the biodiversity consultancy

What is biodiversity?

What is it?

Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth and the interactions between its components. It is defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity as “the variability among living organ­isms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems”. Biodiversity is everywhere, found in wild nature, agricultural landscapes and urban parks.

Why manage it?

Biodiversity is important to us in many ways: both intrinsically and also through the economic and cultural “ecosystem services” it provides to humanity. For example, preventing the extinction of rare and endangered species is regarded by many as a critical ethical issue: just like human rights, we feel that the rest of nature has a right to existence, particularly unique components like species. Culturally, nature is of key importance to the well-being and recreation of millions of people, like woods where you walk your dog. Economically, much of the global human economy is built upon the natural resources provided by biodiversity – like oil and gas, or more immediately, soil, water and timber. More intimately, several billion people are directly dependent on biodiversity for their livelihoods – bamboo huts, fisheries and all non-timber forest products.

Over the past decade, managing biodiversity issues – whether endangered species, aesthetic landscapes or grasses for weaving mats – has become an increasingly important component of environmental risk management: as nature becomes more scarce, people value it more highly. As ecosystem services become stressed by human development, they are becoming a commodity that can be priced or traded. Climate change and the burgeoning carbon market is the result of the first globally stressed ecosystem service.

These are some of the reasons why we manage biodiversity.