Lecture 3 - The Benefits of Living with Nature, automated transcript
May 25, 2021
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Okay. So in the first two lectures in this series, we had look at what biodiversity
is and how we can measure it. And then in the second lecture, we looked at the impact
that humans are having on biodiversity and how they're destroying it and degrading
it. And then, in this lecture, we're going to look at why that's a problem. So value
that biodiversity has both, you know, in and of itself and also for humans.
Yes.
The benefits of living nature and why we need conservation. Biology,
So first kind of think about sustainable development. So sustainable development
became a really major talking point in international politics and international
Affairs in the early 90s, although awareness of the problems of natural, the degradation
of the natural world and the loss of biodiversity and climate change lines of the
things had been building for decades so throughout the 20th century or at least
the second half of the 20th century.
And again a lot of the times when we talk about these these things it's very much
looking at this from a sort of Western perspective and it doesn't mean that other
communities and other people. So lots of indigenous people lived with the natural
world without without kind of they did alter it, but they didn't necessarily destroy
it and they have there's lots of there's been lots of Notions of stewardship of
the natural.
World and care for natural world from many different cultures. But what we're looking
at here is sort of the spread of Western way of thinking about conservation. Sustainable
development that has generally dominated World politics due to historical factors
including industrialization and colonization and things like that. So that's definitely
what we're looking at here. I just mention it because I don't want to make it seem
like this is the only way of thinking about conservation is definitely other ways.
It's
It's been considered integral to human societies, over the over history. And a good
example of that is lots of different indigenous cultures but just as a little disclaimer
so it had been consciousness of these problems have been developing for the 20th
century but the 1992 seminal Earth Summit which happened in Rio de Janeiro, which
was a un conference on
I'm in development environment and development, brought this concept of sustainable
development onto the international political agenda. And what this is is coupling
development with the sustainable. Use of wild animals, and plants. And so, there
had been any Millennium development goals around the turn of the century around
2000. These are mostly focused on development and reduction of poverty and other
kind of human and social focused goals. What the sustainable development goals did
was copy,
All that with with conservation or environmentalism or kind of whatever label you
like to call it, but a consideration for the sustainability of using these natural
resources so that was signed in as a Green Lantern entity and then signed afterwards.
But then the sustainable development goals were developed the UN conference on sustainable
development in 2010. And these are those are these 17 goals which you can see down
the bottom here and 13, 14 and 15.
So protect Planet Life Below water and life on land. Focus on biodiversity and the
environment.
And another example of this is the Millennium ecosystem assessment, so this was
called for by the UN secretary-general in 2000. Again, turn the Centre and what
this aim to do was to create an assessment of kind of the current state of affairs
in terms of global ecosystems. So it wants to look at what the benefits of ecosystems
were to humans who had benefited and also the impact that resource extraction into
had on the natural,
This brought together experts from all around the world with a strong review process.
And it came up with it came up with a reports that has been so seminal in showing
how human societies can interact with the natural world.
One of the main things it did was come up or codify this concept of ecosystem services.
So in the very first lecture, we talked about it in function and ecosystem Services
little bit. Now we're going to go into a bit more depth and what these are basically
just the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems and they are split into 4 large
categories. So the one on the left here, which is supporting these are sort of the
fundamental processes that make our
Take the natural world make the Earth system continue to function so it's nutrient
cycling or something. We talked about in the first lecture. So your formation primary
production. All these things that underpin all of the natural processes that go
on our planets, that, that allow ecosystems to survive and allow wild animals and
wild plants to continue to survive as well as those supporting things. We have provisioning,
regulating and cultural,
Then they all contribute to different constituents of well-being, which are these
things in the right here, which are different ways of measuring human well-being.
But we're going to focus on the left here on the green ecosystem Services which
going to go through what each of these things are. First one, we'll look at is provisioning
because it's kind of the one of the easiest ones to think about here.
