Exodus

It was yet another Day celebrated but with dire warnings – loss of biodiversity. But even as World Biodiversity Day passed by, not many of us know the significance of the word. A conservative estimate puts the pace of species extinctions today on par with 65 million years ago when 50 per cent of all species went extinct, including the dinosaurs. Commitments made by nations in 2002 to stem the loss of biodiversity has not been upheld.

The UN's third Global Biodiversity Outlook report warned of the dire consequences associated with alarming biodiversity declines and losses of habitats. Since 1970, we've seen a 30 percent decline in wildlife species, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). This is, as unconnected as it may seem, harming food sources, intensifying global warming, and harming industry.

Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said: "Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of 6 billion [people], heading to over 9 billion by 2050. Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet."

Biodiversity provides the basic infrastructure for all our activities and our survival. Ecosystems offer services worth billions of dollars such as food, water, energy, clean air and medicine. But more than 60 per cent of those services are degraded worldwide and human pressure has accelerated species extinction to 1,000 times the natural rate of loss. Only 48,000 species are assessed on IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species™ out of the 1.9 million known and the millions of others yet to be discovered.

Once a gene, species or ecosystem disappears, it is gone forever. Today, we depend on so many plants and bacteria for our medicine and health. When some ecosystems disappear they take with them the protection they hold against infectious diseases. Some 15,000 species of medicinal plants are globally threatened from, amongst others, loss of habitat, overexploitation, invasive species and pollution.

To conserve this valuable natural resource, IUCN, Plantlife International and TRAFFIC are calling for governments to endorse a revised and updated Global Strategy for Plant Conservation which aims to halt the continuing loss of the world’s plant diversity. The significance of medicinal plants can’t be underestimated. 80% of people in Africa use traditional medicine for primary healthcare. 323,000 households in Nepal alone are involved in the collection of wild medicinal plants to sell for their livelihoods.

India is a biodiversity hotspot, home to an estimated 15,000 plant species - 6 per cent of the world's total - including some 300 trees that are considered threatened by extinction.

In the intricately linked web of life on the planet, every insect or plant has a role to play. Ensuring that this web is intact is the need of the hour, however ‘trivial’ it may seem compared to an oil spill or stocks plunging.