Why is biodiversity important?

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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

15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Look at bananas for example. Because of a loss of biodiversity in bananas, a single fungus is now threatening to their extinction. If there were multiple strains of bananas which weren’t t susceptible to the fungus still around, biodiversity, banana extinction wouldn’t be a serious concern.

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