SALT LAKE CITY — On average, the equivalent of a football field is being lost to some sort of development across the lower 48 states, and Utah is seeing some of its own natural places disappear.
A new report commissioned by the Center for American Progress and conducted by a team of scientists with Conservation Science Partners says the equivalent of nearly nine Grand Canyon National Parks, or 49 Great Smoky Mountain National Parks, has been lost to some sort of development between 2001 and 2017.
That amounts to just over 24 million acres.
During that time, Utah lost to development 576,611 acres of its roughly 54.3 million acres, the report said, and ranks No. 17 on a scale that goes from highest to lowest in natural landscapes replaced by roads, buildings, or oil and gas development.
The analysis includes federal- and state-owned lands and pointed to 12% of Utah's land that is in some sort of protected status, such as national parks.
The most rampant rate of development happened in North Dakota, which saw 5.3% of its natural acreage replaced with roads, buildings, or oil and gas development. Oklahoma and Pennsylvania made the top three, and the states with the least amount of change were Nevada and Maine at 0.2%, followed by Connecticut at 0.3%.
The numbers are not startling to Wendy Fisher, executive director of Utah Open Lands.
"With those 577,000 acres lost, we recognize that some of that is disproportionately farmland," she said. "Utah Open Lands has a concern in protecting our agricultural heritage."
Her organization engaged in a successful multimillion-dollar fundraising campaign to preserve 19 acres of farmland within Park City limits, with landowners who agreed to lower the price and one who donated an additional 16 acres.
The Armstrong Snow Pastures Ranch is permanently protected with a conservation easement.
"We need that ability to protect land to produce food and fiber. It is a key thing for keeping our carbon footprint down and also ensuring our food costs don't go up dramatically," Fisher said.
A 2015 pollby Envision Utah put the preservation of farmland as a high priority for the majority of Utahns, with 83% of respondents who said they are willing to constrain development to protect existing high quality agricultural land.
Fisher, too, said many people characterize the preservation of open space as an environmental story, but undeveloped natural land in Utah helps infuse $12.3 billion into Utah's economy, and 72% of the state's residents engage in some sort of outdoor recreation, according to an Outdoor Industry Association report.
"It's clean activity that doesn't adversely affect our air quality," Fisher added.
The land analysis comes ahead of the widely anticipated release Thursday of a reporton climate change and land use by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation's body assessing science related to a changing climate.
A live-streamed summary of the report will be delivered at a press conference at a meeting of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
The report by Center for American Progress notes that the majority of lost natural spaces is due to urban encroachment.
"I think honestly generations from now we are going to be judged on not what we developed, but what we saved, because that truly is the legacy we will leave," Fisher said.
"The next generation is going to look at what we were able to do to protect the quality of life in Utah."
The Center for American Progress describes itself as a public policy and advocacy organization that takes a "liberal" viewpoint on social and economic issues.