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Chivian and Bernstein 2010 How Our Health Depends on Biodiversity

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Chivian and Bernstein 2010 How Our Health Depends on Biodiversity How Our Health Depends on Biodiversity Eric Chivian M.D. and Aaron Bernstein M.D., M.P.H. Prepared for the United Nations on the occasion of the International Year of Biodiversity ABout tHE AutHors Eric Chivian M.D. is the founder and director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. He co-founded International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. Aaron Bernstein M.D., M.P.H. is a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and the Center for Health and the Global Environment. He practices pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston. CoVEr PHoto Blue Dart-Poison Frog ( Dendrobates tinctorius ). Found in lowland forests of South America, this frog contains several poisons in its skin that have been used to understand how local anesthetics work in people. It is threatened with extinction (as are approximately one third of the world’s almost 6,700 known amphibian species). (Photo © Art Wolfe) Special thanks to Johnson & Johnson for underwriting the cost of printing this report. The views expressed in this booklet are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United Nations Environment Programme or the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The eminent Harvard biology Professor Edward O. Wilson once said about ants, “We need them to survive, but they don’t need us at all.” The same, in fact, could be said about countless other insects, bacteria, fungi, plankton, plants, and other organisms. This fundamental truth, however, is largely lost to many of us. Rather, we humans often act as if we are totally independent of Nature, as if our driving thousands of other species to extinction and disrupting the life-giving services they provide will have no effect on us whatsoever. This summary, using concrete examples from our award-winning Oxford University Press book, Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity , co-sponsored by the U.N. (CBD Secretariat, UNEP, and UNDP) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has been prepared to demonstrate that human beings are an integral, inseparable part of the natural world, and that our health depends ultimately on the health of its species and on the natural functioning of its ecosystems. We have written this summary because human health is generally not part of discussions about biodiversity loss, by policy-makers or by the general public, and because most people, as a result, do not understand the full magnitude of the biodiversity crisis and do not develop a sense of urgency about addressing it. We believe that once people really grasp what is at stake for their health and their lives, and for the health and lives of their children, they will do everything in their power to protect the living world. BIODIVERSITY Biological diversity, or biodiversity for short, is the scientific term used for the variety of life on Earth. This variety exists at different levels and includes the genes found in all living things, as well as all species and the ecosystems these species comprise. Approximately 1.9 million species have been identified, but this number leaves out very large numbers of organisms, particularly those that are microscopic or that live in inaccessible, hard to study places such as the deep oceans. Many scientists have estimated the total number of species on Earth to be around 15 million, but even this figure may be a significant underestimate. Very little is known, for example, about the diversity of microbes like bacteria. A natural background, or baseline, rate of species extinction (i.e. the rate that existed before our species, Homo sapiens , first appeared approximately 195,000 years ago) can be very roughly calculated for all organisms. That rate has been estimated at one species per million species each year, so that for 15 million species, 15 extinctions would occur each year. Human activity has accelerated this natural extinction rate many fold, so that for some groups of organisms the rate is 100 times baseline levels, and for others, it is 1000 times and even more. Because of the very high level of current extinctions, scientists say we have now entered “the sixth great extinction event,” the fifth having occurred sixty-five million years ago, when dinosaurs and many other organisms went extinct. That event resulted from natural causes, perhaps including a giant asteroid striking the Earth; this one we are causing. We have identified no more than one in ten of all species on Earth. FIGurE 1. Twenty-five beetle species mostly from the Genus Lebia . Some 350,000 beetle species have been described, a number that is six times greater than all known vertebrate species. (From C.B. Champion, Biologia Centrali-Americana , Volume 1, Part 1, R.H. Porter and Dulau and Company, London, 1881 –1884. Courtesy of the Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University) FIGurE 2. Scanning electron micrograph of Escherichia coli bacteria. Most biodiversity