Health in our hands: Protecting the planet’s resources is a necessary step to maintaining the health of our species.
Giles Crosse investigates why.
For thousands of years, human beings have relied on natural planetary resources for cures to all sorts of coughs and colds.
But as we increasingly damage the fragile ecosystem around us, we may be prejudicing future cures for things like cancer or AIDS, hidden deep in the Amazon, or in plants in the marine ecosystem.
Protecting the planet’s resources is a necessary step to maintaining the health of our species. Giles Crosse investigates why.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was signed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit by 150 governments, hoping to protect and maintain a healthy environment in which to live. Ahmed Djoghlaf is Executive Secretary of the organisation. He has some pretty clear ideas about the danger we are placing ourselves in.
“Biodiversity contributes tremendously to human health through the innumerable goods and services it provides us for free, which include food, medicines, air and water purification, pollination of crops for food, buffering from floods and storm surges, and climate stabilisation,” he says.
“To focus on food as an example, biodiversity can be used to alleviate the effects of the micronutrient deficiencies that are undermining the health of hundreds of millions of people in developing countries, since a more diverse diet is an effective means of acquiring important nutrients.”
“Recognising the importance of biodiversity for human health, UNEP and WHO are coorganising a meeting on April 30th 2010 in New York, on the subject of biodiversity and child health. In addition in April a meeting on healthy parks will be organised in Australia to demonstrate the value of parks to human health, indeed of healthy ecosystems as key to ensuring healthy human beings.”
Protecting biodiversity
“We need to raise public awareness on the importance of protecting life on earth.” Djoghlaf continues. “This is the very objective of the decision by the United Nations General Assembly to declare 2010 as the international year on biodiversity.”
“We must indeed get every sector of society involved in efforts to save biodiversity, including businesses, private citizens, governments, cooperative agencies, because in the long run biodiversity loss affects us all.”
“It is particularly important to reflect the true costs of biodiversity loss, as well as climate change, pollution and other causes of environmental degradation in the global economic system. Ultimately we need mechanisms that benefit biodiversity friendly production.”
Achieving this will take some radical steps. But they may be on the way. “In the context of the celebration of 2010 International Year of Biodiversity, the United Nations General Assembly will convene in September 2010 in New York at high level, with the participation of Heads of State and government exclusively devoted to biodiversity.” reveals Djoghlaf.
“This is the first time that the leaders of the world will be meeting on biodiversity,” he explains. “They will provide leadership in shaping the new biodiversity vision which will be finalised one month later in Nagoya, Japan, with the participation of more than 10,000 delegates.”
“Indeed the Nagoya biodiversity summit will adopt a new strategy containing a biodiversity vision for 2050 and a biodiversity mission for 2020 with the participation of all stakeholders including mayors and parliamentarians, youth, indigenous peoples, NGOs, private sector, bilateral and multilateral development agencies and private donors.”
“The international community needs to show its commitment to preserving life on Earth during New York, Nagoya, and beyond 2010 if we are to pass on a healthy biosphere to our children.”
Safeguarding the future
As ever, the individual has a major role to play in maintaining biodiversity and its effects on human health. “Each and every individual needs to be fully engaged in the battle for life on Earth. To this end, the first thing they must do is help shape the Convention’s post 2010 biodiversity strategy by actively contributing to our online global biodiversity conference, http://www.cbd.int/aniec2010/, which was launched in November last year and will close this July.” asks Djoghlaf
“The second thing individuals must do is contribute to the implementation of the objectives of the International Year of Biodiversity by learning about biodiversity and sharing their knowledge with the people around them, and by sending us their conservation success stories, to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , so we can share them with the rest of the world.”
“The third thing individuals must do is act: make responsible consumption choices, support activities and organisations that conserve biodiversity, and join a local environmental group or organise activities to help preserve biodiversity. Finally, today’s children, who are tomorrow’s citizens, need to be actively engaged in shaping their future, for example by contributing to the Green Wave educational campaign.”
Human error
Sadly, often we only have ourselves to blame for the poor state of biodiversity, and how that impacts on future cures we need. “Human activity has unintentionally led to increased genetic diversity among bacteria.” explains Djoghlaf.
