ARTICLE | Reviving Biodiversity
Reversing ecosystem degradation working with city youths
O
xygen, which is otherwise taken for granted, has been the most talked about crisis in India in recent months. However, much of the attention stayed put on the oxygen cylinders and concentrators. Very naturally so. A few Indians, who are generally concerned about environment in normal times as well, raised the issue of oxygen that we get from natural environment. A few posts on social media emphasised the need for planting more trees. Some even discussed, rather criticized, about the damage we are doing to ourselves by destroying the trees and forests. These few people, to me, are the real thinkers of our times. As a self-proclaimed civilized world, we should never forget the fact that each oxygen-laden breath we take, the food we eat, the shelter we are in, and almost everything that we claim to be rightfully ours, are given by the natural world. We are part of the natural systems, an
40 June 2021 | www.urbanupdate.in
integral component of the biodiversity ourselves. However, we have been the prime reason for destroying the ecosystems that support us. Our fight for oxygen cylinders and concentrators during the Covid pandemic may end soon but our fight for oxygen from the natural system is getting fiercer by the day. There will certainly be life beyond one pandemic, but there cannot be life when we have destroyed the natural spaces and the biodiversity they support. While Covid is a huge challenge, perhaps the most difficult pandemic we have faced so far in our life time, loss of biodiversity, coupled with climate change, is a much bigger challenge that we face at the moment. Understanding this would help us fight not only this one pandemic but also the future pandemics.
Biodiversity loss and our peril
The loss to biodiversity has been the fastest in recent decades, even as climate change science gets
much sharper and awareness drives against destruction of ecosystems go overboard. The last 50 years have seen the maximum destruction to the biodiversity. According to estimates, about half of all the animals may have been lost in just half a century’s time. The way we are destroying habitats now was not seen in the four billion years of Earth’s history. Some scientists are of the opinion that this may already have started the process for the sixth mass extinction. A ground-breaking study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and reported in the Guardian, has given frightening estimates of how humans have pushed almost all other species to extinction already. This first comprehensive estimate of the weight of every class of living creature finds out that the humans represent just 0.01 per cent of all living things but has caused the loss of 83 per cent of all wild mammals and half of plants. Of all the birds that exist in the world today, only 30 per cent are wild. Rest are
