Sounding the alarm on biodiversity loss
With the United Nations’ climate change conference under way in Bonn, Germany, rising global temperatures are once again at the top of the world’s agenda. But why care about the increase in temperature, if not because of its impact on life on Earth, including human life?
That is an important question to consider, in view of the relative lack of attention devoted to a closely related and equally important threat to human survival: the startling pace of global biodiversity loss.
The availability of food, water and energy — fundamental building blocks of every country’s security — depends on healthy, robust and diverse ecosystems, and on the life that inhabits them. But as a result of human activities, planetary biodiversity is now declining faster than at any point in history.