is microbial, but no one knows how many different microbes there are. Estimates range from 10 million to as high as a billion or more. (Courtesy of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, U.S. National Institutes of Health) ECOSYSTEM SERVICES An ecosystem is characterized by its collection of species, the physical environment in which these species live, and the sum total of their interactions, with each other and with their shared environment. Tropical rainforests, coral reefs, and freshwater marshes are examples of ecosystems. The Earth’s ecosystems provide goods and services that sustain all life on this planet, including human life. Tragically, humanity often takes these services, delivered free of charge, for granted. Ecosystem services are commonly divided into four categories: 1. provisioning services like food, fuel, and medicines; 2. regulating services like purifying air and water, mitigating floods, and detoxifying soils; 3. cultural services that meet our aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual needs; 4. and supporting services , which make possible all other ecosystem services, like pollination, nutrient cycling, and the photosynthetic capture of the sun’s energy and production of biomass by plants, called “primary production.” While we know a great deal about how many ecosystems function, they often involve such complexity and are on a scale so vast that humanity would find it impossible to substitute for them, no matter how much money was spent in the process. Examples are: the breakdown and decomposition of dead organisms and wastes; the recycling of nutrients for new life on land, in rivers, lakes, and streams, and in the oceans; and the regulation of climate. A temperate forest well illustrates the abundance and complexity of the services ecosystems may provide. Temperate forests serve as sinks for CO 2 by storing carbon in trees and soils, thereby helping to mitigate human-caused climate change; maintain the water cycle and precipitation levels, thereby stabilizing local climates, through the uptake of water by tree roots, transport through the trees, and evaporation from the leaves back to the atmosphere; reduce soil erosion by dampening the power of rain and by tree roots binding soils; purify air by filtering particulates and providing chemical reaction sites on leaf surfaces where pollutants can be converted to harmless compounds; purify water by soils acting as massive filters to bind toxic substances; provide goods such as timber, medicines, and food; and reduce the risk of some human infectious diseases, such as Lyme disease, when they provide adequate habitats to maintain vertebrate species’ diversity. Ecosystems provide goods and services that sustain all life on this planet, including human life. If damaged, we cannot fully restore them, no matter how much money we spend. FIGurE 3. Mangroves in southeastern Florida, U.S. The strong, dense branches and roots of mangroves break up the force of waves and storm surges, and stabilize coastlines. They are also critically important breeding sites and nurseries for many marine food fish (e.g. some 1/3 rd of the food fish caught in Southeast Asia spend part of their lives in mangroves), and play central roles in the health of coastal marine ecosystems. Mangroves are among the most threatened of all ecosystems on Earth, with some 50% having been lost to development, wood harvesting, and aquaculture, particularly in Southeast Asia. (Courtesy of U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) FIGurE 4. Temperate Forest (© Jinyoung Lee, Dreamstime.com) FIGurE 5. Hand-Pollinating Apple Blossoms. These women, from Maoxian County at the border of China and Nepal, are pollinating apple trees by hand because bees in this region have gone extinct, probably from an excessive use of pesticides. It takes 25 people to pollinate 100 trees, a job done much more effectively by two beehives. (Photo by Farooq Ahmad and Uma Partap, Courtesy of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development [ICIMOD], Kathmandu, Nepal) N 0 10 20 Kilometers 19 Jun 1975 N 0 10 20 Kilometers 19 Sep 2001 HUMAN ACTIVITY AND THE THREAT TO BIODIVERSITY The main factor currently driving biodiversity loss is habitat destruction—on land; in streams, rivers, and lakes; and in the oceans. Human activities such as: deforestation; bottom trawling in the oceans; the damming and dredging of streams, rivers, and lakes; and the draining and degradation of wetlands, estuaries, and mangroves are responsible. Other threats to biodiversity and to ecosystems include the over-harvesting of plant and animal species, the introduction of non-native species, and pollution. Many types of human-caused pollution are a threat—the release of excessive amounts of nitrates and phosphates from sewage and agricultural run-off, persistent organic pollutants that can concentrate in food webs (and in our own tissues) and adversely affect hormonal and reproductive function, pharmaceuticals used by people and in livestock production that are toxic to wildlife, acid rain, heavy metals, herbicides and pesticides, and plastics.
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