How Much Wild Nature Is Left?

The science

How much of the natural world is still intact? A team led by Tim Newbold, working with the UK's Natural History Museum, set out to answer that quantitatively. Using more than two million records covering nearly 40,000 land species, they modeled how local biodiversity responds to human land use, then estimated the result across the planet at roughly one-kilometer resolution. The measure they produced is the Biodiversity Intactness Index: the average abundance of a place's original species, expressed as a percentage of what it would be in an untouched ecosystem.

Their conclusion was stark. Across about 65% of Earth's land surface, intactness has fallen below the 10% loss that some scientists propose as a “safe” limit – the point beyond which ecosystems may stop functioning reliably. Even wilderness regions like the Amazon and the Congo are approaching that boundary.

How we turned it into a print

We mapped intactness as color: the richest, most complete ecosystems glow, while heavily altered land fades. The result is a different way of seeing the world – not by country or terrain, but by how much wild nature remains. It rewards close reading, and it starts conversations.

The print

From our Spectrum collection, The World as the Status of Biodiversity is printed on premium paper in 70x50 cm and 100x70 cm. Data source: Newbold et al., Global map of the Biodiversity Intactness Index, Science / Natural History Museum.