How can your business help safeguard biodiversity?
Protecting and conserving biodiversity is central to creating a sustainable planet.
However, in all the talk of recycling, reducing fossil fuel usage, and preventing pollution, biodiversity can often get lost in wider conversations around sustainability. Here's why biodiversity is important and what you can do to help.
What is biodiversity?
The term biodiversity refers to the variety and variability of life forms. Biodiversity encompasses all types of life, from microbes and fungi to plants and animals. Although the term is often used on a global scale, we can also measure the biodiversity of any one region or ecosystem by investigating the relative abundance and species richness of the life present there.
We have an exciting webinar coming up on in October all around how companies can include Biodiversity into their sustainability efforts.
Some areas tend to be more biodiverse than others. Tropical regions such as northern South America, Madagascar, and Southeast Asia are known as hotspots of biodiversity due to their dramatic concentrations of different life forms; over 75% of non-marine species are found in the tropics. Brazil alone hosts over 160,000 species of plant, animal, and fungi, with around 700 new animal species being discovered each year!
A breakdown of Brazil's biodiversity. Image source: UNEP
Why is biodiversity important?
Protecting tropical ecosystems is crucial due to the massive volume of species they hold. However, carrying out conservation work closer to home is also essential due to the range of benefits and values associated with biodiversity all over the world. These benefits can be summed up by the concept of ecosystem services.
An ecosystem service is a benefit provided to humans by an ecosystem. These can be divided into four categories:
Provisioning - physical goods derived from ecosystems, e.g. food, wood, medicinal products
Regulating - benefits derived from the natural processes and functioning of ecosystems, e.g. pollination, flood regulation, carbon sequestration
Cultural - non-material benefits offered by ecosystems, e.g. recreation, aesthetic beauty, spiritual enrichment
Supporting - processes necessary for the production of all other ecosystem services, e.g. soil formation, water cycling, habitat provision
Image source: Fermilab
Biodiversity is necessary to uphold all four categories.
We cannot sustainably obtain water, food, or raw materials like timber without healthy, diverse ecosystems to provide them. The genetic resources held by biodiversity are also vital for research in healthcare and agriculture.
Pollination (a key regulating service) requires diversity in insects, while carbon sequestration and climate regulation demand abundance and diversity in plants.
Conserving biodiversity is essential to uphold cultural services including aesthetic beauty, heritage and cultural identity, and outdoor recreation such as hiking.
Finally, biodiversity is a supporting ecosystem service in and of itself. Every living thing that provides benefit to us is part of a broad interconnected ecological web - removing any one element of the web causes a cascading effect on the other elements like a row of dominoes falling down. Due to this effect, one seemingly insignificant species becoming extinct could result in its entire ecosystem collapsing.
For these reasons, protecting biodiversity is essential to secure a sustainable future for humanity. The importance of biodiversity is emphasised by two of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 14 (Life Below Water) and SDG 15 (Life on Land). Achieving these SDGs necessitates safeguarding biodiversity by protecting, conserving, and restoring vulnerable ecosystems.
What can my tech/IT business do to help?
Controlling and reducing your carbon footprint is one of the best things your business can do to protect biodiversity. Carbon-induced climate change will cause rising temperatures, increased drought, sea level rise, and frequent extreme weather events in the coming years; all of these will negatively affect biodiversity globally. Delicate ecosystems such as tropical rainforests are particularly vulnerable, as well as all ecosystems in regions of the world that have limited financial ability to mitigate the effects of climate change - this includes many regions around the tropics where the world's biodiversity is concentrated. Reducing your emissions as much as possible and offsetting the rest via schemes that protect or restore ecosystems ensures that your business does not have a negative impact on biodiversity.
Your business can also help to safeguard biodiversity on a more direct local scale. If your company owns offices, consider planting native trees, shrubs, and flowers outside. By creating a more natural habitat outside your building, you will attract pollinators such as bees as well as other insects. These insects will in turn draw in birds and could even attract small mammals such as hedgehogs or shrews. If you wish to help insects further or if you don't have full control of the land outside your building, consider buying an insect hotel or bee house; just make sure that it is built from high quality materials and maintained correctly. As a less intensive option, there is a wide range of services that allow businesses to sponsor or 'adopt' beehives, meaning you can support bees even if you cannot host them on your premises.
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