Loss of biodiversity poses as great a risk to humanity as climate change

HUMAN SOCIETIES depend on healthy ecosystems. People consume their products in the shape of fish, meat, crops, timber and fibres such as cotton and silk. Medicines may be directly harvested from the natural world or inspired by molecules and mechanisms found within it. The ecosystems that crops depend upon are regulated by living things. Through photosynthesis, trees and other plants take in carbon and pump out oxygen. In doing so they remove roughly 11bn tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, equivalent to 27% of what human industry and agriculture emits (the oceans absorb a further 10bn tonnes).