Study 3: Ecodestruction and the Right to Food: The Cases of Water ...

Starving the Future Study 3
B. Basics on Biodiversity
1. Types of Biodiversity
Biological diversity or biodiversity is a term that is used to describe the variety of living beings, their
relationships to each other and interactions with their environment. Biodiversity encompasses several
different levels of biological organization, from the very specific to the most general, which form a
hierarchy of categories:
i. Genetic diversity: The basis of biological diversity is formed by the variety of information contained in
the genes of specific organisms. This covers distinct populations of the same species (such as the
thousands of traditional rice varieties in India) or genetic variation within a population. Different
combinations of genes within organisms, or the existence of different variants of the same basic gene
are the basis of evolution. The wealth of life on earth today is the product of hundreds of millions of
years of this evolutionary history.
ii. Species diversity: At the next hierarchical level is the variety of different species that exist on Earth.
A concept that includes not only the number of species in a region – its “species richness” - but also the
relationship of different groups of species to each other.
iii. Ecosystem diversity: Biodiversity also describes the varied composition of ecosystems and the
variety of different sorts of ecosystems.
The knowledge about the world’s life forms lags surprisingly far behind other fields of scientific inquiry.
While a great deal is known about individual species of bird, fish, mammals and plants, the total number
of species that inhabit the planet remains unknown. The UNEP Global Biodiversity Assessment uses an
estimate of about 13 million, but the range varies from 8 to 50 million or more, out of which only about 2
million species have been described scientifically or studied in detail. Nevertheless it is not necessary to
know the exact number of species to be concerned about the rates at which the documented species
are now disappearing or even already disappeared from our world. Today, most extinction will occur
before the species have even been named and described or known ecologically.
2. Human benefits from biodiversity
All life on earth is part of one great, interdependent system. It interacts with and depends on the nonliving
components of the planet like atmosphere, oceans, freshwater, rocks and soils. Humanity
depends totally on this community of life, this biosphere: Many essential goods for human societies
derive from the variety of natural ecosystems; including seafood, game animals, fodder, fuelwood and
timber. But natural ecosystems also perform fundamental life support services like the purification of air
and water, detoxification and decomposition of wastes, regulation of climate, regeneration of soil fertility,
and last but not least the production and maintenance of biodiversity, from which key ingredients of our
agricultural, pharmaceutical, and industrial enterprises are derived. Hence the variety of the world’s
organisms, the biological diversity is a direct source of ecosystem goods and is the blanket term for the
natural biological wealth that sustains human life and well-being.
Our lifes depend on biodiversity in ways that are not often appreciated. It is well understood by most
people that we rely on the earth’s non-renewable resources of oil and other fuel and non-fuel minerals
Due to the technological advances that dominate our lives, we can easily forget the extent to which the
modern, industrial world is embedded in the biological world. Ecosystem services operate on such a
FIAN International 108
June 2002