Genuine question. I was talking to someone recently and they asked me this and while I had some answers (mentioned below), I didn’t have confidence in my answers.
I know climate change is a threat to biodiversity and that it’s important to preserve it but I was never told why biodiversity is important. Is it to keep ecosystems in check (I feel like this is probably one of the most important reasons)? Is it to just give humans a bunch of species to look at and appreciate? Is it to ensure that if the human population died, some forms of life would remain that would be fit for whatever catastrophe affected human populations and keep life going?
Is it all of these things? Any other reasons?
Thank you!
In: Biology
There are lots of reasons why biodiversity is important, but I haven’t seen an important one mentioned yet.
It’s import because we have humans have decided to value it. There are species of no ecological importance (Death Valley pupfish are classic example) that we conserve because we value biodiversity for it’s own sake.
We value the continued existence of species for their own sake, not necessarily because they provide value to us.
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