Biodiversity

Question 1

What is biological diversity?

Answer 1

the variety of all forms of life, from genes to species, through to the broad scale of ecosystems

Question 2

Why is biodiversity important?

Answer 2

• Functionally: diversity helps living systems survive and thrive
• Culturally: intrinsic and instrumental values

Question 3

What is intrinsic value?

Answer 3

Organisms are valuable in their own right, regardless of their use to people

• e.g. striped beetles have their own reasons for being

Question 4

What is the use instrumental values?

Answer 4

use value: organisms provide us with things we need or want

e.g. food, medicine (present and future)

Question 5

what is the non-use instrumental values?

Answer 5

non-use value: we benefit from biodiversity without using it up

• aesthetic value (enjoy a nice sunset)
• existence value (feel good knowing pandas exist)
• bequest value (protect for future generations)

Question 6

What is Anthropocentric?

Answer 6

human-centred

Question 7

what is Ecocentric?

Answer 7

nature-centred

Question 8

What biodiversity is under threat?

Answer 8

mass extinction events

• 96% of marine species, 70% of land species extinct
• caused by meteorite or major volcanic activity
• half of all species extinct including dinosaurs
• probably caused by asteroid or comet

present day
- mass extinction event caused by human activities

Question 9

What are the threats to biodiversity?

Answer 9

• habitat change
• invasive species
• pollution
• climate change

Question 10

What has happened to habitat change?

Answer 10

• land surface altered
• ocean area experiencing increasing cumulative impacts
• wetland areas lost

Question 11

What are the causes to habitat changes?

Answer 11

• deforestation and forest fragmentation
• urban sprawl
• agriculture, aquaculture
• resource extraction and industry

Question 12

What are invasive species?

Answer 12

introduced species that change the competitive balance of an ecosystem

Question 13

what can invasive species do?

Answer 13

can crowd out, replace or kill native species

• hard to remove or control

Question 14

What are the impacts of chemical and wastes on the environment?

Answer 14

• industrial releases: regular and accidental
• wastewater: treated and untreated
• leaching of stored wastes

Question 15

What are the types of pollution caused by waste?

Answer 15

• air pollution
• radioactive waste

Question 16

What can climate change cause?

Answer 16

• contribute to habitat change
• shift growing and breeding seasons (altering food supplies)
• help pests and invasive species to spread (faster than species can adapt)

Question 17

What are biodiversity hotspots?

Answer 17

areas with high species diversity and impacts from human activities

Question 18

How many biodiversity hotspots are recognized globally?

Answer 18

Conversation International recognizes 35 hotspots around the world

Question 19

Why are biodiversity hotspots important?

Answer 19

Cover only 2% of earth’s land area, but half of plant species and 42% of land vertebrates are endemic to hotspots – they live only in those regions

Question 20

What is Arturo Escobar’s perspective on biodiversity?

Answer 20

• bio diversity not only biological concept - it also has a social meaning
• cultural difference and political autonomy for Indigenous people can be seen as part of biodiveristy

Question 21

What is Fortress conservation?

Answer 21

an approach to conservation that defines protected areas and restricts human activities inside them

e.g. US National Parks

Question 22

What is the significance of the Fortress conservation?

Answer 22

• credited with protecting some species and landscapes
  -criticized for social impacts, especially on Native Americans prevented from hunting, fishing and gathering

Question 23

What was the problem with fortress conservation in parks?

Answer 23

• in NA and Africa, those designating parks saw areas sparsely populated by humans
• both cases, thriving Indigenous populations had been wiped out
• NA: human diseases
• Africa: cattle disease and human disease

Question 24

How did the tsetse fly transform African landscapes?

Answer 24

• Rinderpest (cattle disease) wiped out livestock
• without grazing, vegetation grew higher, improving conditions for the tsetse fly (transmit sleeping sickness)
• when people + cattle tried to move back to areas where they used to live, they couldn’t due to sleeping sickness
• colonialist assumed landscapes had always been full of wildlife and empty of people + created parks reinforcing this pattern

Question 25

What was the problems with fortress conservation for people and wildlife?

Answer 25

• fortress conservation enforces the idea that people and wildlife should live separately
• protected areas have often worsened poverty (cost and benefits of conservation are unequally distributed)
• fencing wildlife in and people out can harm both (animals need to migrate, people need forest resources to live)

-without fences, animals don’t stay inside lines on a map (human-wildlife conflict)

• policing boundaries causes human-human conflicts

Ex. Project Tiger, India

Question 26

What are the alternatives to fortress conservation?

Answer 26

community based conservation

ex. black rhinos in Namibia

• govt transfer wildlife management to local people
• insurance compensate ppl for wildlife dmg
• issued 5 trophy hunting permits/yr with high fees that fund conservation
• black rhino # increase