Linkage between Biodiversity & Human Well-being

 Provide more food resources.  Provide more medicinal resources and pharmaceutical drugs.  Offer environments for recreation and tourism.

Linkage between Biodiversity & Human Well-being

Biodiversity delivers many key welfares to individuals that go beyond the meagre provision of raw materials. Biodiversity loss has adverse effects on several characteristics of human well-being, such as food security, vulnerability to natural disasters, energy security, and access to clean water and raw materials. It also disturbs human health, social relations, and self-determination of choice. Civilization tends to have various challenging objectives; many depend on biodiversity. When humans transform an ecosystem to improve a service it provides, this generally also results in changes to other ecosystem services. For example, actions to surge food production can lead to abridged water availability for other uses. As a result of such trade-offs, many services have been degraded, for instance fisheries, water supply, and shield against natural hazards. In the long term, the value of services lost may greatly exceed the short-range economic benefits that are gained from renovating ecosystems. Contrasting goods bought and sold in markets, many ecosystem services are not operated in markets for readily observable prices. This means that the significance of biodiversity and natural procedures in providing welfares to human being is overlooked by financial markets. New methods are being used to assign monetary values to benefits such as regeneration or clean drinking water. Dilapidation of ecosystem services could be pointedly reduced down or overturned if the full economic significance of these services were taken into account in decision-making. Over the last period, some people have promoted from the transformation of natural ecosystems and growth in international trade, but other individuals have suffered from the consequences of biodiversity losses and from controlled access to resources they depend upon. Vagaries in ecosystems are harming many of the world's poorest people, who are the least able to adjust to these changes.

Figure 20.21: Services provided by Urban Biodiversity Source: Toke Emil Panduro , 2013