Biodiversity is important for many reasons, including ecological services, such as pollution breakdown and absorption, soil formation, and social services, for example, recreation and tourism. According to Roe (2019), the loss of biodiversity is an environmental problem that needs urgent intervention since it threatens livelihoods. The article “Biodiversity Loss—More Than An Environmental Emergency” provides a comprehensive analysis to illustrate why this issue is an ecological emergency. The United Nations declared the year 2010 as the International Biodiversity Year (Roe, 2019). However, around this time, people did not understand the significance of ensuring environmental continuity. Roe (2019) defines biodiversity as “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, among other things, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems” (p. 287). Whenever biodiversity is reported in media outlets, the coverage always contains disturbing news as the poaching of such rare species like elephants, polar bears, rhinos, and tigers.
Different environmental issues have varying significance, but biodiversity loss deserves further discussion and research for many reasons. The first one is that it notably affects the stability and productivity of natural ecosystems. Thus, this issue undermines the effective functioning of the ecological systems. This way, it deters nature’s ability to support a healthy environmental system (Roe, 2019). Furthermore, communities, especially those from low socioeconomic backgrounds, benefit much from the abundance of animal and plant species. For example, the ecosystem helps people in many ways, including the absorption of air pollution, providing food, and being a natural barrier against adverse weather, such as storm surges.
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Moreover, biodiversity loss ruins the resilience of nature to climate change and threatens livelihoods. Poverty-stricken people depend on balanced biodiversity to cushion themselves from the obvious adverse consequences of global warming. Besides, the destruction of the natural environment impedes food security and health. For example, crop yields significantly reduce when genetic multiplicity is lost, thereby causing famine. Additionally, since food production and wellbeing are directly related, the overreliance on agrochemicals in farming, due to climate change, exposes people to pollutants, leading to adverse health outcomes. Therefore, biodiversity loss needs to be treated as an environmental emergency and should be prioritized for further discussion and research.
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