An environment works well with a wide variety of species. Without tiger sharks, sea turtles would eat all the best sea grass, destroying that habitat for all the other animals that depend on it.
If one species—turtle, shark, or sea grass—disappears, other plants and animals that are connected to that species could go extinct too. Losing just one species can harm many others. Many of these known and unknown species have uncertain futures though. Climate change , pollution , poaching, and habitat destruction change the number of plant and animal species that live in a habitat, known as declining biodiversity.
Simply: a lot. Here are six significant human problems caused by reduced biodiversity. Topping the list, of course, is the monetary value of biodiversity around the world. In terms of ecosystem services—functions like pollination, irrigation, soil reclamation, and other things that would have to be paid for if nature couldn't take care of it on its own—the value of global biodiversity has been estimated in the trillions. Reductions in biodiversity do not only occur during deforestation or through poaching.
The introduction of new species is another culprit. In much of the world, this is happening on farms, too, where foreign breeds of cattle are being imported, pushing out natives. This means that the world's livestock population is becoming increasingly narrow and more vulnerable to disease, drought, and changes in climate, leading to an overall reduction in food security.
The loss of biodiversity has two significant impacts on human health and the spread of disease. First, it increases the number of disease-carrying animals in local populations. At the same time, habitat fragmentation brings humans in closer and more frequent contact with these disease-carrying species.
If forecasting the weather seems simply a matter of deciding to bring an umbrella or not, ask any farmer or coastal homeowner how they feel. Indeed, unseasonable weather, extreme weather, and weather that does not perform to historical norms is a huge problem that can lead to drought, destruction, and displacement.
The loss of species—even those replaced by invasives—has been shown to cause more unpredictable weather. From fishermen to farmers, biodiversity—not to mention healthy ecosystems—is essential to maintaining livelihoods. When ocean ecosystems collapse, for example, entire communities built on the bounty they provide fold as well.
As Indian activist and scientist Vandana Shiva and others have shown in countless work, indigenous people often have their cultures and lifestyle structured in a way that works with nature and would not undermine their own resource base. For example, in her book Stolen Harvests South End Press, she describes how their traditional knowledge has been beneficial to the environment and has been developed and geared towards this understanding and respect of the ecosystems around them.
Yet because of blanket conclusions that humankind is responsible for deforestation, we risk assuming all types of societies are equally responsible for deforestation that is damaging to the environment. This hints then, that for sustainable development projects, a more participatory approach can be accepted by local people, reducing the chance for conflict and distrust and therefore be more likely to succeed as well.
As the cartoon, further above, from the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment notes, logging companies and others can often have a larger impact on deforestation. Industrial agriculture and beef production for example, is a major cause of deforestation in the Amazon, to raise cattle. This is not even for local needs, but to meet fast food restaurant demands in the Northern countries. A combination of geopolitics and economic agreements foster a scenario for such results to occur. Indigenous and local communities play a significant role in conserving very substantial areas of high biodiversity and cultural value.
In addition to officially-designated protected areas, there are many thousand Community Conserved Areas CCAs across the world, including sacred forests, wetlands, and landscapes, village lakes, catchment forests, river and coastal stretches and marine areas.
They are voluntarily conserved by indigenous and local communities, through customary laws or other effective means, and are not usually included in official protected area statistics. Globally, 4 to 8 million square km the larger estimate is an area bigger than Australia are owned or administered by communities.
By no means all areas under community control effectively conserved, but a substantial portion are. In fact, some studies show that levels of protection are actually higher under community or indigenous management than under government management alone. How land is used to produce food can have enormous impacts on the environment and its sustainability. And this often has nothing to do with populations. Take the following as an example:.
Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, are under attack from major environmental groups in the United States and other developed countries because of their environmental impact. Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation, land degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources. For every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to about gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all.
In the United States, nearly 70 percent of grain production is fed to livestock. For the poorest, this biodiversity is the most important resource for survival. Because industrial agriculture promotes the use of monocultures, rather than a diversity of crops, the loss of biodiversity is leading to more resource usage, as described above. This as well as other political situations such as the motives for dumping surplus food on to developing countries to undersell the local farmers, leads to further hunger around the world.
