Around the world, geopolitical conflict and migration crises are fueling an unprecedented boom in border wall construction. For wildlife these barriers pose an existential threat, blocking critical migration corridors in a time when more and more animals are on the move to survive a changing climate.
“The border wall is essentially an uncontrolled ecological experiment on a continental scale,” says Myles Traphagen, Borderlands Program Coordinator with Wildlands Network. “It could cut off essential migration routes for a variety of wildlife who have learned generation after generation from their parents and family cohorts where the water is, where the food is, where the prey is. We are dividing 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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Today there are more than 74 border walls around the world, with many more in the planning stages. That’s six times the number of barriers than at the end of the Cold War, all together covering more than 20,000 miles.
“Countries have been building fences between their friends and neighbors and enemies on a scale that 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 are fencing wildlife in and fencing ourselves into ever smaller and smaller areas, cutting off wildlife from the space that it needs.”
It’s a pressing question in Eastern Poland’s Białowieża Forest, a transboundary UNESCO World Heritage site and the largest remaining primeval forest in Europe. Wildlife biologists are scrambling to study the impacts of an ancient ecosystem now divided in half by a wall built in 2021.
The wall was erected to halt the movement of refugees through Belarus, escaping war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.
“We can’t really say how animals are going to respond,” says Katarzyna Nowak, a University of Warsaw conservation biologist at the Białowieża Geobotanical Station. “Some will walk along this barrier and look for gaps and they’ll bounce back and forth against it and back into the forest and then back to the back to the barrier. Others, like the small carnivores will probably go through the concertina somehow. But the larger mammals will not.”
This border cuts one of the few remaining migration corridors for Eurasian lynx, wolves, and other large mammals coming from the east into western Europe. Scientists like Nowak have been accused of treason by Poland’s pro-government media, and face harassment in the field by the military and border guard.
“I think this is all important document in order to inform mitigation measures down the line in the anticipation that something will change in the future,” she says. “This fence, just like the Berlin Wall, just like other Iron Curtain era Soviet fences came down, will also eventually come down.”
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Poland’s new walls are not alone across the continent. National border walls in Europe jumped from zero to nineteen in the last two decades, with more than 1,200 miles of physical barriers. And with Finland’s upcoming fence with razor wire along its Russian border, the animals of western Europe 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 point of view, Europe is suddenly on its own,” says Linnell, “It can no longer count on the the extra viability which comes from this connection to these much larger kind of populations in the East. We, in effect, are starting to live on an island.”
A recent study published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciencesfound that by 2070 roughly a third of the world’s mammals could have to cross borders as climate change shifts more than half of their habitat to new countries where they don’t exist today. The U.S.-Mexico border has some of the highest numbers of species at risk from a border wall.
So far, about 700 miles, roughly a thirdof the entire US..-Mexico border, have been walled or fenced. On the Mexican side of the wall, conservationists are concerned about the 30 foot steel barrier now separating protected habitat on both sides of the border.
“It’s really a hot spot of biodiversity,” says José Manuel Pérez Cantú, Conservation Director with the nonprofit, Cuenca Los Ojos. “If we want to preserve the richness of this biodiversity, we need to create really friendly passes for wildlife.”
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Those developments may be on the horizon, thanks to a recent lawsuit against the Trump Administration by 18 states and two organizations. Under the lawsuit’s settlement terms, the Department of Homeland Security must create several large wildlife passages to mitigate the wall’s impact on critical migration corridors for animals like jaguar, black bear, and sonoran pronghorn. Traphagen has a permit to monitor the first open gates with trail cameras.
“This has never been done before. So, there is no playbook,” he says, in the documentary. “This is a pretty big compromise to say that they’re going to open up passages for wildlife to come through, which obviously means that there would be a human component.”
Critics say the wildlife gates are part of a larger ‘open borders’ policy. Under the ruling the gates can be closed by Homeland Security at any time for border security operations.
“To have gates every so often for wildlife to be able to gain passage, that could mean the difference between survival from one year to the next,” Traphagen says. “To see this open now is very satisfying that something came out of all that work and we’re able to make a difference.”
