Details
- Publication date
- 25 October 2022
- Author
- Directorate-General for Environment
Description
Biodiversity on land and in the ocean is the variety of life on Earth. This web of living things is the fabric of life, cleaning the water we drink, pollinating our crops, purifying the air we breathe, regulating the climate, keeping our soils fertile, providing us with medicine, and providing many of the basic building blocks for industry. Terrestrial and marine ecosystems provide crucial services that maintain our life support system. When we destroy biodiversity, we destroy this system, sawing off the branch that we sit on. Damaged ecosystems are fragile, and have a limited capacity to deal with extreme events and new diseases. Well-balanced ecosystems, by contrast, protect us against unforeseen disasters, and when we use them in a sustainable manner, they offer many of the best solutions to urgent challenges. By taking better care of nature we can mitigate and adapt to climate change, often at a very low cost.