Why biodiversity is good for our health

Do you know why cone-shelled snails are important? And the polar bears? And the sea sponges? The natural world has gifted us with incalculable health and medical benefits, and probably harbors many more breakthroughs to discover. However, we risk losing these benefits if we continue to degrade the environment.

The UN Conference on Biodiversity, COP25, recently concluded in Montreal with a historic agreement to protect 30% of the planet’s land, coastal zones and inland waters by the end of the decade.

Currently, one million species are threatened with extinction, and if species continue to be lost exponentially, ecosystem functions vital to human health and life will continue to degrade.

Ecosystems provide goods and services that support all life on this planet, including human life.

Although we know a lot about how ecosystems function, they often involve complex processes and are so vast in scale that it would be impossible for humanity to replace them, no matter how much money was spent in the process.

a living laboratory

Most prescription drugs in industrialized countries come from natural compounds produced by plants and animals. One billion people in the developing world depend on traditional medicinal plants for primary health care.

Many nature cures are familiar: painkillers such as morphine from opium poppies, antimalarial quinine produced from the bark of the South American cinchona tree, or antibiotic penicillin generated by microscopic fungi, while microbes discovered in the soil of RapaNui (Easter Island) fight heart disease by reducing cholesterol.

Other treatments, on the other hand, are not as well known to the general public, but AZT, for example, one of the first drugs against the AIDS virus, came from a large shallow-water sponge that lives in the Caribbean, which is being the same sponge that produced antivirals to treat herpes and serves as the source of the first marine-derived cancer drug licensed in the United States.

Biodiversity is good for our health. (Image: UNDP)

A crucial reservoir for future treatments

To date, only about 1.9 million species have been identified, many of which have barely been studied. It is believed that there are millions more that are completely unknown.

Everything alive is the result of a complex “living laboratory” that has been conducting its own clinical tests since life began approximately 3.7 billion years ago.

This natural pharmaceutical library is home to countless cures yet to be discovered, if we don’t destroy them before they are recognized.

Consider the polar bear, now classified as an endangered species. As its arctic habitat melts due to climate change, the world’s largest land predator has become an icon of the dangers posed by rising temperatures around the globe.

But they could also be an icon for health.

Solutions to diabetes, osteoporosis and kidney failure

Polar bears have naturally developed “solutions” to problems like type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and kidney failure, all of which afflict millions of people.

For example, polar bears accumulate large amounts of fat before hibernating. However, despite having fat to a degree that would be life-threatening to humans, they are apparently immune to type 2 diabetes.

In addition, they remain immobile for months, but their bones remain unchanged.

And, while they’re inactive, they don’t urinate, but their kidneys aren’t damaged. If we understood and could reproduce how bears manage their fat, care for their bones, and detoxify waste while they hibernate, we could treat, and perhaps even prevent, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and kidney failure in humans.

Just to give us an idea of ​​what their benefit could be, if we can uncover these secrets before the polar bears disappear, just point out that:

-currently, 13% of the world’s population is clinically obese, and the number of patients with type 2 diabetes is projected to rise to 700 million by 2045

-over the course of their lives, one in three women over the age of 50 and one in five men will experience osteoporosis-related bone fractures

-In the United States alone, each year kidney failure kills more than 82,000 people and costs the economy $35 million a year

Coral reefs and morphine

Another example is that of coral reefs, sometimes called “rainforests of the sea” due to their high biodiversity.

Among the innumerable inhabitants of these reefs are the so-called conical shell snails. It is a predatory mollusk that hunts with darts that contain 200 different toxic compounds.

The drug Ziconotide copies exactly a toxic peptide from one of these snails, and is not only 1,000 times more potent than morphine, but also prevents the tolerance and dependence that opioids can cause.

To date, of all 700 cone-shelled snail species, only six have been examined in detail, and of the thousands of unique compounds they harbor, only 100 have been studied in detail.

Coral reefs and all of their occupants are being destroyed at alarming rates.

Not just a chemical pantry

Providing chemical compounds is not the only way that biodiversity is crucial to our health. An amazingly wide range of species has helped revolutionize medical knowledge.

The zebrafish, for example, has been fundamental to our knowledge of how organs, especially the heart, are formed; while a microscopic roundworm has led to an understanding of “programmed cell death” (apoptosis) which not only regulates organ growth but, when disrupted, can cause cancer; and fruit flies and bacterial species were the main contributors to the research that mapped the human genome.

All this illustrates that there may be undiscovered species that possess attributes that make them particularly suitable for studying and treating human diseases. If these species are lost, their secrets will be lost with them.

What is driving the current loss of biodiversity?

The main factor currently driving biodiversity loss is habitat destruction on land, streams, rivers, lakes and oceans.

Unless we significantly reduce our use of fossil fuels, climate change alone is anticipated to threaten the extinction of about a quarter or more of all species on earth by 2050, surpassing even habitat loss as the largest. threat to life on earth.

Species in the oceans and in freshwater are also at great risk from the effects of climate change, especially those like corals that live in ecosystems sensitive to warming temperatures, although the extent of that risk has yet to be calculated.

Healthy planet, healthy humans.

Biodiversity losses influence human health in many ways. Ecosystem malfunction and biodiversity loss have major impacts on the emergence, transmission, and spread of many human infectious diseases.

The pathogens of 60% of human infectious diseases, for example malaria and COVID, are zoonotic, meaning they have entered our bodies after living in other animals.

The HIV virus that causes AIDS, and which has killed more than 40 million people to date, probably jumped from chimpanzees. Overall, there may be 10,000 zoonotic viruses circulating silently in nature today that are capable of passing to us from other species.

This makes the health approach a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach that brings together various intergovernmental agencies, governments, and local and regional actors to address human health and environmental health together in order to minimize the risk of future disease.

Selfishly, if the natural world is healthy, we will be too.

planetary life insurance

A key challenge for organizations working to preserve biodiversity is convincing policy makers, and the general public, that humans and our health are fundamentally dependent on the animals, plants and microbes with which we share this small planet.

We are totally dependent on the goods and services provided by the natural world, and we have no choice but to preserve it.

The World Economic Forum estimates that half of the world’s Gross Domestic Product, some 44 trillion dollars, depends on nature.

Globally, annual revenue for the pharmaceutical industry is $1.27 trillion, and each year, healthcare in the United States costs more than $4 trillion.

By comparison, the amount of money needed to close the biodiversity conservation finance gap is only $700 billion a year. For the health and life insurance of the planet, that figure isn’t just a bargain, it’s a necessity.

Humans cannot exist outside of nature. Protecting the plants, animals and microbes with which we share our small planet is vitally important, as it is these organisms that create the support systems that make all life on Earth, including human life, possible. . (Fountain: UN News)