If ecosystems deteriorates to an unsustainable level, then the problems resulting can be very expensive, economically, to reverse. In Bangladesh and India, for example, logging of trees and forests means that the floods during the monsoon seasons can be very deadly. Similarly, many avalanches, and mud slides in many regions around the world that have claimed many lives, may have been made worse by the clearing of so many forests, which provide a natural barrier, that can take the brunt of such forces.
As the Centre for Science and Environment mentions, factors such as climate change and environmental degradation can impact regions more so, and make the impacts of severe weather systems even worse than they already are. As they further point out, for poor regions, such as Orissa in India, this is even more of a problem. Vanishing coral reefs , forests and other ecosystems can all take their toll and even make the effects of some natural events even worse.
The cost of the effects together with the related problems that can arise like disease, and other illness, or rebuilding and so on is much more costly than the maintenance and sustainable development practices that could be used instead.
As an example, and assuming a somewhat alarmist scenario, if enough trees and forests and related ecosystems vanish or deteriorate sufficiently:. Compare those costs to taking precautionary measures such as protecting forests and promoting more sustainable forms of development. Of course, people will argue that these situations will not occur for whatever reasons. Only when it is too late can others say told you so — a perhaps very nasty Catch The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity TEEB is an organization — backed by the UN and various European governments — attempting to compile, build and make a compelling economics case for the conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity.
It has also attempted to put a value on the ecological services provided to humanity. Social costs to some segments of society can also be high. Take for example the various indigenous Indians of Latin America. Throughout the region, as aspects of corporate globalization spread, there is growing conflict between land and resources of the indigenous communities, and those required to meet globalization related needs.
The following quote from a report on this issue captures this quite well:. Many of the natural resources found on Indian lands have become more valuable in the context of the modern global economy. Several factors have spurred renewed interest in natural resources on Indian lands in Latin America, among them the mobility of capital, ecological limits to growth in developed countries, lax environmental restrictions in underdeveloped nations, lower transportation costs, advances in biotechnology, cheap third world labor, and national privatization policies.
Limits to logging in developed countries have led timber transnationals overseas. Increased demand and higher prices for minerals have generated the reopening of mines and the proliferation of small-scale mining operations. Rivers are coveted for their hydroelectric potential, and bioprospecting has put a price tag on biodiversity.
Originally considered lands unsuitable for productive activities, the resources on Indian lands are currently the resources of the future. Indian land rights and decisionmaking authority regarding natural resource use on territories to which they hold claim threaten the mobility of capital and access to resources—key elements of the transnational-led globalization model.
Accordingly, increased globalization has generally sharpened national conservative opposition to indigenous rights in the Americas and elsewhere in the name of making the world safe for investment. The World Trade Organization WTO , free trade agreements, and transnational corporations are openly hostile to any legislation that might create barriers to investment or the unlimited exploitation of natural resources on Indian lands.
The result has been a growing number of conflicts between indigenous communities and governments and transnational corporations over control of natural resources. Many military forces of the world also have an effect on the environment. Sometimes, the scale of problems they leave when they move out of a training area or conflict is considerable.
In some nations, such as the United States, the military can be exempt from many environmental regulations. In April , the Parties to the Convention committed to significantly reduce the loss of biodiversity loss by Perhaps predictably, that did not happen. As the Global Biodiversity Outlook report summarizes, despite numerous successful conservations measures supporting biodiversity,. The biodiversity target has not been met at the global level. None of the twenty-one sub-targets accompanying the overall target of significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by can be said definitively to have been achieved globally, although some have been partially or locally achieved.
Despite an increase in conservation efforts, the state of biodiversity continues to decline, according to most indicators, largely because the pressures on biodiversity continue to increase.
There is no indication of a significant reduction in the rate of decline in biodiversity, nor of a significant reduction in pressures upon it. Action to implement the Convention on Biological Diversity has not been taken on a sufficient scale to address the pressures on biodiversity in most places.
There has been insufficient integration of biodiversity issues into broader policies, strategies and programmes, and the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss have not been addressed significantly.
Biodiversity loss disrupts the functioning of ecosystems , making them more vulnerable to perturbations and less able to supply humans with needed services. The consequences are often harshest on the rural poor, who depend most immediately upon local ecosystem services for their livelihoods, and biodiversity loss poses a significant barrier to meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
To stop ecosystem degradation , the full contribution made by ecosystems to both poverty alleviation efforts and to national economies must be clearly demonstrated. This summary is free and ad-free, as is all of our content.
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