This includes things that are kind of direct goods from you from ecosystems. So
there's wooden fiber and so people need timber for the furniture for building for
lots of other things. So, extracting Timber and is is an ecosystem service. Something
that ecosystems provide for humans. Other one is food. So, this is an example of
bushmeat hunting. So, this is a Pangolin. So, before we humans invented farming,
And we were all hunter-gatherers. So this is the kind of
This is the kind of ways this is, this is the way that we would sustain ourselves
as a society, we've got and we'd hunt for food, gather food and this continues,
the present day. So lots of people around the world rely on wild-caught meat and
wild caught food and to survive, it's not it's not all, it's not a hundred and the
food that we isn't doesn't come from just farming.
And this tends to occur more often in less developed countries and in communities
that live relatively remotely from large population centers and generally living
more pristine ecosystems. As a rule, is that there's probably a bit of argument
to be had there, but this is yeah. An example of a ecosystem service that is provided
to people. So food is one. So you can extract animals and plants that are edible,
then you are getting an ecosystem.
Service. So I've used an example of a Pangolin here, so they are eaten. This becomes
the problems of hunting and poaching and Things become slightly more serious. When
it's ties into global economic market, so pangolins their scales are used in traditional
East Asian, traditional Chinese medicine for various things. There's no evidence,
there's no evidence that they actually have any real medical benefit, but they are
used in these traditional, lots of traditional remedies.
And so their scales, they're hunted often for their scales and they're traded internationally.
And there's a huge demand for that. So it puts a great pressure on these populations.
And several of the penguin, species are now, critically endangered and very much
in danger of going extinct. So that is also any customer service because people
are getting it personal benefit from that, but the out which ones have talked about
kind of the food benefit we get here. But Bush me isn't the only kind of wild-caught
food that we get.
Get that people around the world get from from Wild ecosystems and other one is
industrial fishing so this is effectively hunter-gathering cover on an industrial
scale. Apart from fish farming, fish are generally courts like they are wild individuals
that are called from their ecosystem. So it's going out and it's hunting just under
a different name really. And this if you know Fisher even all around the world so
developed countries developing countries
All around the world. So this is another ecosystem Benefit exim Service that people
get from marine ecosystems.
However, looking at food there there's also other things we looked at would as fresh
water and fuel and other things that you can just Harvest directly from you, get
systems, but it's not just wild-caught food that dip is dependent on ecosystem Services.
It's also agriculturist depend on ecosystem services.
So which comes through these supporting and regulating Services we have here. So
nutrient cycling. Soil formation. Are all crucial to the continuance of Agriculture
to human agriculture. So, we couldn't Farm without soil. We can't Farm Without Rain.
Those kind of things. And this is the so we come across in these regulating Services
here, which are kind of Regulation, flood regulation, disease, regulation, water
purification. So these
A bit more difficult to understand sometimes because it's not directly going out
and extracting a, a good or a bit of food from an ecosystem. Instead, it's, they're
less tangible, really because they're they're not kind of, you can't go out and
grab them, but they are just as important and especially supporting ones, here they
are vital to the, to all life on Earth, including humans,
So when we look at this kind of a field of me, sort of feel the Wheats, like we
have here, it may be all you may think of it as a completely human designed and
human-dominated Landscape. However, this I've got to does depend on all those Services.
We were just talkin about. So it needs soil formation in each of those supporting
ecosystem services to continue. So, whilst human activity is causing these crops
to grow. It does also rely on the natural world without that we wouldn't be able
to sustain our farming systems.
So when we looked at this, we also looked at kind of water purification. So and
then provisioning. We get fresh water from these ecosystems as well.
And then we can also not just drink this water, but we can harness it for power
so we can build Hydro hydroelectric, dams, which rely on rainfall and water flows
to create energy for humans. And all these other things that that underpin all of
our food systems and our our drinking water systems and all these other things.
I don't talk too much about the other ones here but
It's things such as climate regulation. So the carbon sequestration you get with
trees and other ecosystems, that's an ecosystem Service as is disease regulation.
