Bio Diversity

Biodiversity is the foundation of ecosystem services to which human well-being is intimately linked. Biodiversity includes all ecosystems—managed or unmanaged. Sometimes biodiversity is presumed to be a relevant feature of only unmanaged ecosystems, such as wildlands, nature preserves, or national parks. This is incorrect. Managed systems—be they plantations, farms, croplands, aquaculture sites, rangelands, or even urban parks and urban ecosystems—have their own biodiversity. Given that cultivated systems alone now account for more than 24% of Earth’s terrestrial surface, it is critical that any decision concerning biodiversity or ecosystem services address the maintenance of biodiversity in these largely anthropogenic systems

However, Biodiversity is known to be sensitive to a range of global change drivers, including climate, land-use change and land management. Widespread biodiversity loss would be expected to significantly reduce ecosystem services globally, because even small declines in species populations can negatively impact service provision, and such loss of function in turn threatens human well-being. According to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCCC) Special Report, increase of 2℃ rise in global temperature will severely impact the marine and terrestrial biodiversity. Therefore, increased efforts are required to prevent further losses to terrestrial biodiversity and the ecosystem services. We CERCT is working on terrestrial and marine ecosystems to increase the extent of land under conservation and management, restore degraded land and generalize landscape-level conservation planning, biodiversity trends from habitat conversion to conserve and mitigate the global pressure on biodiversity