“With one million species facing extinction, there has never been a more important time to focus on biodiversity”
– Joint statement by Ricardo Lozano, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, Colombia; Jochen Flasbarth, Secretary of State for the Climate, Germany; and Inger Andersen, Executive Director, UNEP.
The foods we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the climate that makes our planet habitable all come from nature. Yet, some of us, especially the ones living in the tropics, blessed with so much natural resources, take nature for granted. But this is the time to wake up and take inventory of our natural environment – the biodiversity. It is time to realise that we cannot built ourselves without building our planet. It is the Peoples’ Day; it is the World Environment Day!
The icing on the cake is the year 2020 is a critical year for nations’ commitments to preserving and restoring biodiversity because it marks the end of the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity (2011- 2020).
The World Environment Day 2020 would be celebrated on Friday, June 5, in Colombia. The theme for this year’s WED focuses on “Biodiversity”. The United Nations Environment Programme announced that Colombia would be hosting WED 2020 in partnership with Germany. Why Colombia? Simple. Because the country is one of the largest “Megadiverse” nations in the world to hold 10% of the planet’s biodiversity. Since it is part of the Amazon rainforest, Colombia ranks first in bird and orchid species diversity and second in plants, butterflies, freshwater fish, and amphibians.
The WED is widely celebrated in more than 143 countries. It is popularly called the “People’s Day” to show their care and support for the Earth and their environment. Celebrated every June 5, it is the UN’s prime vehicle for encouraging awareness and action to protect our environment. Over the years, it has become a global platform for public outreach, and presently a crucial platform for promoting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. First organised in 1974, it has become the major campaign for environmental issues ranging from marine pollution, human overgrowth, and raising awareness about global warming, sustainable consumption, and wildlife crime.
The day can be commemorated in many ways; activities such as campaign clarification, sensitising the locals about the growing environmental conditions and suggesting ways to prevent them like clearing our gutters and waterways of plastic waste and learning how to adopt renewable energy; organising plays, quizzes, tree planting, nature art, lectures and kids’ poster competition, etc., are quite typical. So, tomorrow, let us go outside, and show Mother Nature that the social distancing principle does not apply to our relationship with her.
Meanwhile, it is important to know the minute details about the central theme for tomorrow’s celebration. Biodiversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. It is typically a measure of variation at the genetic, species, and ecosystem level. It is, however, not distributed evenly on Earth, and is richest in the tropics, for instance, enjoyed by a tropical country like Nigeria. This is because terrestrial biodiversity is usually greater near the equator, which is the result of the warm climate and high primary productivity.
It is interesting to note that these tropical forest ecosystems cover less than 10 per cent of earth’s surface, yet contain about 90 per cent of the world’s species. On the other hand, marine biodiversity is usually highest along coasts in the Western Pacific, where sea surface temperature is highest, and in the mid-latitudinal band in all oceans. There are latitudinal gradients in species diversity. Biodiversity generally tends to cluster in hotspots, and has been increasing through time, but will be likely to slow in the future.
Why we should be concerned is that rapid environmental changes typically cause mass extinctions. More than 99.9 per cent of all species that ever lived on Earth, amounting to over five billion species, are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth’s current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 per cent have not yet been described.
More recently, in May 2016, scientists reported that one trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one per cent described. The total amount of related DNA base pairs on Earth is estimated at 5.0 x 10 and weighs 50 billion tonnes. In comparison, the total mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC (trillion tons of carbon). In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all organisms living on Earth.
The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years. The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates at least from 3.5 billion years ago, during the Eoarchean Era after a geological crust started to solidify following the earlier molten Hadean Eon. There are microbial mat fossils found in the 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia. Other early physical evidence of a biogenic substance is graphite in the 3.7 billion-year-old meta-sedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland. More recently, in 2015, “remains of biotic life” were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia.
Since life began on Earth, five major mass extinctions and several minor events have led to large and sudden drops in biodiversity. The Phanerozoic eon (the last 540 million years) marked a rapid growth in biodiversity via the Cambrian explosion – a period during which the majority of multicellular phyla first appeared. The next 400 million years included repeated, massive biodiversity losses classified as mass extinction events. In the Carboniferous, rainforest collapse led to a great loss of plant and animal life. The Permian-Triassic extinction event, 251 million years ago, was the worst; vertebrate recovery took 30 million years. The most recent, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago and has often attracted more attention than others because it resulted in the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
The period since the emergence of humans has displayed an ongoing biodiversity reduction and an accompanying loss of genetic diversity. Named the Holocene extinction, the reduction is caused primarily by human impacts, particularly habitat destruction. Because of this, the United Nations has designated 2021-2030 as Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
We should care about biodiversity because it positively impacts human health in many ways. It is the variation of Earth’s terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species, as well as their habitats. We should celebrate it because it is vital to the survival of all life on earth and is also the cornerstone for the goods and services of the environment that allow human societies to thrive. It provides us with food, water and resources as well as services such as climate control, pollination, flood mitigation and cycling of nutrients. Sadly, according to a 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 25% of plant and animal species are threatened with extinction as the result of human activity.
Ecosystems are relying on all parts from the smallest bacteria to the largest vertebrate. They are all interconnected. Some are producing oxygen that others are breathing. Some provide food for larger species, which in turn become prey to even larger species. Every living organism has a role to play in the maintenance of balance. So, as we raise awareness to protect precious nature and look at various environmental issues that are growing day by day, we must keep it at the back of our mind that even the tiniest species matters as the building block to rebuild what we lose as a result of emerging climate crisis.
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