So covid-19 is really highlighted, the importance of zoonotic diseases so those
are diseases that spread from animals to humans, and there's a lot of evidence.
Now that connects ecosystem degradation with increased prevalence of those zoonotic
diseases,
So an increased rate of pathogens or diseases spreading from other species to humans.
So that's the importance of that already been highlighted in the last few years
with the covid-19 pandemic.
Yes, and so one of the other ones here is flood regulation. So this is a picture
of a mangrove ecosystem. So mangrove, forest that grows on the posts in tropical
places and there's loads of evidence that mangroves are vital in protecting Coastal
ecosystems and Coastal communities from extreme weather events from tsunamis from
typhoons and those kind of things. So these the effects of those weather events
are much greater in places, where mangroves have been cut down or degraded,
So is another example of a service? So this Mangrove is protecting Coastal communities
from extreme weather.
And finally, we get to these cultural cultural Services here, which again are bit
more difficult to get your head around and understand because they're less. Again,
they're not entirely tangible, but many people around the world, get huge benefits
and huge satisfaction from spending time in nature whether or not that's educational
recreational or spiritual. I neither type. So think about here. So not only do people
like to go out into nature too.
Did you Recreation to cycle that example here. But nature also underpins a lot of
our cultural and aesthetic movements and activities. So, painting is example that
we use here.
and,
Yeah, this game we just talked about, kind of the benefits of spending time in nature.
So not only is it good for a recreational point of view. But there's also lots of
evidence building that it's, it has serious health benefits and contributes to the
well-being. So those measures of here, the blue well-being that we talked about
before. So there's all these things. So good, social relations security, and also
health. And so there's lots of evidence building that spending time in nature is
good for your physical health and for your mental health. So there's
The said it can be relaxing reduces stress and it may help to treat depression and
other mental health issues. So doctors in the UK are increasingly. Prescribing and
time spent out in nature, to try and help people deal with anxiety and other mental
health problems. They may have because it has been shown to have a real real benefit.
But even studies that have shown that patients recovering from surgery, tend to
have better results if they have a window overlooking, a green
mr. Of some kind. So whether they can see a tree or something, they seem to get
better results and patients that are in windowless rooms, there's lots of evidence
building to this and there's some papers in the cited in the notes for the slide,
on the PowerPoint that you'll be able to find in the solder that shows some of this
evidence.
So just to bring it back to the first lecture in this series. Why is diversity important?
So yes we can go out and spend time in nature but is the biodiversity present really
important for ecosystem services. And as we talked about, in the first lecture,
there is evidence that particularly for some ecosystem Services. There is a positive
relationship between the provision of that service and diversity. So the example
that we looked at in that first lecture was
Pollination. So the more species of pollinators that were present, the greater the
benefit to fruit yields in coffee farming, in Indonesia.
There's other things to think about here as well. One is resilience which we talked
about in the first lecture. So if environment is going to be changing and we want
to still have natural spaces in the future that we need to allow them to adapt to
those changes. So whether its climate change or other human mediated changes, whether
thing is we can use the genetic diversity present in Wild places for our as also
a z systems services.
So relatives of Honor will talk about the relatives of the livestock and crops in
a second and the one is health. So between 25 and 50 percent of currently marketed
trucks, owe their Origins to natural products. And the more diversity in the more
genetic diversity there is present in the natural world. The more likely we are
to be able to find more of these medicinal compounds in the future.
And then, if you think about agriculture, oh yeah. So this is a good example of
that. So this is a fox love, which is a flower that we get in the UK and in Western
Europe, I'm not sure about where else in the world it occurs but has a chemical
in it called digitalis, which is the constituent of lots of heart medicines. I used
around the world for different conditions. So, this is just an example of a source
of one of these medicinal compounds.
