From rock and ice to political convenience: persistent biases in Argentina’s protected areas

Protected areas (PAs) are one of the central tools to achieve international conservation targets toward 2030, yet biases in their location often undermine their effectiveness. A recurrent pattern worldwide is the tendency to establish PAs in remote or marginal lands, the so-called “residual conservation” or “rock and ice problem”. While elevation has been widely studied as a driver of this bias, other key topographic dimensions have received far less attention. Here we compared altitude, slope, and irregularity within Argentinian PAs against national, local, and ecoregional baselines, and examined their variation with the year of establishment and IUCN category. Our results show that Argentine PAs are disproportionately located in higher, steeper, and more irregular environments, with these biases being most pronounced in strictly protected categories. Protection increases sharply above 2000 m, in slopes steeper than 27 °, and in rugged terrains, while fertile and accessible lowlands remain largely underrepresented. These biases show little evidence of having changed substantially through time, despite Argentina’s international commitments on biological representativeness. Overcoming these long-standing topographic biases to truly meet the international agenda will require moving beyond economically convenient expansions and strategically directing protection toward the current deficits of the system, even when this implies political conflict.