All over the world, geopolitical conflicts and migration crises are fueling an unprecedented boom in the construction of the border wall. For wildlife, these barriers pose an existential threat, blocking essential migration corridors at a time when more and more animals are on the move to survive climate change.

“The border wall is essentially an uncontrolled ecological experiment on a continental scale,” says Myles Traphagen, Borderlands Program Coordinator at Wildlands Network. “This could cut off critical migration routes for a variety of wild animals that have learned, generation after generation, from their parents and family cohorts, where the water is, where the food is, where the prey. We divide the continents.

For an “In Real Life” documentary, correspondent and video journalist Sam Eaton examined the ecological costs of these new high-tech border walls — and some potential solutions for wildlife.

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There is today more than 74 border walls around the world, with many more in the planning stages. That’s six times as many barriers as at the end of the Cold War, covering a total of more than 20,000 miles.

“Countries have erected barriers between friends, neighbors and enemies on a scale we have never seen before in human history,” says John Linnell of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research . Linnell, the lead author of a global study on the impacts of border walls on wildlife, told In Real Life: “We’re fencing off wildlife and we’re fencing ourselves in smaller and smaller areas, cutting off wildlife from the space she needs. »

It’s a pressing question in eastern Poland’s Białowieża Forest, a cross-border UNESCO World Heritage site and Europe’s largest virgin forest. Wildlife biologists are scrambling to study the impacts of an ancient ecosystem now split in two by a wall built in 2021.

The wall was erected to stop the movement of refugees through Belarus, escaping war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

“We can’t really say how the animals will react,” says Katarzyna Nowak, a conservation biologist at the University of Warsaw at the Białowieża geobotanical station. “Some will walk along that fence and look for gaps and they will bounce off it and go back into the forest and then back behind the fence. Others, like small carnivores, will probably go through the accordion in one way or another. But not the biggest mammals.

This border cuts one of the few remaining migration corridors for the Eurasian lynx, wolves and other large mammals coming from the east to western Europe. Scientists like Nowak have been accused of treason by pro-government Polish media and face harassment on the ground by the army and border guards.

“I think this is an important document to inform long-term mitigation measures, in anticipation of changes in the future,” she says. “This fence, just like the Berlin Wall, just like the other Soviet fences from the Iron Curtain era that fell, will also eventually fall. »

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Poland’s new walls are not the only ones on the continent. In Europe, national border walls have increased from zero to nineteen over the past two decades, with more than 2,000 kilometers of physical barriers. And with The next Finnish fence with barbed wire along its Russian border, Western European animals will soon be almost completely isolated from the east, increasing the threat of inbreeding and, ultimately, local extinctions.

“Which means that from a wildlife conservation perspective, Europe suddenly finds itself alone,” says Linnell. “It can no longer rely on the additional viability that comes from that connection with these kinds of much larger populations in the East. In effect, we’re starting to live on an island.

A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesfound that by 2070, about a third of the planet’s mammals may have to cross borders as climate change shifts more than half of their habitat to new countries where they do not exist today. The U.S.-Mexico border has the largest number of species threatened by a border wall.

So far, about 700 miles, about a thirdof the entire border between the United States and Mexico have been walled or fenced. On the Mexican side of the wall, conservationists are concerned about the 30-foot steel barrier that now separates protected habitats on both sides of the border.

“It’s really a biodiversity hotspot,” says José Manuel Pérez Cantú, conservation director for the nonprofit Cuenca Los Ojos. “If we want to preserve the richness of this biodiversity, we must create passes that are truly friendly to wildlife. »

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These developments could be on the horizon, thanks to a recent lawsuit against the Trump administration by 18 States and two organizations. Under the terms of the lawsuit settlement, the Department of Homeland Security must create several large wildlife crossings to mitigate the wall’s impact on critical migration corridors for animals like the jaguar, black bear and l Sonoran antelope. Traphagen has a permit to monitor first-time openers with surveillance cameras.

“This has never been done before. So there’s no playbook,” he says in the documentary. “It’s a pretty big compromise to say they’re going to open up wildlife crossings, which obviously means there’s going to be a human component.”

Critics say the wildlife barriers are part of a broader “open borders” policy. Under the ruling, the gates can be closed at any time by Homeland Security for border security operations.

“Having doors every now and then to allow wildlife to pass through could mean the difference between survival from one year to the next,” says Traphagen. “To see this open now is very satisfying because something has come out of all this work and we are able to make a difference.”