This is a red jungle fowl. It is the wild ancestor of many of the chickens that
we grow that we farm for human consumption around the world and maintaining the
genetic diversity in either the ancestors of our domestic species, whether they'll
baby plants or animals or closer related species will be beneficial in the future,
in a changing world. So if a changing world or a particular disease, affects a particular
livestock.
Then can we go back to natural world look, for genetic diversity allows those wild
species to be more resilient to those changes to protect themselves against those
diseases. And can we use that genetic diversity to breed some of that diversity
back to our livestock species or plant species and make them more resilient to those
challenges. And so that's why it's not just maintaining kind of a green and pretty
landscape. That is important. For humans, maintaining
Being and maintaining species diversity and maintaining ecosystems maintaining genetic.
Diversity is also vital to ecosystem services.
Which is on one of the slides that we talked about in the first lecture, which I'm
just going to bring up again now.
It's, this is a reminder of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem
services from that first lecture. So it's not only a regulator. It can be a final
ecosystem service and can also be a good in itself. So a good in itself is because
so this time we're not looking at whether or not certain species provide services,
it's where they're not biodiversity in and of itself can provide ecosystem services.
So we mentioned about how more bio diverse places.
Elmo beneficial for human Recreation and human health. Biodiversity is a final ecosystem
service. So that's having this genetic diversity present in both relatives of livestock,
and plants and crop species and having the source for medicinal compounds. And also
this first on here, is that more by diverse systems, tend to be produce more stable.
Ecosystems that
Ryder services and are also more resilient if you change. And there's a tends to
be a positive relationship between those functions that our services and
And by the besties great. So we're not up to different classes of ecosystem services.
That have a look at what the Millennium ecosystem assessment found, so just going
to quickly outline its findings. So these are things that it looked at ecosystem
changes in the last 50 years gains and losses from ecosystem change. What the prospects
are for the next 50 years and also how we reverse ecosystem degradation
So finding number one over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more
rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period in human history. So this
ties into what we look at in the last lecture. So these human impacts, the natural
world that have been greatly accelerating since about 1950.
Let me effects. This has had on the diversity of life.
It's not all bad. The changes that were made to ecosystems have contributed to substantial
net, gains in human, well-being and economic development. So there's all these indicators
that in certain places of the world, at least human well-being is getting better,
health is improving, food is more available. Water water is more available. So there's
all these indicators that human well-being is getting better in certain areas, the
world, this isn't completely
Mobile is obviously a reason well that still lighted by serious levels of poverty
and conflict and lots of other things, but there has been a net gain in human well-being
and economic development due to demands placed on ecosystems. However as this has
been leading to ecosystem degradation which we'll talk about in the next findings,
this is going to be a game of diminishing returns. So the longer this goes on, unsustainably,
the smaller are benefits from. Ecosystems will
Be especially for future Generations.
And the degradation of ecosystem Services could grow significantly worse during
the first half of this Century. So the more on sustainable resource extraction,
we carry out the more we degrade, ecosystems the less able, they are to provide
a services and meet our needs. And if we continue on trajectories or resource, use
and climate change and other things, this degradation is only going to increase,
only going to accelerate and we're only going to see much less
if it from these ecosystems,
the last thing is to look at how we can try and reverse this degradation ecosystem
degradation. So there are some scenarios where you can see that demands for ecosystem
Services, increasing demand, because I'm Services can be met. So, you know, we're
not that supervision or any of those other things. There are ways of doing these
things sustainably under projected population growth,
But the has to be serious radical and very significant changes in policies. Institutional
practices, that's do not look to be on track currently. So, the Paris agreement
with the one point five degree of warming Target, that's an example. So that's an
agreement that governments are made, but is it going to be Mets? It seems to be
unlikely. It seems like we're going to push past that Mark and whether or not, we
can keep ourselves in the two degrees of warming is under is Up For Debate. It's
against you.
Unlikely, unless serious changes are made in the very near future.
