United Nations Conference on Biodiversity, COP15which ends on December 19. This weekend, we’ll look at some of the ways humanity relies on a healthy and thriving global ecosystem.
One million species are now thought to be endangered, and if species numbers continue to decline, ecosystem functions vital to human health and life will continue to be disrupted.
Ecosystems provide the goods and services that sustain all life on this planet, including human life. While we know a lot about how many active ecosystems there are, they often involve such complexity and scale that humanity will not be able to replace them, no matter how much it spends. money for the process.
Living Lab
The majority of medicines prescribed in industrialized countries are derived from natural compounds produced by animals and plants. Billions of people in the developing world rely heavily on traditional plant-based medicine for their primary health care.
Many natural cures are familiar; Pain relievers such as morphine from the poppy plant, antimalarial drugs from the bark of the South American cinchona tree and the antibiotic penicillin are produced by fungi.
Bacteria discovered in the soil of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) fight heart disease by lowering cholesterol. AZT, one of the first anti-HIV/AIDS drugs, is derived from a large shallow-water sponge that lives in the Caribbean.and happens to be the same sponge that makes antivirals to treat herpes and serves as the first licensed supply of marine-derived anticancer drugs in the United States.
An important reservoir for future cures
To date, only about 1.9 million species have been identified (and in many cases barely studied). It is believed that there are millions more who are completely unknown.
Everything that is alive is the result of a complex “living laboratory” that has been conducting its own clinical trials since life began – about 3.7 billion years ago. This library of natural medicines contains countless undiscovered cures, if we do not destroy them before they are recognized.
Take the polar bear, currently classified as “threatened”. As its Arctic habitat melts due to climate change, the world’s largest terrestrial predator has become a symbol of the dangers posed by rising global temperatures. It can also be a symbol for health. Polar bears accumulate large amounts of fat before hibernation. Although they are so fat that they can be life-threatening, they appear to be immune to Type II diabetes. They remained motionless for months, but their bones remained unchanged. While inactive, they do not urinate, but their kidneys are not damaged. If we understand and can reproduce how bears detoxify waste during hibernation, we could treat – and possibly even prevent – kidney failure toxicity in humans.
Currently 13% of the global population is clinically obese and the number of people with Type II diabetes is projected to increase to 700 million by 2045. During their lifetime, one in three women over the age of 50 have 1 person and 1 woman over 50 years old. 5 men will break a bone due to osteoporosis. In the United States alone, kidney failure kills more than 82,000 people and costs the US economy $35 million each year. Polar bears have naturally developed ‘solutions’ to these problems – obesity-induced type II diabetes, immobility-induced osteoporosis and kidney failure toxicity – all of which cause suffering. for millions of people.
Coral reefs and morphine
Another example is from coral reefs, sometimes referred to as “marine rainforests” due to their high biodiversity. Among the numerous inhabitants of these reefs is the cone shell, a dart-hunting mollusk that delivers 200 distinct toxic compounds.
The drug Ziconotide precisely replicates the toxic peptide of a cone shell, and is not only 1,000 times more potent than morphine, but also avoids the tolerance and dependence that opioids can cause. To date, out of 700 species of cone snails, only 6 have been studied in detail, and of the thousands of unique compounds they contain, only 100 have been studied in detail. Coral reefs and all their inhabitants are being destroyed at an alarming rate.
Supplying chemical compounds is not the only way that biodiversity plays an important role in our health. A surprising variety of species has helped revolutionize medical knowledge. Zebrafish are central to our knowledge of how organs, especially the heart, form; a microscopic roundworm has led to the understanding of ‘programmed cell death’ (apoptosis), which not only regulates the growth of organs but, when disrupted, can cause cancer. Fruit flies and bacterial species are major contributors to human genome mapping research.
There may be undiscovered species, like science lab animals, that possess properties that make them particularly well-suited to the study and treatment of human diseases. If these species are lost, their secrets will be lost with them.
What leads to loss of biodiversity?
The main driver currently leading to biodiversity loss is habitat destruction—on land; in streams, rivers and lakes; and in the oceans.
Unless we dramatically reduce our use of fossil fuels, Climate change alone is predicted to threaten the extinction of about a quarter or more of all land species by 2050.beyond habitat loss as the greatest threat to life on land.
Oceanic and freshwater species are also at great risk from climate change, particularly those such as corals that live in ecosystems that are particularly sensitive to warming temperatures, but the full extent of risk remains. has not been calculated.
Healthy planet, healthy people
Loss to biodiversity affects human health in many ways. Ecosystem disruption and loss of biodiversity have a major impact on the emergence, transmission and spread of many infectious diseases in humans. Pathogens that cause 60% of infectious diseases in humans, such as malaria and COVID, are zoonotic, meaning they enter our bodies after living in animals. is different.
The virus that causes HIV/AIDS and has killed more than 40 million people to date, likely made the species jump from chimpanzees slaughtered for meat in West Central Africa. Collectively, there may be 10,000 viruses that are transmitted from animals to our species that are quietly circulating in the wild today.
This makes the One Health approach – a collaborative, multi-sectoral and interdisciplinary approach that brings together a wide range of intergovernmental agencies, governments and local and regional stakeholders to work together to tackle the problem. human health and environmental health issues – become important to reduce the risk of future disease transmission.
Selfishly, if the natural world is healthy, so are we.
Planetary life insurance
A key challenge for organizations working to conserve biodiversity is to convince others – especially policymakers and the public – that people and our health are fundamentally depends on the animals, plants and bacteria that we share on this tiny planet. We are completely dependent on the goods and services that the natural world provides, and we have no choice but to preserve it.
The World Economic Forum estimates that half of the world’s GDP ($44 trillion) depends on nature. Globally, the pharmaceutical industry’s annual revenue is $1.27 trillion, and healthcare in the United States alone costs more than $4 trillion each year.
Meanwhile, the amount of money needed to close the financial gap to conserve biodiversity is only $700 billion a year. For life insurance and planetary health, that number is not only a bargain but a necessity.
Humans cannot exist in nature. Protecting the plants, animals, and bacteria with which we share our little planet is not voluntary, as it is these creatures that create the support systems that help all life on Earth, including all human life, becomes possible.
The story is based on the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) booklet, How our health depends on biodiversity.
