How can we Preserve Biodiversity?

First, let’s answer the question: “What is biodiversity?”. Biodiversity is the term encompassing the variety of life, such as variety in species, in genes, and even ecosystems. This is a critical aspect of nature because it provides stability to an ecosystem, and greater resistance to disasters and disease.

The main threats to biodiversity are habitat loss, invasive species, and overexploitation of resources. Humans play an important role in these three threats. For habitat loss, deforestation is a prime example of how humans cause biodiversity loss by destroying species’ habitats. Additionally, humans have been responsible for the introduction of many invasive species by means of transportation. Many of these invasive species were not intentionally introduced, but they would act as stowaways on ships or other vehicles, being transported to a foreign ecosystem where they could thrive and disrupt the balance and biodiversity. For the third threat, humans can over use the resources of the land by over fishing, hunting, or mining, which would destabilize biodiversity.

So how can we prevent these issues from happening?

As people living on this Earth, we should also care for it. While it would be unrealistic to address every single threat to biodiversity, we can at least reduce our own contributions to its decline. The best ways to do this are to reduce deforestation and set limits or taxes when fishing and hunting. There are many nations already implementing these changes, but for them to stick, the regulations must be even more strict than they are now. This strictness could come in forms of hard stops in terms of fishing and hunting activity after passing a specified amount, or increased taxes when it comes to deforestation.

There are also many ways in which humans can address the invasive species problem. The first would be to minimize of completely get rid of human involvement in introducing invasive species to new ecosystem. This could be achieved by thoroughly checking vehicles for any stowaway species before departing. For the invasive species that have already been introduced to a new ecosystem, people can report them to local authorities. In some regions, the hunting of invasive species is allowed, and you may be rewarded for the amount of specimens you catch.

While this blog has many proposed solutions to the broad threats to biodiversity, these solutions would be very difficult to achieve without substantial support and compliance from institutions. We must cooperate with each other and think about the good of this planet and its inhabitants (including us!) and build our world into a safer and healthier place for the future.