Many options exist to conserve or enhance specific, ecosystem services in ways that
reduce negative trade-offs. So, we talked a little bit in the last lecture about
how not all in the first lecture. Sorry, about how not all ecosystem services.
Correlate with diversity. So, we talked about carbon sequestration and planting
and monoculture of a particular, a fast-growing type of tree. So that's a negative
trade off with biodiversity, but there are ways where we don't have to have these
negative trade-offs. There are ways around it and they're always having a win-win
situations where different ecosystem services are all increased and all benefited
together if you want the bit more detail about this. I recommend going to there's
a link on the last
Slide of this presentation going have a look at the mainly because it's an assessment
is a really interesting piece of work. And it's definitely worth having a look at
its little bit old now though. So there's been updates to it. So, this is again,
from this ipbs Global assessment report and the International Panel for biodiversity
and ecosystem Services, which synthesizes evidence on human impacts, our natural
world. And what we look at here is the 50-year global trend
in the provision of these ecosystem services or what it calls here, Nature's contribution
to people. So as you can see, lots and lots of things, have these things are declining.
So, happy that creation and maintenance going down, pollinated and dispersal of
seeds and other propagules also going down. So, lots and lots of these things are
declining, which makes ecosystems less able to provide Goods in the future.
And it's not just these things that kind of are fundamental to supporting life on
Earth, there's also indicators of of people's connections, a natural world. So learning
inspiration here, physical and psychological experience with my identities, what
these things are are kind of indicators of people's connection to the natural world.
And so, here we have on the right hand here, right inside here. Number of people
in close proximity to Nature area of natural and traditional
a tional size Landscapes and seascapes these kind of things. So these are indicators
of how connected people are so natural world. As you can see, they're all the climbing.
So it's not only that things that are fundamental to human, survival are declining.
But if we're not, we don't feel connected to the natural world. We can't persuade
people. That is important to save the natural world. Then why would they have any
reason to protect into the future? So these things are just, as important as kind
of as the purely conservation science side of things. So we also need to think about
social.
You think about people? Again, the day humans are the root cause of all these environmental
problems and humans will be the solution conservation is a inherently social exercise,
about persuading people to change their behavior. So, without this connection to
Nature, it's gonna be much more difficult to do that. As we can see, the things
that are increasing are the kind of direct resource extraction. So energy food,
and feed materials, and assistance. So these
These things are the contribution of these things from nature to humans, are all
increasing, which is possibly a good thing. But it also means that this is potentially
happening in a unsustainable way. So whilst, you know, we're increasing on demands
and the natural world and that's meeting a lot of the demands we place on it. If
it's happening on sustainably, it means that we're setting ourselves up in the future
to not be able to continue to meet those needs.
So in the face of all this, what can we do against it? So we have the conservation
movement, which is about protecting the natural world and persuading people to protect
the natural world. However,
Constipation them accomplish movement isn't necessarily the same as conservation
biology. And as this is a science course or go talking about conservation, biology
which is a scientific discipline.
So again, as I turn to the start, the idea of living with the natural world, the
ideas of stewardship and things aren't new just cultures around the world have been
doing them for hundreds. Have been doing for thousands of years and I've been coexisting
with the natural world in you know, probably sustainable ways of looking at here
is a kind of modern and largely Western awareness of the problems that come along
with natural resource extraction.
So kind of a hundred fifty years ago that culture that was spread around the world
by Colonial and colonialism, largely saw the natural world as there to be exploited.
However starting from kind of the mid-twentieth century, it was there was a growing
awareness that there was a, this there's going to be problems with this and the
term conservation biology which dates around the 1960s is a was a field of science.
Since that was created to try and support conservation to try and not only record
declines and try and identify problems with the natural world and what was causing
them. But also prefer about propose ways of tackling them and proposed interventions
and changes that we needed to try and for humans to sustainably live with nature.
An immediate challenge here is to ensure the effective application of scientific
information to conservation practice.
