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Why fostering biodiversity matters
Just eight crop species — dominated by wheat, rice and maize — provide more than half of our average daily food.
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Balinese farmers at a rice terrace in Jatiluwih village in Tabanan regency in Bali on January 1, 2014. Countries that consume rice could be at risk for devastating effects from global warming. (AFP/Sonny Tumbelaka)
O
ver the next few decades, we have to eradicate hunger, and do so for a growing population. And we’ll have to do that amid climate trends that will require our food systems, starting with the agricultural sectors, to become increasingly flexible, resilient and adaptable.
Providing nutritious food to a growing world population poses many challenges. To address these challenges, we need to make crop and livestock systems, forests, fisheries and aquaculture more productive while guarantying the ability of landscapes and seascapes to provide other essential ecosystem services as regulation of air quality, soil fertility, crop pollination or even control of natural disaster as floods.
We’ll need to put a lot of natural capital — especially biodiversity — to work to do that.
While the loss of biodiversity is occurring at an alarming rate, agricultural systems are becoming simpler, wider and more uniform with less diversity in terms of species, varieties and breeds. Some 150 livestock breeds have become extinct between 2000 and 2018.
