BIODIVERSITY AND HUMAN HEALTH

Executive Summary
by Joseph Dougherty

Contents:

• Healthy Environments for Healthy People
• Defining Biodiversity
• The Value of Biodiversity
  • Putting a Price on Nature
  • Ecosystem Services as a Sample of Biodiversity Value
• Biodiversity is a Wise Investment

Healthy Environments for Healthy People

Caring for yourself — watching what you eat, exercising, not smoking — in order to increase your chances of enjoying good health may seem like common sense. Yet everyday, around the world and in our own backyards, people engage in activities that directly or indirectly endanger their health, often without realizing the consequences of their actions. Acts as seemingly innocent as how you landscape your yard, where you buy your groceries, or which restaurant you choose when you go out to dinner may have much deeper impacts than you realize: environmental pollution, global climate change, habitat destruction, the spread of invasive species, resource overexploitation, cultural homogenization... these trends may threaten human health far more than we realize, or can even measure.

All living things are interconnected in a vast web and science is only beginning to unravel how these complex interdependencies work.

Monitoring the Pulse of the Planet

The health of the natural world is often measured by examining the distribution and health of the many plants and animals who share this planet with us. This gives scientists a picture of the planet’s biological diversity, or biodiversity: the sum of variations of all kinds within living systems, from the DNA in a microbe’s genetic code to the vastness of an ecosystem that spans a continent. Ecologists have shown that the healthier an ecosystem is, the more diversity it will contain. Heavily damaged or polluted biomes contain far fewer kinds of plants and animals than natural, undamaged biomes of the same type. Thus, monitoring trends in biodiversity is like listening to the heartbeat of the planet.

Nature’s Tool Kit

More kinds of organisms inhabit the earth today than have ever lived on this planet at one time before. Unfortunately, humans are rapidly depleting the earth of its biological treasures. The phenomenal diversity of organisms and cultures on earth today is the result of over 3.5 billion years of biological evolution. Through the millennia, each living thing has adapted to meet the demands of the habitat in which it lives. When physical forces (volcanoes, earthquakes, glaciers, droughts, floods, etc.) change the character of a region, changes also occur in the array of organisms that dwell there, including humans. Biological pressures (predation, disease, starvation, competition for mates, etc.) can also influence populations or communities of organisms. A vast diversity in genes, species, ecosystems, and even cultures provides the raw materials with which populations and communities, including humans, adapt to change. The more options that exist, the more likely a solution can be found to face the challenge — be it climate change, a new disease, or a need to produce greater agricultural yields on a limited piece of land.

Stewards For the Future

The loss of each additional portion of the spectrum of biodiversity reduces the number of tools nature can use when responding to changing conditions. This is as true for humans as for any other species, and that is why we must work to preserve and maintain our natural inheritance. As stewards for the next generation, it is our responsibility to ensure the tools we were handed by nature are still here for use by the generations that follow our own. Maintaining maximum biological diversity assumes far greater urgency as rates of environmental change increase and, through pressures both natural and man-made, an ever-increasing number of plants, animals, and other resources are pushed toward the brink of extinction.