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Biodiversity loss happens when plant or animal species disappear completely from Earth or when there is a decrease or disappearance of species in a specific area. Biodiversity loss means that there is a reduction in biological diversity in a given area. The decrease can be temporary or permanent.
Species will be pushed out of their habitat either directly by habitat destruction or indirectly by fragmentation, degradation, or pollution. Any efforts to protect the world's remaining natural habitat and biodiversity will compete directly with humans' growing demand for natural resources, especially new agricultural lands. [56]
Tearing down these areas for increased consumption directly decreases the world's biodiversity of plant and animal species native to those areas. Along with destroying habitats and ecosystems, decreasing the world's forest contributes to the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere. By taking away forested areas, we are limiting the amount of carbon ...
Forests harbour most of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. The conservation of the world's biodiversity is thus utterly dependent on the way in which we interact with and use the world's forests. [75] A new method used in 2011, put the total number of species on Earth at 8.7 million, of which 2.1 million were estimated to live in the ocean. [76]
Beyond the value biodiversity has in regulating and stabilizing ecosystem processes, there are direct economic consequences of losing diversity in certain ecosystems and in the world as a whole. Losing species means losing potential foods, medicines, industrial products, and tourism, all of which have a direct economic effect on peoples lives. [6]
The environmental impact of transport is significant because it is a major user of energy, and burns most of the world's petroleum. This creates air pollution, including nitrous oxides and particulates, and is a significant contributor to global warming through emission of carbon dioxide, [276] for which transport is the fastest-growing ...
A 2017 World Wildlife Fund study found that 60% of biodiversity loss can be attributed to the vast scale of feed crop cultivation needed to rear tens of billions of farm animals, which puts enormous strain on natural resources, resulting in extensive loss of lands and species.
Pollution on a beach in Guyana. Triple Planetary Crisis is a term and framework adopted by the United Nations system to describe the three intersecting global environmental crises of pollution, climate crisis, biodiversity loss and/or ecological crises.