BIODIVERSITY LOSS AS A MENACE FOR HUMANITY

Abstract

The most unusual attribute of the world is the essence of life, and its beauty is the most extraordinary characteristic of creation. Around 9 million species of plants, insects, protests and fungi populate the World. Seven billion people do it, too. Two decades ago, at the First Earth Summit, every majority of the nations of the world declared that human activities were destroying the ecosystems of the Earth, removing at an alarming rate genes, species and biological characteristics. This hypothesis led to the question of how this loss of biological diversity would alter the functioning of the environment and its capacity to provide society with the goods and services needed for prosperity. Remarkable progress has been made over the past 20 years to understand how biodiversity loss impacts the functioning of the environment and thereby affects society. Soon after the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, there was a substantial increase in interest in recognizing how biodiversity loss could affect ecosystem dynamics, but also the functioning of ecosystems, and the provision of goods and services.