So conservation, biology is a scientific discipline that sits within the wider conservation
movement and is aimed at providing information and evidence to support it.
Ideas of conservation and preserve the natural world. They're not changing the same
everywhere and they're a large cultural and economic differences. That lead to different
ideas of how to treat the natural world.
And so, this is a photo that Kathy Walton, who's one of the teachers on these courses
users, when she is giving this lecture, and it's of a National Forest Reserve, I
think in Thailand and what this is, is it shows. So it should therefore be a kind
of place has been designed to protect nature. But as you can see, all the four threes
have been cut down. The land has been burnt. And what this is is called swidden
agriculture. So,
The people that farm this area and they create new land by cutting down trees and
burning the land. So it gets rid of all the trees kind of in the quickest possible
way. They then farm that land, but rain forest soils, tend to be quite low nutrient
and quite thin. So they kind of extract the nutrients very quickly from it and then
they move on, they do the somewhere else and then they leave this bare area of land
that where the biodiversity value is massively reduced from the primary forest and
they've been there before.
And this yet, as I said, I think this is called swidden Agriculture. And when Katie
said, she spoke to the people that lived in this area that carried out this activity,
The reason was the roads have been built markets were more accessible. So they went
from, they could expand their farming because they could not only just use it to
feed themselves but they can also sell Surplus into these markets. So bringing these
areas into kind of into the marketplace into creating grid infrastructure leads
to can lead to this kind of problem. So this kind of sets up this problem of development
versus conservation and can we pair the two? Because you
Blame these people wanting to wanted to earn more money when it's have a better
way of life wanted to potentially pull themselves out of poverty. If they were in
poverty before, you know, you can't really blame them for wanting to do that. And
if they have the opportunity to sell surplus food into markets, we shouldn't necessarily
stop them from doing that. But it does set up this problem because it does come
at the expense of biodiversity. So how do we are other ways of finding win-win solutions
for development and conservation?
So this when you first see it, this obviously looks kind of a degraded landscape
often when people look at this. They think of this as a very natural landscape.
So this is kind of a classic rural landscape that you get in in the UK. And it's
kind of thought of, as the green and pleasant land of England or UK, which features
in lot of art culture and a lot of our mindset of a thought of what the rural and
natural landscape should look like. However, this is
Very very far from being natural and this kind of landscape has been modified for
thousands of years. So looking at the ecological and environmental history evidence
mostly UK should be covered in relatively thick wood Woodland very relatively thick
forest in deciduous forest.
And only small parts. This remain a lot of our rural landscape has been given over
to not only crops, but also here, it's probably sheep agriculture on these fields.
So this whilst it features in lots of people's mindsets as natural and beautiful.
And it's not necessarily that it's not attractive, but it's not not natural, really.
It has been altered by humans. And depending on what your definition of natural
is,
So going to people who are doing this to try and make some more money and feed themselves
and telling them that it's, it's unacceptable when as a nation and as a culture
people in the UK did similar stuff thousands of years ago and alter our landscape
in similar ways a long time ago going to those people and say you can't do that.
It's slightly hypocritical really? And so we need to be careful.
About doing that. And especially people like me and the developed world needs to
be careful about being hypocritical and and not telling people that they have to
reduce their aspiration for fear of damaging the natural world. So we need to find
solutions that are win-win.
This is finally just having a look at some, a kind of aspects of conservation biology
as a science. It's a bit of a bum.
Odd science in a way because it's it has certain aspects that, that make it a bit
different from your kind of basic biology, or your basic chemistry, those basic
sciences. And so, one is that it's an applied science and it takes into account
a whole range of different disciplines. So it's not just biology, but it takes account
of social science, and politics and physical sciences, and all these other things,
and it uses them, it kind of borrows methodologies from different fields and applies
them to problems.
To try and solve problems and its own in their sphere of conservation, really. So
it's an applied science, it's also value-laden science. So it's kind of striving
towards a goal. It's not just about the discovery of knowledge and the uncovering
of knowledge. It's also comes in with normative values that practitioners often
at adhere to. So that the diversity of species involved with communities is good.
