Policy News
Wiping nature's hard drive
A new book explains how human health will suffer from a decline in biodiversity as potential medicines are lost and food production takes a hit.
The planet's nature-based capital is under siege, with overexploitation of resources, pollution, and climate change all taking their toll. This is the message of a new book that describes how a range of medical treatments could vanish unless the world acts to reverse the present trend of biodiversity loss.
The book, Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, describes how over the past 50 years the planet has lost one-fifth of its topsoil, one-fifth of its agricultural land, almost 90% of its large commercial marine fisheries, and one-third of its forests. Yet medicines, biomedical research, and the production of food on land and in the oceans all depend on biodiversity.
People need to understand how all environmental changes ultimately affect biological systems, including humans, says the book's co-editor Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
At risk are different avenues of medical research and treatments, pharmaceuticals, and diagnostic tests. For example, many decongestants come from plants, as does the well-known anticancer drug Taxol. Research on a new generation of antibiotics or new treatments for bone diseases and kidney failure may never come to fruition because many of the life forms that might yield these medicines could be gone before scientists unlock their secrets.
One example is the southern gastric-brooding frog (Rheobatrachus silus). Now thought to be extinct, the baby frogs grew inside their mothers' stomachs by producing a substance that inhibited the production of acid and enzymes. Studies of this substance might have led to insights into preventing and treating peptic ulcers.
"We are currently in the process of wiping nature's hard drive—at a tremendous pace and without any hope of restoring the data once it is lost," said Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's minister of the environment. "We have to comprehend the extent of the damage we are doing to ourselves so that we can bring about a change of course."
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