• 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.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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