In this chapter you will:

• Learn that due to human activities biodiversity is being lost at a much higher rate than is normal;

• Consider why this matters to humans;

• find out why reducing the rate of biodiversity loss is difficult;

• Learn about the main features of the international treaty intended to address the problem.

The problem of biodiversity loss has a lot in common with the climate-change problem, and the main international treaty intended to deal with it shares a number of features with the UNFCCC discussed in the previous chapter. We will look at the treaty in section 14.4. In the first section we explain what biodiversity loss is, what is driving it, and why it matters to humans. Section 14.2 is about the characteristics it shares with the climate-change problem, and section 14.3 identifies some of the main issues arising in policy formulation.

THE BIODIVERSITY-LOSS PROBLEM

In this section we are going to set out the essential features of the biodiversity-loss problem. We begin by explaining what biodiversity is, and what is known about how much of it there is.

What is biodiversity?

Most generally, biodiversity is the diversity of living organisms, the genes that they contain and the ecosystems in which they exist. The most fundamental level at which to consider biodiversity is the genetic. As discussed in Chapter 2, genes determine the potentialities of individual organisms.