Biodiversity and Health

Achim Steiner, former Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, describes our relationship to the living world in these terms: “Across cultures, humans inherently value nature. The magic of seeing fireflies flickering long into the night is immense. We draw energy and nutrients from nature. We find sources of food, medicine, livelihoods, and innovation in nature. Our well-being fundamentally depends on nature.” 
Over and above the beauty of the natural world that enchants us and the diversity of species that fascinates us, it is important that we acknowledge more explicitly our structural dependency on biodiversity: it is a necessary condition for our existence, to the extent that preserving our societies is inextricably tied to preserving the living world.

The Strategic Plan for Biological Diversity 2011-2020 and Aichi Biodiversity Targets formulated in 2010 by the Convention on Biological Diversity were intended to lay the groundwork for international action to protect ecosystems vital to human health. The failure of these targets, particularly target 14 on restoring and protecting ecosystems that contribute to health, access to water and well-being, underscores our collective inability to stem the decline of these fundamental ecological services. Continuing along the same trajectory leads to on-going reductions in the ability of ecosystems to provide these services, with disproportionate impacts on economically disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, confirming that biodiversity loss is a major structural determinant for human health, over and above the environmental issues it raises.

The unbreakable ties between ecosystem stability and human health mean that simply noting the damage is not enough: we need to take action to restore the living world. Preserving biodiversity requires coordinated action at every level underpinned by growing public awareness. In France, mobilization against the proposed Duplomb Act, which sought to overturn the ban on acetamiprid, a pesticide banned in France since 2018, showed that there is now a better understanding of the risks that harming
pollinator populations poses to human health and food security, revealing a shift in the public debate surrounding biodiversity and the degree to which humanity depends on it.