Translations:AY Honors/Biodiversity/Answer Key/27/en

The new term “biodiversity” energized some fundamental ideas developed over the previous decade (or longer). Precursor terms like “biotic diversity” had helped to communicate why we should be concerned about the loss of variety, arising from the species extinction crisis (later, the “biodiversity crisis”). This recognized the idea that living variation itself has current value, because it provides the opportunity for future benefits for humanity. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN 1980) summarized these early ideas about variety as providing both “insurance” and “investment” benefits. The focus on the variety of life was echoed later in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) definition of “biodiversity”, and in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The IPBES conceptual framework, describing “nature’s contributions to people” (Díaz et al. 2018), includes the maintenance of options for future generations that is provided by biodiversity as variety (see Faith forthcoming).