• What is biodiversity?
Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth at all levels: from genes to species to ecosystems. An apple variety is an example of biodiversity; so is Siberian coastal tundra. Most of the time, though, biodiversity is spoken about in terms of species.
• What are the benefits of biodiversity?
In two words: ecosystem services. Research has shown that diverse ecosystems are better at supplying amenities like food and clean water, and at recovering from shocks like hurricanes.
Biodiversity also means options. From medicines to technologies inspired by plants and animals, the natural world is a vast repository of potentially helpful information. This goes for food too. At the moment, humans eat about two dozen species of the thousands available. In the face of new diseases, pests and weather patterns, cultivating a diverse portfolio of crops is the best way to ensure food security.
• Is it threatened?
Many scientists believe the Earth is undergoing a sixth great extinction event caused by humans. Extinction is natural, but scientists estimate the current pace outstrips the average rate by between 100 percent and 1,000 percent. About one-third of assessed species worldwide are threatened with extinction in the wild. Ecosystem diversity is also vulnerable: Mediterranean-climate shrublands, for example, are more endangered than tropical rainforests.
• How do we know biodiversity is decreasing?
Measuring biodiversity is difficult. Scientists don’t know how many species exist (estimates vary from 5 million to 30 million), and of the 2 million they’ve identified, only about 50,000 are monitored. To get a sense of how biodiversity is doing overall, conservationists have developed the Living Planet Index (LPI). It tracks the populations of 1,686 indicator species around the globe, much like a stock market index. Over the past 35 years, the index dropped 28 percent, suggesting biodiversity is not doing particularly well.
• What are the main threats to biodiversity?
The greatest threat right now is habitat loss. Agriculture, grazing and urban development divide and destroy terrestrial habitats. In the oceans, fishing trawlers scrape the sea floor while aquaculture eats up mangroves and other sensitive coastal regions.
Overexploitation for food, medicine and materials also threatens biodiversity. Fishing has depleted 80 percent of wild stocks, while deforestation and bushmeat hunting in the tropics have pushed many forest species to the brink. The thriving illegal trade in wild plants and animals is second only to the drug trade in profits, according to Interpol.
• What about pollution?
It’s a problem. Hazards range from the invisible — pesticides and industrial waste poison rivers and accumulate in food chains — to the inedible: thousands of sea birds and turtles die every year from ingesting bits of plastic. Fertilizer and sewage run-off causes algae blooms and marine dead zones. The carbon dioxide that drives global warming is a pollutant, acidifying the oceans and potentially dooming biologically rich coral reefs.
• Is biodiversity at risk from fauna and flora, as well as humans?
Sometimes. Invasive species like the water hyacinth and Asian carp have run roughshod after being transported to distant parts of the globe — native species are often no match for invasives in the competition for resources. On islands, where species have not evolved to cope with imported predators, invasives are as significant a danger to biodiversity as habitat destruction.
• What about climate change?
Climate change will pose an increasing threat to biodiversity in coming decades. Conservationists set up the current global network of nature reserves with today’s climate in mind. Plants and animals attempting to migrate with the changing conditions may find themselves in human territory with nowhere to go.
• How can we better value biodiversity?
The UN has launched a global effort to calculate the value of biodiversity — from crop pollination to income from tourism — so it can factor into policy decisions. Biodiversity isn’t always of tangible benefit to humans, despite being vital for clean water, air, food and other “services.” Some say that its economic benefits are overblown, and that biological richness should be protected for its own sake. Economists, however, call that a benefit too: “existence value” — the comfort that comes from knowing biodiversity is there.
• What organizations exist to protect biodiversity?
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is a conservation giant, operating 1,300 projects in 40 countries worldwide. Another powerful independent, Conservation International, has pioneered the use of biodiversity hotspots — areas with many unique species at risk — as a way of deciding what to protect first.
The grandfather of nature conservation, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), was founded in 1948 by a large group of governments and conservation organizations. The IUCN runs the red list of threatened species, the authoritative global database on the conservation status of species worldwide.
Several international treaties exist to protect biodiversity, including the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species and the Convention on Biological Diversity. This year marks the culmination of an IUCN initiative to slow biodiversity loss by 2010, and the UN has declared this year the International Year of Biodiversity and next Saturday the International Day for Biological Diversity. Celebrations, however, may be muted: Despite the participation of governments and organizations worldwide, it’s unlikely that biodiversity loss will be slowed by the end of the year.
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