Biodiversity crisis: mass extinction with consequences

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There are a few things on this earth that we humans cannot live without. Firstly, of course, we need air to breathe and water to drink. But apart from these basic building blocks of life, nature provides us with so many other things that we humans need: Fruit, vegetables, cereals, honey, fish and meat - in other words, all the FOOD we can buy in the supermarket these days. And if we don't want to freeze, we also need cotton, silk and wood, which have been providing us with warmth for thousands of years. Finally, nature also provides us with active ingredients for medicines that we use to cure illnesses. As different as all these natural products are, they have one thing in common: they need intact ecosystems in order to thrive.

Biodiversity crisis: Why is biodiversity important?

In short: Nature provides us with essential products for survival. Behind the production are incredibly complex processes that, for the most part, we humans still do not fully understand. Take the apple as an example: Just because you plant an apple seed doesn't necessarily mean you'll harvest apples after ten years. Worms, bacteria, and fungi improve germination conditions in the soil by, for example, fueling decomposition processes or loosening the soil. A few years later, the apple tree needs help from others again, because without the pollination of the flowers by wild bees and others, it cannot bear fruit. And even in reproduction, the apple tree cannot act alone, as it needs animals that eat its fruits, swallow the apple seeds, and later excrete them in their dung (which, by the way, is excellent fertilizer). As you can see, even this greatly simplified explanation quickly becomes very complicated.

Die Biodiversitätskrise bedroht auch die Bienen
Die Biodiversitätskrise bedroht auch die Bienen (c) Pixabay

So, we agree that an apple tree will not have a successful apple harvest unless other living beings help it. A successful harvest depends on biological diversity. And this applies not only to apples: 75 percent of global food production depends on pollination by insects. And these insects, in turn, need other plants and bacteria to continue pollinating flowers. Conversely, this means that we are not only dependent on pollinating insects to meet our food needs: We rely on high biodiversity if we want to stay fed.

Why is biodiversity under threat?

Since the 1990s at the latest, we have been aware that we are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. Biologists and ecologists have documented the rapid decline of plant and animal species around the world in numerous studies. There are many reasons for this mass extinction: Climate change, pollution and the industrial exploitation of soils, oceans, plants and animals. The introduction of animal and plant species (so-called neozoa) into other regions can also lead to ecosystems being disrupted. For example, the American swamp crayfish is displacing native crayfish in Berlin and transmitting deadly diseases.

Mass extinction is not a new phenomenon on earth: there have already been six mass extinctions of living organisms in the history of the earth. However, what distinguishes past mass extinctions from today's is the driver of extinction. For the first time in Earth's history, it is not external factors such as asteroids or volcanic eruptions that are responsible for the mass extinction. Instead, it is a single species: Homo sapiens.

Biodiversity crisis: is it more threatening than the climate crisis?

In 2019, scientists wrote in a report from the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) that one million animal and plant species are on the brink of extinction. We humans need many of these species to secure our food production. Yet, we are doing too little in the fight against mass extinction. This biodiversity crisis threatens our existence just like the climate crisis. However, it does not receive the same media attention as the climate crisis. The loss of biodiversity leads to a chain of consequences, the extent of which many are unaware of. Global biodiversity must receive more attention, and the preservation of biological diversity must become our shared goal.

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