Where does biodiversity go from here? A grim business-as-usual forecast and a hopeful portfolio of partial solutions

Abstract

The threats to the future of biodiversity are many and well known. They include habitat conversion, environmental toxification, climate change, and direct exploitation of wildlife, among others. Moreover, the projected addition of 2.6 billion people by midcentury will almost certainly have a greater environmental impact than that of the last 2.6 billion. Collectively, these trends portend a grim future for biodiversity under a business-as-usual scenario. These threats and their interactions are formidable, but we review seven strategies that, if implemented soundly and scaled up dramatically, would preserve a substantial portion of global biodiversity. These are actions to stabilize the human population and reduce its material consumption, the deployment of endowment funds and other strategies to ensure the efficacy and permanence of conservation areas, steps to make human-dominated landscapes hospitable to biodiversity, measures to account for the economic costs of habitat degradation, the ecological reclamation of degraded lands and repatriation of extirpated species, the education and empowerment of people in the rural tropics, and the funda-

Reservoirs of richness: least disturbed tropical forests are centres of undescribed species diversity

“…However, efforts to conserve biodiversity are constantly being undermined by anthropogenic activities [1][2][3][4][5]. Biodiversity losses, including the loss of undescribed species [6] and populations [7], are certain to increase as natural habitats are altered for human uses [8,9]. Our inadequate knowledge of biodiversity hampers our understanding of patterns and rates of extinctions, thus undermining our ability to develop effective strategies to conserve it [10].…”

La Biodiversidad en el contexto Educativo. Múltiples miradas en el escenario mundial

“…Esta estrategia, también es respaldada por autoridades científicas como Ehrlich y Pringle (2008), para quienes la educación es herramienta importante en el logro de la sostenibilidad y la protección de la biodiversidad, porque facilita la transformación de las actitudes humanas hacia la naturaleza; así, configuran un escenario de afirmación para hacer de la educación un instrumento que responda a la necesidad de incrementar el conocimiento general del significado de la biodiversidad y su conservación, como proyecto político y cultural.…”

The ongoing extinction event: a deep time, eco-evolutionary perspective for mitigation and reconciliation management

“…"Despite the high uncertainty associated with future climate predictions, urgent decisions and rapid action are required to conserve biodiversity, including the genetic diversity that is needed for evolutionary adaption [70]. "Although academic conservation biology still has an important role to play in developing technical tools and knowledge, success at this juncture hinges more on a massive mobilization of effort to do things that have traditionally been outside the scope of the discipline [71]. "…”