Our biodiversity provides the life supporting systems that enable all organisms, including

humans, to survive. Our wetlands purify water and help prevent flooding and drought.
Indigenous forests provide carbon sinks and purify the air we breathe. Forests also provide
products such as timber, fuel, food and medicines. Our farming, forestry and horticulture
depend on the resources and services provided by biological systems.

No life without diversity!

Biodiversity; Photo: Miguel Schmitter/Julia Hamacher

Nature, with its biological diversity of ecosystems, animal and plant species and of course the
gene pool is the basis of all life on our planet Earth. The interaction of plants, animals and
microorganisms with the atmosphere, air, water, rock and soil is a prerequisite for the diverse
ecosystem services that sustain life and from which we human beings also benefit. In the face
of numerous threats, in particular the intensive use of resources, environmental pollution and
global climate change, the protection of biological diversity all over the world is one of the
most urgent and important tasks now. We have arrived at a point where human-induced
ecosystem degradation is further exacerbated by global climate change and vice versa: The
loss of biodiversity reduces the resilience and adaptation capacities of ecosystems to climate
change and can lead to the functional loss of forests and coral reefs as carbon stores, for
example – and such losses also accelerate climate change. The effects of climate change, such
as periods of drought, heavy rain and floods can disrupt the equilibrium of weakened
ecosystems, causing them to lose their ecosystem functions – a deadly cycle of events.