“When antibiotics are overused, a form of artificial selection is imposed on bacterial populations. It has been shown, for example, that routine use of antibiotics as prophylactic or growth promoting agents in intensive agriculture, i.e. not just for therapeutic purposes, has led to emergence of bacterial strains that are resistant to antibiotics, and these strains can infect humans.”
We have to stop doing this. “The comprehensive 2008 book Sustaining life, edited and written by Harvard Medical School physicians Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein with contributions by over 100 leading scientists, argues that a new generation of antibiotics, new treatments for thinning bone disease and kidney failure, new cancer treatments, new kinds of safer and more powerful pain killers, and treatments for macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness, all stand to be lost unless the world acts to reverse the present alarming rate of biodiversity loss.” fears Djoghlaf.
“While the book covers many different species from around the world, an illustrative example comes from Gymnosperms, from which several pharmaceuticals have already been isolated, including decongestants and the anti cancer drug taxol.”
“The researchers believe many more are yet to be discovered and may be lost if species of Gymnosperms become extinct. For example, substances from one Gymnosperm, the Ginkgo tree, may reduce the production of receptors in the human nervous system linked with memory loss and thus may play a role in countering Alzheimer’s disease. These substances may also help in the treatment of epilepsy and depression.”
Action not words
The ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity is an intergovernmental regional centre of excellence in the field. Researchers there too fear the future.
“Just as nutrition, access to health care and clean water, biodiversity is a fundamental determinant of health,” Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School and its Center for Health and Global Environment, said in his keynote address at the ACB2009 on October 21, 2009.
Dr. Bernstein said symptoms of a ‘biosphere under stress,’ such as infectious diseases, have occurred due to alterations or outright loss of biodiversity.
“We must consider whether or not to deal with what is necessary to prevent the ailments that we can foresee on the horizon. In making this deliberation to act or not, to consider biodiversity loss is more than a matter of ethics, is more than a matter of spiritually; it is more than a matter of how much it is worth. It is perhaps, without fear, a matter of health.”
“Ultimately, we have no choice when it comes to protecting biodiversity. We must protect the natural world if we are to protect ourselves,” Dr. Bernstein added.
Cone snails, described as beautiful but deadly because of their venomous toxins, are one group of organisms that inhabit coral reefs. A drug, zinconotide, was developed in 2004 from the cone snail peptides to relieve the pain of cancer patients who are already tolerant to opium. Some of the patients were “miraculously” rid of their pain, Bernstein said.
“What made zinconotide remarkable is that the major problem with opium therapy is that people develop tolerance, requiring increasing doses of the drug to have the same therapeutic effect. But the side effects increase with it; at some point you can no longer give the drug because the side effect is dangerous. In zinconotide, there is no tolerance. It is a thousand times more potent than morphine. And it treats pain by a mechanism that has never before been done.”
He said cone snails, which have 700 species, may represent the “greatest treasure trove of potential medicines of any other group of organisms on earth,” but because they live on or near coral reefs, they are in danger.
“With climate change, coral reefs, the habitat of cone snails and thousands of other organisms, will be lost in their entirety by 2100,” he said.
“We use species as just one measure of biodiversity. But biodiversity is far greater than just a measure of species. It is the sum total of all varieties of life on earth, including all the genes, all the species, all the population of the species and ecosystems on earth.”
“As far as human health and biodiversity are concerned, species are essential. Ecosystems and ecology are absolutely critical in understanding biodiversity”
The argument seems pretty fixed. Now we just have to do something about it.
What are your views? Not sure? Read the resources below for more information. Add your comment below. We welcome your thoughts and proposals. Not a Planetary Citizen? Sign up to Our Future Planet Today!
Resources:
ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity- Recommendations and Outcomes of the ASEAN Conference on Biodiversity 2009
Convention on Biodiversity Fact Sheets:
Fact Sheet - Forest Biodiversity
Fact Sheet -Marine and Coastal Biodiversity
Fact Sheet- Gender and Biodiversity
Fact Sheet -Mountain Biodiversity
Fact Sheet - Biodiversity for Development and Poverty Alleviation
Fact Sheet -Inland Waters Biodiversity
Fact Sheet - Sustainable Use of Biodiversity
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