Walls, fences, razor wire, and other physical barriers all make crossing a border a much more dangerous undertaking. In some cases, people on the move fall off walls, injuring themselves or even dying, and in others, the barriers force them into riskier — and potentially more fatal — journeys through rougher terrain.
But that’s not the only way that border walls and other physical barriers pose serious threats to the world. A recent study in the journal Biological Conservation dug deep into the dangers these border barriers impose on wildlife.
Authors Carol L. Chambers and Cole Sennett found that walls and fences take a drastic toll on wildlife species and “fragment habitat, reduce gene flow, and access to important resources.” For east-west borders, climate change will only make the risks more severe.
Although the “construction of barriers to enforce borders dates back thousands of years,” border walls and fences have been on the rise since 2001, the paper explained.
Border walls often prevent migratory paths for wildlife, destroy their habitats, and leave them at greater danger of injury at the hands of poachers or even “fence entanglement,” among other consequences.
Take the US-Mexico border, which the authors described as a “prominent example.” In 1993, US authorities began constructing sections of the border wall between San Diego and its Mexican counterpart, Tijuana. As politicians have time and again expanded and fortified that wall, including in other southwestern states, it has resulted in considerable damage for both wildlife and “binational conservation” between Mexico and the US.
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It’s not just the US-Mexico border wall that has proven detrimental to wildlife species. A fence spans around 70% of the India-Bangladesh border, and much of it includes razor wire. India built the barrier to stop people on the move from entering the country.
Both elephants and residents of rural communities bore the brunt of it. That fence has “interrupted historical migration routes of Asian elephants,” Chambers and Sennett wrote, and “trapped animals in populated rural areas,” which led the elephants to change routes and destroy “agricultural land and homes.”
Despite harms like these, the paper noted, “the construction of international border walls has intensified globally with the refugee crises in Europe and Asia and after the terrorist attacks on the United States” on Sept. 11, 2001.
In fact, some scholars have estimated that there are at least 30,000 kilometers (18,641 miles) of fencing and walls on borders in Eurasia, the paper added, and as of 2012, some “13.2 % of the world’s borders [had] a physical barrier.”
In other words, governments and politicians might advocate for border barriers as a way to make it more difficult for refugees and migrants to cross boundaries, but it’s wildlife that has to often shoulder the consequences.
What should governments do about that? According to Chambers and Sennett, they might want to consider “cross-border collaboration, creation of peace parks, use of technologically advanced surveillance instead of physical barriers, placing fences in areas that would not disrupt wildlife migration routes, creating wildlife-friendly openings in fences, and wildlife-friendly fencing.”
