Safeguarding our future by protecting biodiversity
#MMPMID32837768
Corlett RT
Plant Divers
2020[Aug]; 42
(4
): 221-228
PMID32837768
show ga
The Anthropocene is marked by twin crises: climate change and biodiversity loss.
Climate change has tended to dominate the headlines, reflecting, in part, the
greater complexity of the biodiversity crisis. Biodiversity itself is a difficult
concept. Land plants dominate the global biomass and terrestrial arthropods
probably dominate in terms of numbers of species, but most of the Tree of Life
consists of single-celled eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea. Wild plants provide
a huge variety of products and services to people, ranging from those that are
species-specific, such as food, medicine, and genetic resources, to many which
are partly interchangeable, such as timber and forage for domestic animals, and
others which depend on the whole community, but not on individual species, such
as regulation of water supply and carbon sequestration. The use of information
from remote sensing has encouraged a simplified view of the values of nature's
contributions to people, but this does not match the way most people value
nature. We can currently estimate the proportion of species threatened by human
impacts only for a few well-assessed groups, for which it ranges from 14% (birds)
to 63% (cycads). Less than 8% of land plants have been assessed, but it has been
estimated that 30-44% are threatened, although there are still few (0.2%)
well-documented extinctions. Priorities for improving protection of biodiversity
include: improving the inventory, with surveys focused on geographical areas and
taxonomic groups which are under-collected; expanding the protected area system
and its representativeness; controlling overexploitation; managing invasive
species; conserving threatened species ex situ; restoring degraded ecosystems;
and controlling climate change. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
COP15 and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
COP26 meetings, both postponed to 2021, will provide an opportunity to address
both crises, but success will require high ambition from all participants.
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