Like every 22nd of May, it’s World Biodiversity Day!

Its main purpose is to raise awareness among global citizens about issues related to the conservation of “biodiversity”, a term that refers to all forms of life on Earth: plants, animals, microorganisms, etc. The concept also includes genetic differences within species.

We only know a small part of biodiversity: 1.9 million species are listed in the Catalogue of Life but there are a priori four times more, or 8.7 million! And of these 8.7 million, nearly a million are threatened with extinction, and 75% of the world’s ecosystems are degraded… The 6th mass extinction of biodiversity is underway.

The causes of this worrying degradation are known, and 5 main factors explain these impacts: habitat destruction, overexploitation of species, chemical pollution, climate change, invasive species.

Biodiversity provides a multitude of services to humanity: production of food and medicine, regulation of natural cycles such as water cycles, and carbon (and therefore climate), soil protection… It also fulfills a cultural, even religious role: a source of inspiration for artists, it is also omnipresent in the symbolism of many religions, for example.

According to the UN, current negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystems are expected to undermine the achievement of 80% of the Sustainable Development Goals targets.

The theme of the International Day for Biological Diversity is “From Agreement to Action: Rebuilding Biodiversity”, highlighting the need to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework of December 2022, whose ambition is to reverse the loss of biodiversity by 2050.

And us in all this?

SalvaTerra offers a holistic and multidisciplinary approach to provide advisory support to meet the social, economic and environmental challenges of biodiversity conservation. From the initial diagnosis (floristic and faunal inventories) to the feasibility study or evaluation of conservation projects, we are able to accompany each stage of the projects, mobilizing naturalist experts as well as other expertise in various related fields (climate change, sustainable agriculture, forest management, mapping and remote sensing, etc.).