When most people picture African wilderness, they imagine vast savannas teeming with wildlife, untouched by human civilization. North America, meanwhile, conjures images of sprawling cities and suburban developments. The reality? These two continents have remarkably similar amounts of wilderness—around 25-27% each.

What Counts as "Wilderness"?

Scientists define wilderness as areas with minimal human impact—no roads, no buildings, no significant land modification. These are places where nature still operates on its own terms.

The most comprehensive mapping comes from the Human Footprint Index, which tracks everything from population density to infrastructure. Areas scoring in the lowest impact categories qualify as true wilderness.

The Numbers Might Surprise You

Africa's wilderness is concentrated in some predictable places:

The Sahara Desert (yes, deserts count)
The Congo Basin rainforest
Parts of the Kalahari and Namib deserts
Remote regions of the Sahel

North America's wild spaces, meanwhile, cluster in Alaska, northern Canada, and scattered mountain regions. The Canadian boreal forest alone represents one of Earth's largest intact forest ecosystems.

Why Are They So Similar?

Africa's lower percentage might surprise those who think of it as "undeveloped." But the continent has been continuously inhabited by humans longer than anywhere else on Earth. Thousands of years of agriculture, herding, and settlement have shaped the landscape extensively.

North America, by contrast, saw its indigenous populations dramatically reduced through colonization and disease. Large areas were never intensively settled by European colonizers because they were simply too remote, too cold, or too dry.

There's also a measurement quirk: deserts and frozen tundra count as wilderness. Both continents have plenty of land that's "wild" mainly because it's inhospitable. The Sahara and the Canadian Arctic inflate the percentages significantly.

Wilderness Is Disappearing Fast

Here's the concerning part: global wilderness declined by 10% in just two decades between the 1990s and 2010s. That's an area roughly the size of India—gone.

Africa is losing wilderness to expanding agriculture and growing populations. North America faces pressures from resource extraction, particularly in Canada's oil sands and Alaska's mineral-rich regions.

The Amazon basin, not included in these continental figures, has lost wilderness at an even faster clip. Scientists estimate we could lose most of Earth's remaining wilderness within a century at current rates.

Does It Matter?

Wilderness areas serve as carbon sinks, biodiversity reserves, and climate regulators. They're also the last places where ecosystems function without human management—living laboratories for understanding how nature actually works.

The similarity between Africa and North America tells us something important: no continent has escaped human impact. Even places we imagine as pristine have been shaped by millennia of human activity. The wilderness that remains is genuinely rare—and increasingly precious.

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