7. What is the importance of biodiversity?

The construction of the biological variety that we enjoy on our planet has taken the Earth almost four billion years, through a slow evolutionary process. Today’s biodiversity is the heritage we have inherited after that long time. The progressive and rapid destruction of biodiversity, due to human activity, would leave huge gaps in food chains, which would result in chaos whose end is difficult to imagine. If we do not take drastic measures to stop the destruction of biological diversity, in an infinitesimal time, compared to the age of the Earth, we will be the architects of the extinction of most species.

An advance of this scenario could be seen in a few years with the death of the Great Coral Reef of Australia, the largest coral reef system in the world, whose bleaching is currently very advanced. Much of the life of numerous marine species depends on the Great Coral Reefs, whose disappearance would affect almost the entire global ocean system. (See question #5)