape conservation strategies, there have been few tests to date of conservation gains achieved through such approaches. We tested for conservation gains in the Y2Y region of North America following initiation of the Y2Y conservation vision in 1993 using a counterfactual spatiotemporal comparison and tracking change in five different conservation metrics. First, we enumerated the area of land within Y2Y in designated protected areas. We then compared the rate of change of protected area growth before‐ and after‐initiation of Y2Y in 1993 and to two adjacent counterfactual regions. Protected areas in the Y2Y grew by 7.8%, increasing by 107,289 km2, exceeding the Aichi target of 17% of the area under protection by 2018. More importantly, the rate of protected area growth increased 90% following initiation of the Y2Y large‐landscape conservation vision in 1993, whereas protected area growth declined in adjacent regions, or remained constant throughout North America. Sustained growth in protected areas and private land conservation was complemented by expansion of endangered grizzly bears in the U.S. portion of Y2Y, the greatest global expansion from zero to at least 117 wildlife road‐crossing structures and growing mainstreaming coverage of the Y2Y vision. Our counterfactual comparison provides valuable evidence that large‐landscape conservation strategies such as Y2Y can enhance protected area growth and other conservation metrics. We conclude that large‐landscape conservation strategies may be a useful model for achieving global large‐landscape conservation and biodiversity conservation targets. Maps showing growth of protected lands (light green) in 1993 and 2018 (dark green) in the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) region.

The World Heritage Convention could make a bigger and more systematic contribution to global wilderness conservation by: (1) ensuring the World Heritage List includes full coverage of Earth's wilderness areas with outstanding universal value and (2) more effectively protecting the ecological integrity of existing World Heritage sites. Here, we assess current coverage of global‐scale wilderness areas within natural World Heritage sites and identify broad gaps where new wilderness sites should be identified for inclusion in the World Heritage List. We also consider how existing mechanisms under the Convention can improve the ecological integrity of existing sites by expanding or buffering them, and by promoting connectivity between World Heritage sites, between World Heritage sites and other protected areas, or both. We suggest that the Convention should consider a new mechanism called a “World Heritage Wilderness Complex” to facilitate a wilderness approach. Finally, we map three landscapes and one seascape to illustrate how World Heritage Wilderness Complexes might be implemented.

Small animal practitioner and BVA past‐president, Harvey Locke, will join recent graduate Stephanie Massey to discuss practice support at this year's BVA Careers Fair at the London Vet Show. Here he discusses what to look for

The World Conservation Union (IUCN) plays a global leadership role in defining different types of protected areas, and influencing how protected area systems develop and are managed. Following the 1992 World Parks Congress, a new system of categorizing protected areas was developed. New categories were introduced, including categories that allowed resource extraction. Since that time there has been rapid growth in the global numbers and size of protected areas, with most growth being shown in the new categories. Further-more, the IUCN has heralded a ‘new paradigm’ of protected areas, which became the main focus of the 2003 World Parks Congress. The paradigm focuses on benefits to local people to alleviate poverty, re-engineering protected areas professionals, and an emphasis on the interaction between humans and nature through a focus on the new IUCN protected area categories.The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the implications of the new categories and paradigm shift in light of the main purpose of protected areas, to protect wild biodiversity. Wild biodiversity will not be well served by adoption of this new paradigm, which will devalue conservation biology, undermine the creation of more strictly protected reserves, inflate the amount of area in reserves and place people at the centre of the protected area agenda at the expense of wild biodiversity. Only IUCN categories I–IV should be recognized as protected areas. The new categories, namely culturally modified landscapes (V) and managed resource areas (VI), should be reclassified as sustainable development areas. To do so would better serve both the protection of wild biodiversity and those seeking to meet human needs on humanized landscapes where sustainable development is practised.