Conserving biodiversity

Why should we conserve biodiversity? There are three kinds of reason:

• Narrowly utilitarian: nature gives us direct benefits: food (cereals, pulses, fruits), firewood, fibre, building materials, industrial products, and medicines. More than 25% of the drugs sold worldwide come from plants, and 25,000 plant species contribute to traditional medicine. Searching nature for products of value is called bioprospecting.
• Broadly utilitarian: biodiversity provides ecosystem services we cannot do without: the Amazon forest produces a large share of the earth's oxygen; pollinators (bees, birds, bats) make fruit and seed production possible; and nature offers beauty and peace.
• Ethical: every species has an intrinsic value, even if it is of no use to us. We have a moral duty to look after them and pass them on to future generations.

There are two ways to conserve biodiversity.

In situ (on site) conservation protects species in their natural home, by protecting the whole ecosystem: to save the tiger, save the forest.

• Biodiversity hotspots are regions with very high species richness, many endemic species (found nowhere else), and serious habitat loss. There are 34 hotspots in the world. Three of them cover India's rich regions: Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, Indo-Burma and Himalaya. Hotspots cover less than 2% of the earth's land, but strictly protecting them could reduce the coming extinctions by almost 30%.
• India also has legally protected areas: 14 biosphere reserves, 90 national parks and 448 wildlife sanctuaries.
• Sacred groves: forest patches protected by local communities for religious and cultural reasons. In India they are found in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya, the Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan, the Western Ghats of Karnataka and Maharashtra, and the Sarguja, Chanda and Bastar areas of Madhya Pradesh. Many rare and threatened plants survive in them.

Ex situ (off site) conservation takes threatened species out of their habitat to a safe place where they can be protected and bred:

• Zoological parks, botanical gardens and wildlife safari parks. Some animals extinct in the wild survive only in zoos.
• Cryopreservation: gametes of threatened species are kept alive and fertile for long periods at very low temperatures.
• In vitro fertilisation, and plants propagated by tissue culture.
• Seed banks store the seeds of many commercially important plants.

Biodiversity has no borders, so conservation needs nations to work together. At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, countries agreed to conserve biodiversity and use its benefits sustainably. The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 followed it up, with 190 countries pledging to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss significantly.