BIODIVERSITY: ITS WORTH A BIT...

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BIODIVERSITY: ITS WORTH A BIT...

See here for a great report, full of useful references on biodiversity (from the Science magazine September 2010)

Sometimes it seems nature is not especially valued. How often have complaints been heard about frogs or snails halting progress, or the unproductively of land not exploited to the fullest?

But nature is also biodiversity – the variety of life in all its forms on earth. So what is biodiversity worth?

In the first instance, there is no life without it – to call that valuable is an obvious understatement. Without the various taxa of soil microorganisms, producing food would not be possible. Our food varieties, and future food advancements, come from biodiversity: up to 1/3 of all pollinated plants are pollinated by bees.

And while there has always been biodiversity loss throughout human history, the rate of loss at present is thought to be between 1000 and 10,000 times the natural extinction rate.

In Europe, “Populations of farmland birds in Europe, which indicate the health of the ecosystem as a whole, have declined by almost 50% in the past 25 years” according to Birdlife International.

In Ireland, biodiversity loss is also occurring: “conventional crop cultivation has had an adverse impact on biodiversity on Irish farms, with 15 of the 21 studies demonstrating negative trends for the taxa investigated” according to O' Brien 2008. (Note: this is all available studies on this topic in Ireland)

Dr Gordon Purvis, who led the five-year Ag-Biota project on biodiversity and farming in Ireland found that “while bumblebees as a group are still readily found on typical farmland, our findings reveal that their abundance and diversity on moderately-to-intensively managed farmland may have declined by at least 50 per cent over the past 20-30 years.”

But in crude cash terms, what is biodiversity worth? Recent estimates (Welzel and Hardt 2009) claim that the economic value of benefits from biodiverse natural ecosystems may be 10 to 100 times the cost of maintaining them. The value of biodiversity to the economy is typically worth almost twice the global GNP. A much cited peer-reviewed figure puts this at $33 trillion annually, but this figure dates from 1997. With inflation and other factors, this is now inevitably higher.

A recent UK report, The National Ecosystem Assessment, tried to put a monetary value on biodiversity services. It put the value of just living near a green space at £300 per year.

Basic services biodiversity provides includes material goods (for example, food, timber, medicines, and fiber), underpinning functions (flood control, climate regulation, and nutrient cycling), and non-material benefits such as recreation. Biodiversity can contribute to agriculture through pollination and pest control, provide carbon storage and sequestration, and positively affect human physical and mental health.

Medicine as we know it today has biodiversity to thank numerous remedies: aspirin for pain relief (from meadowsweet), penicillin for antibiotics (from the pencillium fungi), digitoxin for cardiac treatment (from common foxglove), L-dopa for Parkinson's disease (from velvet bean), taxol for ovarian cancer (from the Pacific yew), and quinine for malaria (from yellow cinchona).

Even something as simple as seaweed can lead to numerous everyday items, from plastics, paints and polishes to deodorants, detergents and dyes.

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