Biologists and environmentalists dedicated to studying the natural world may say that hope is a scarce resource of late. Human-driven shifts to the climate have increased the frequency and severity of extreme climatic events, including droughts, heat waves, flooding, and massive wildfires. Despite a growing recognition and awareness that humans are the primary contributors to the climate crisis, the slow and often tepid political response to counteract such extreme disasters is underwhelming.
As once-in-a-lifetime natural catastrophic events become more commonplace, we are becoming increasingly aware of how fragile ecosystem health is and how interdependent we are on the ecosystem services provided therein. Societies globally have a vested interest in functional ecosystems: provisioning services provide food, water, and other natural resources; regulating services balance temperature, precipitation, and other abiotic (e.g.
, water, air) factors; supporting services maintain nutrient cycling and sustain habitats; and cultural services enrich the educational, spiritual, and recreational values we gain from our natural environments. Notably, ecosystems do not exist solely for human benefit—other nonhuman species also have a claim to a healthy and functioning ecosystem. Conserving ecosystem services—and by extension the natural capital that supports those services—is therefore both a global imperative and a just obligation.
Biodiversity is a central pillar to that natural ca.