Reason For Conserving Biodiversity Essay

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What are the main reasons for conserving biodiversity?

Humans think of themselves as kings of the Earth. With 7 billion people on Earth colonizing almost every corner of the planet, it is quite understandable why one might think that way. However, the Earth is more than just for humans. The Earth is full of diverse life, housing approximately 9 million types of animals, plants, fungi, and protists (Cardinale et al, 2012). This diversity is called biodiversity, stemming from the words biological diversity. Biodiversity can be classified into three elements: genetic (diversity at the level of the genetic code), species (differences within and between species and populations of species), and ecosystem (different habitat communities and ecological processes). DeLong (1996) describes the meaning of biodiversity extensively as follows:

“Biodiversity is a state or attribute of a site or area and specifically refers to the variety within and among living organisms, assemblages of living organisms, …show more content…

The importance of biodiversity is not simply environmental or economical alone, and cannot be measured by economic costs. While it has no price, it is priceless. Whether direct or indirectly, biodiversity benefits mankind by providing clean water, recreation, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and more. Biodiversity proves to be valuable even though it cannot be measured with empirical values. It provides not only direct use values (consumption), but also indirect use (ecosystem services), option values (ecosystem resilience), and existence values (knowledge that it exists). Biodiversity loss could degrade many of the ecosystem services biodiversity provides, and incite a chain reaction of more losses which could prove to be significant losses of capital assets of the Earth, and reflect negatively on the environment, human well-being and economic growth. Therefore, biodiversity should be

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