Environmental Impacts and Threats to Biodiversity

Biodiversity conservation is critical for sustainable development—as the natural biological underpinning that supports human life and well-being. Threats-based analyses can help determine the extent of pressures in a given area of biodiversity and offer science-based strategies and approaches to address the root causes of these threats. USAID lists five primary direct threats to global biodiversity: conversion of natural habitat to croplands, urban areas or other human-dominated ecosystems; overexploitation of valuable species; introduction of invasive species; pollution of water, land and air; and macro-environmental change such as climate change, desertification and other environmental change originating from outside the natural habitat. In addition are human-induced threats such as natural population growth; human migration; unsustainable agricultural practices; inappropriate livelihood strategies and weak governance structures. The documents in this section provide more details on the biodiversity threats and environmental impacts.

Improving Access to Family Planning Can Promote Food Security in a Changing Climate

2012 | MEASURE Evaluation PRH | 4

A growing body of evidence indicates that climate change is decreasing the productivity of many crops around the world, thus exacerbating existing food security challenges. Ensuring sufficient food for a growing world population in the context of climate change will require innovative technologies and strategies to boost agricultural yields and improve access to nutritious foods for the world’s poorest people.

2012 | MEASURE Evaluation PRH | 38

2010 | World Conservation Society | 75

The Wildlife Conservation Society organized a December, 2009 forum to explore the question, “Can health be economically quantified as an ecosystem service, correlated with ecosystem intactness and if so, under what circumstances?” To provide for a richer discussion, WCS compiled an illustrative (not exhaustive) set of annotated readings exploring five dimensions of this question.

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A call for a family planning surge

2012 | International Centre for Reproductive Health | 5

In 1994, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo, Egypt, laid out in its Programme of Action an impressive and ambitious set of goals for improving sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) all over the world, by the target date of 2015 (International Conference on Population and Development 1994). One of these goals was the provision of universal access to a full range of safe and reliable family -planning methods.

2009 | Annual Reviews | 19

Large-scale anthropogenic changes to the natural environment, including land-use change, climate change, and the deterioration of ecosystem services, are all accelerating. These changes are interacting to generate five major emerging public health threats that endanger the health and well-being of hundreds of millions of people. These threats include increasing exposure to infectious disease, water scarcity, food scarcity, natural disasters, and population displacement. Taken together, they may represent the greatest public health challenge humanity has faced.

2008 | SCOPE Series | pp. 5

URI_BioEcosystemServices.pdf

In this world the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem services in critical to human health and welfare. The climate change wild card adds insecurity as to what biotic resources may be needed for human adaptation to food supply disruptions, ecosystem alterations, shifting disease patterns, and other health threats. This document has explored the effects of biodiversity on four major determinants of human health and well-being: ecosystem services, constraints of infectious disease, medicinal resources, and quality of life.

2007 | Population Environment Vol 28 | pp. 223-236

HumanPopEnviroDegradation.pdf

The environmental consequences of increasing human population size are dynamic and nonlinear, not passive and linear. The role of feedbacks, thresholds, and synergies in the interaction of population size and the environment are reviewed here, with examples drawn from climate change, acid deposition, land use, soil degradation, and other global and regional environmental issues. The widely assumed notion that environmental degradation grows in proportion to population size, assuming fixed per capita consumption and fixed modes of production, is shown to be overly optimistic.

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Population and Environment

2007 | Annual Review of Environment and Resources | pp. 345-373

PopandEnviron.pdf

The interactions between human population dynamics and the environment have often been viewed mechanistically. This review elucidates the complexities and contextual specificities of population environment relationships in a number of domains. It explores the ways in which demographers and other social scientists have sought to understand the relationships among a full range of population dynamics (e.g., population size, growth, density, age and sex composition, migration, urbanization, vital rates) and environmental changes.

2007 | Ecological Economics Vol. 62 | pp. 93-101

PovertyHotspots.pdf

In an effort to prioritize conservation efforts, scientists have developed the concept of biodiversity hotspots. Since most hotspots occur in countries where poverty is widespread, the success of conservation efforts depends upon the recognition that poverty can be a significant constraint on conservation, and at the same time conservation is an important component to the alleviation of long-term poverty.

2005 | Conservation Biology

HabitatStatusHumanPop.pdf

Priority setting is an essential component of biodiversity conservation. Existing methods to identify priority areas for conservation have focused almost entirely on biological factors. We suggest a new relative ranking method for identifying priority conservation areas that integrates both biological and social aspects. It is based on the following criteria: the habitat’s status, human population pressure, human efforts to protect habitat, and number of endemic plant and vertebrate species.

2005 | Population Council

Population Council

Sustainability refers to the preservation of human-valued natural capital—the

2003 | Biological Conservation Vol. 109 | pp. 137-149

PrimatesHumanDensities.pdf

IUCN Red List conservation status is apparently judged mainly by assessment of species’ susceptibility to threat. However, risk must often depend also on the threat itself. Therefore, we investigate the value of adding to IUCN’s current criteria a separate index of threat, human density. Human density in the geographic range of Threatened primate species is significantly higher than in the range of Lower Risk species. Thus, Threatened species are both susceptible, and experience more threat. However, the match is far from perfect.

2002 | Population Reference Bureau [PRB]

PRB

Human populations can affect their environment through their natural resource uses and waste production, and in turn these environmental changes can affect the surrounding human communities. This is an 8 page, black and white, letter-size booklet adapted from a wall chart created by the Population Reference Bureau that provides information and data on critical linkages between human beings and the environment. Topics are accompanied by explanatory graphics and maps.

2001 | Population Reference Bureau [PRB]

1_Nash_2001_HealthyPeopleForests_PRB_PNACR715.pdf

This Emerging Policy Issues in Population, Health and Environment brief examines how global deforestation impacts human and ecological health and identifies the underlying causes of deforestation and the role of human population growth. The brief highlights the four main essential causes of human induced deforestation, known as “people, poverty, plunder and policy.” Recommendations for policymakers include ensuring comprehensive consideration of the complex role of population dynamics, including population growth, density and migration.

2001 | Biodiversity Conservation 10 | pp. 1011-1026

HumanDensityAfricanReserves.pdf

Small reserves are especially likely to lose species. Is that because the reserves are small,

2000 | Nature Vol. 404 No. 27 | pp. 91

PopBiodiversityHotspots.pdf

Biologists have identifed 25 areas, called biodiversity hotspots, that are especially rich in endemic species and particularly threatened by human activities. The human population dynamics of these areas, however, are not well quantifed. Here we report estimates of key demographic variables for each hotspot, and for three extensive tropical forest areas1 that are less immediately threatened. We estimate that in 1995 more than 1.1 billion people, nearly 20% of world population, were living within the hotspots, an area covering about 12% of Earth's terrestrial surface.

1999 | Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars | pp. 28

SecondaryCitiesWestAfrica.pdf

Secondary cities in today’s West Africa were rural villages thirty years ago, so their housing, water, sanitation, and public health infrastructures are often very poor or nonexistent. Addressing issues of secondary cities requires new vision, policies, and approaches. Governments must work with local and traditional management systems and structures already in place. This paper describes the concept of environmental health and the related preconditions for disease prevention in secondary cities.

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