The idea that changes in biodiversity can impact how ecosystems function has, over the last quarter century, gone from being a controversial notion to an accepted part of science and policy. As the field matures, it is high time to review progress, explore the links between this new research area and fundamental ecological concepts, and look ahead to the implementation of this knowledge. This book is designed to both provide an up-to-date overview of research in the area and to serve as a useful textbook for those studying the relationship between biodiversity and the functioning, stability and services of ecosystems. The Ecological and Societal Consequences of Biodiversity Loss is aimed at a wide audience of upper undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and academic and research staff.
There is much public concern about threats to global biodiversity, for example from pollution and from climate change, resulting from build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This book addresses these concerns by detailing some of the research currently in progress.
This volume reports key findings of the Biodiversity Program of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Beijer Institute. The program brought together a number of eminent ecologists and economists to consider the nature and significance of the biodiversity problem. In encouraging collaborative work between these closely related disciplines it sought to shed new light on the concept of diversity; the implications of biological diversity for the functioning of ecosystems; the driving forces behind biodiversity loss; and the options for promoting biodiversity conservation. The results of the program are surprising. It is shown that the core of the biodiversity problem is a loss of ecosystem resilience and the insurance it provides against the uncertain environmental effects of economic and population growth. This is as much a local as a global problem, implying that biodiversity conservation offers benefits that are as much local as global. The solutions as well as the causes of biodiversity loss lie in incentives to local users.
The world is losing species and biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. The causes go deep and the losses are driven by a complex array of social, economic, political and biological factors at different levels. Immediate causes such as over-harvesting, pollution and habitat change have been well studied, but the socioeconomic factors driving people to degrade their environment are less well understood. This book examines the underlying causes. It provides analyses of a range of case studies from Brazil, Cameroon, China, Danube River Basin, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Tanzania and Vietnam, and integrates them into a new and interdisciplinary framework for understanding what is happening. From these results, the editors are able to derive policy conclusions and recommendations for operational and institutional approaches to address the root causes and reverse the current trends. It makes a contribution to the understanding of all those - from ecologists and conservationists to economists and policy makers - working on one of the major challenges we face.
The Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences address scientific topics of broad and current interest, cutting across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Each year, four or five such colloquia are scheduled, typically two days in length and international in scope. Colloquia are organized by a member of the Academy, often with the assistance of an organizing committee, and feature presentations by leading scientists in the field and discussions with a hundred or more researchers with an interest in the topic. Colloquia presentations are recorded and posted on the National Academy of Sciences Sackler colloquia website and published on CD-ROM. These Colloquia are made possible by a generous gift from Mrs. Jill Sackler, in memory of her husband, Arthur M. Sackler.
The loss of the earth's biological diversity is widely recognized as a critical environmental problem. That loss is most severe in developing countries, where the conditions of human existence are most difficult. Conserving Biodiversity presents an agenda for research that can provide information to formulate policy and design conservation programs in the Third World. The book includes discussions of research needs in the biological sciences as well as economics and anthropology, areas of critical importance to conservation and sustainable development. Although specifically directed toward development agencies, non-governmental organizations, and decisionmakers in developing nations, this volume should be of interest to all who are involved in the conservation of biological diversity.
Although 'biodiversity' is a relatively new coinage, scientists have been studying the subject it describes long before the word's first appearance in the language in the mid-1980s. In 1973, for instance, the UK Systematics Association held a symposium on 'The Changing Flora and Fauna of Britain' which concluded that not enough attention was being paid to the conservation of rarities, a conclusion also reached, said the symposium, at a meeting of the Linnaean Society some forty years earlier. By 1980, the Global 2000 Report to the President published by the US Council on Environmental Quality starkly warned of a diminution of up to one-fifth of all species by the turn of the century, and there is now a growing consensus that the world faces a 'biodiversity crisis' - a potentially catastrophic global loss of genetic, ecosystem, and, most obviously, species diversity. Indeed, especially since the UN Convention on Biological Diversity was promulgated in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, conserving biodiversity has become the principal focus of the global conservation movement. Indeed, the study of the origins, maintenance, and protection of diversity has become perhaps the most vibrant offshoot of ecology and conservation studies. It is increasingly taught and studied in universities - and other research institutions - around the world. Addressing the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing subject, and its ever more complex and multidisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature, Biodiversity and Conservation is a new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Environment. Edited by Richard Ladle of Oxford University's Centre for the Environment, this new Major Work brings together in five volumes the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship to provide a synoptic view of all the key issues and current debates
Loss of Biodiversity introduces readers to the important concepts for understanding the environmental challenges and consequences of the declining diversity of life on the planet. Contributions from scientists, and academics in the social sciences and humanities provide readers with an initial "tool kit" for understanding the concepts central to their disciplinary perspective and the multi-dimensional aspects of the loss of biodiversity.