That Extinction is bad. Ecological complexity is good, Evolution, should continue
and the biological diversity has intrinsic value. So we can produce evidence as
we've talked about here that ecosystems provide services for humans. We can provide
that evidence and therefore, you know, under a purely human survival Instinct. It's
logical to preserve the natural world. Therefore, however, what we do with a species
that is potentially, we can't find a service. They provide or we can't find a very
important.
Can't find it important function, that it fulfills not to say that exists. But just,
as a thought experiment, should we still preserve it? Well, a lot of practitioners
of conservation, biology. And a lot of other people around the world would say that
we should because it has intrinsic value. So, these are just some of the principles
that people that practice conservation, biology and other people adhere to, and
that we should be aiming for these things when we're practicing our science. Yeah.
And this just kind of
of formalizes, those different motivations for doing conservation. So we have the
exchanger things, which is what we talked about before in terms of ecosystem services.
So you do something to earn a reward or avoid a punishment
That's extrinsic. You're being provided an external motivation of some sort. However,
motivation can also be intrinsic, so you're doing it for its own sake because inherently,
rewarding, and this is one of these principles of conservation biology here. That
species are inherently valuable and should therefore be protected.
It's quite difficult to tell people exactly what the intrinsic value of biodiversity
is. As it's probably largely different for everyone. Everyone values nature in their
own personal way, but it's often considered to have early because of its existence
and separately to any relationship to humans. So it's not just because any, because
it's comprised of service, that we think it's valuable, it would be valuable even
if humans didn't exist.
However, some people more connected nature than others and the difficulty there
for lies in, if you're going to try and motivate people using these extrinsic values,
how do you get people to connect to Nature? How do you persuade them that it's important
in and of itself, you know, can you take them out on, walk on? Can you show them
that actual world? Can you use Nature Documentaries? There's also the potential
things and it's something that is covered more in the conservation set of lectures,
if you are interested,
And yeah, the extrinsic values of biodiversity, the things that we've talked about
all the way through this lecture. So all these ecosystem services,
I finally it's just the example about the difficulty of
Of using conservation science and conservation, biology to persuade people to actually
change their ways. So research can often come up with. Not very clear conclusions,
but the weight of evidence shows that human activities are destroying the natural
world and we're undermining both biodiversity and our own support systems. We're
potentially leading to potentially going down the path of causing so much destruction
that we're undermining our own.
To survive on planet Earth. The evidence of that is extraordinarily strong and very
difficult to disagree with however, policy government moves much more slowly than
that and often as we as we see here equivocates and and also active a quite small
time scales. So a lot of the things we talked about here having of a long periods
of climate changes whilst it's okay and quite quickly you know it's been going on
for hundreds of years
And the effects. A lot of these things might not be seen for quite a long time.
So how do we persuade policymakers to take a long-term view to not? Just think about
the next five years in the next election. But building policies that will make a
difference, long term and won't just be good for their next re-election bid.
And passages. The problem here, is that conservation biology whilst it's a relatively
new field. So, crude a lot of this evidence, a lot of evidence for the methods that
work in conservation. So do we continue to come up with more data? And we continue
to come up with more evidence that species are declining and biodiversity is disappearing,
or do we try and move into politics, and try and persuade people to change their
behavior and to, for governments to put
Place in place policies that will actually tackle the problems.
So that's not really a long lines of scientific discussion we've been having, but
it's very, very important to think about. So this is the reading that I suggest
you do for this lecture. So this is the end of these three lectures as you'll see.
In the teaching notes, you can move on to the other courses in kind of whatever
order you see fit really. But we hope that was interesting introduction to biodiversity
and why it's important and you can move on to other courses now and see the
Ecological and evolutionary processes, that underpin it and also what's being done
to try and protect the natural world. Thank you very much.