Why in News?

• Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) was adopted during the COP15 to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD)

Biodiversity and its significance:

• Biodiversity refers to the variety of species present on earth, which are all connected and play a key role in sustaining the balance of ecosystems, and helping humans to coexist.
• Biodiversity is often regarded as “the web of life”.
• According to UNCBD, only around 1.75 million species have been identified so far and it is estimated that there may be around 13 million species existing on earth.
• Biodiversity plays a crucial role in rendering various ecosystem services to humans such as providing food, air, fuel, shelter, building materials, water purification, stabilisation of climate, pollination of plants, and mitigating the adverse impacts of calamities like floods, drought, and extreme weather conditions.

Need for the protection of biodiversity:

• The disruption of critical ecosystems causes serious consequences such as failure of agriculture, irregular climate patterns and cascading losses of species that accelerate the degradation of the earth. As per the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), about 25% of the plants and animals assessed during the 2019 Global Biodiversity Outlook were listed as threatened.
• This indicates that close to one million species are facing the risk of extinction.

Challenges to protecting biodiversity:

• A review on the economics of biodiversity by a Cambridge professor commissioned by the U. K. government reported that the current model of economic growth would require about 1.6 earths to maintain current lifestyles. According to the professor, the key challenge to protecting and expanding biodiversity conservation is the use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the chief determinant of development. Few economists believe that the GDP is based on a faulty application of economics that excludes the depreciation of valuable assets such as nature which is degraded by the continuous exploitation of resources.