Biodiversity. You just need to type in on google and go to the “news” tabs, and you will see a variety of articles. As I am writing this, some recent titles that just came up on my search range from the BBC “Biodiversity targets may be slipping out of reach”, and an European environment agency report “Biodiversity: state of habitats and species” to “the imperative of financing biodiversity” and “Tool created to assess biodiversity footprint”.
The latter two showing the direction in which the world is going now, by accounting and financing in order to restore, and passing from the concept of carbon credits (of which I already wrote a lot and will more) to that of biodiversity credits. As with many other things these days, we are taking some fancy words and using them and making them part of a commonly used vocabulary. Like making anything sustainable (even a train trip to the airport, can make your travelling “sustainable” - doesn’t matter that you are going there to fly and that’s not so sustainable…), so now protecting and increasing biodiversity is becoming the new buzzword. But “biodiversity” is still a little bit vague as a concept. I really liked this chapter in the book “from assessing to conserving biodiversity” - first of all there are different ways of measuring it. One can think of it as an absolute number of species, or can use one of the many indices that take into account abundances for example, or look at the functions of the organism (functional diversity) or taxonomic diversity. Then there is scale, and one can look at alpha beta or gamma diversity, depending on how one views the ecosystem. There is a choice involved. And it is still a very anthropocentric one. Restoring biodiversity sometimes is intended as reintroducing charismatic species, rather than leave an ecosystem truly flourish. As a truly flourishing ecosystem may not be one that we like as much. Think of it, it may have "unwanted" species in it (insects, spiders, snakes...). There is no doubt that biodiversity is important. I “grew up” (at least academically) with the notion that “Species diversity is a major determinant of ecosystem productivity, stability, invasibility, and nutrient dynamics.” (Tilman et al 2014) however field data show often context-dependent of mixed results (or weaker correlations between diversity and ecosystem functioning) (also here) , which makes it not so easy to transfer to the management of these “real-world” ecosystem (like, those outside of labs and mesocoms..) So, we still have a lot to understand.. This is not to say we shouldn’t protect / conserve ecosystems or even “biodiversity”, but maybe we shouldn’t try to think that we know how to manipulate diversity so it’s restored, but rather give back land that eventually will flourish. Yes maybe give it a kickstart especially if the “physics” of the area were greatly influenced by humans, try to reinstate some of those dynamics, but then take a step back and don’t expect for things to change tomorrow. It takes time. But it’s important to give back to the wild and realise we are the wild. before it’s too late. a must watch if you have netflix (or go find a friend who does) David Attenborough: A life on our planet
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