Swiss biodiversity
The Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) has described the state of Swiss biodiversity as “alarming”.
Biodiversity has been declining continuously for decades and Switzerland has some of the highest proportions of threatened species among the OECD countries. More than a third of all plant and animals species, as well as almost half of all habitat types are endangered.
The usual suspects are to blame, including urban sprawl and changes in land use, high inputs of nitrogen and pesticides from the agricultural sector, an usustainable comsumption level, and the over-exploitation of both soils and water bodies.
Subsidies also come into play. Over 160 subsidies totalling some CHF40 billion per year have been shown to negatively impact biodiversity. Financial subsidies to promote biodiversity are also lower than in many other OECD countries and are insufficient to ensure the protection and restoration of important species and ecosystems. This lack of resources is largely the reason why biodiversity targets are not being met.
Yet the majority of Swiss people surveyed significantly and consistently underestimate the scale of the problem.
Did you know for example that Switzerland comes last out of 30 European countries in terms of protected areas? Moreover, the quality of the protected areas we do have is lacking and many reserves are too small and too poorly connected. Neither do they fully meet conservation objectives.
Nationally designated reserves and protected habitats covered just 6.71% of the territory in 2022. This includes the sole National Park created in 1914 and representing Switzerland’s largest protected area which, at 174.2 km² makes up just 0.4% of the country. Adding private and regional nature conservation areas, such as Ramsar and Emerald Network sites brings the total land area designated for the conservation of biodiversity up to around 12.5% which is below the global Aichi target of 17% and a far cry from the Kunming-Montreal commitment of 30% land and 30% water.
As for forest reserves, they make up some 87,000 hectares or just 6.5% of the total forest surface area.
But while all these areas are “designated” for conservation, that doesn’t mean they are necessarily protected. Private reserves and international reserves don’t benefit from the same protection under the law as federally protected ones and some forest reserves are aggressively logged which much of the extracted trees burnt as energy wood.
Logging and biomass burning represent two of the most important threats to forest biodiversity, especially in nature reserves.