Biodiversity plays a key role in maintaining ecosystem resilience by providing redundancy and adaptability. As it declines, ecosystems become more fragile, raising not only the risk of widespread species loss but also the risk of human extinction, given our dependence on functioning ecosystems.
Is it true that humans depend on functioning ecosystems, in the sense avoiding extinction—or even in the sense of >5% of human lives relying on them?
A lot of the examples[1] I’ve seen are doubtful, e.g. pollination is sometimes given as an example of an ecosystem service, but staple crops like wheat are wind-pollinated, and domesticated bees are used for the crops that require insect pollination.
Edit: More on the pollination example: Yields would decline 5-10% without pollinators,[2] and “Non-bees performed 25–50% of the total number of flower visits [...] pollination services rendered by non-bees [are] similar to those provided by bees.”[3] So if you were to naively combine these, it might mean that yields would decline 2.5-5% if wild pollinators disappeared.
Is it true that humans depend on functioning ecosystems, in the sense avoiding extinction—or even in the sense of >5% of human lives relying on them?
A lot of the examples[1] I’ve seen are doubtful, e.g. pollination is sometimes given as an example of an ecosystem service, but staple crops like wheat are wind-pollinated, and domesticated bees are used for the crops that require insect pollination.
Edit: More on the pollination example:
Yields would decline 5-10% without pollinators,[2] and “Non-bees performed 25–50% of the total number of flower visits [...] pollination services rendered by non-bees [are] similar to those provided by bees.”[3] So if you were to naively combine these, it might mean that yields would decline 2.5-5% if wild pollinators disappeared.
Such as in this Claude Sonnet 4 chat
https://ourworldindata.org/pollinator-dependence
Rader, R., et al. (2016). “Non-bee insects are important contributors to global crop pollination.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(1), 146-151. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517092112