The institute had a couple of dozen long-term projects in the disaster area, a biodiversity hot spot that encompasses 22 nature reserves.
Gregor Hodgson, founder and director of Reef Check, said that while we are no doubt facing a "global biodiversity disaster," he prefers to look at the glass as half full.
Countries need to restore land to produce commodities, like food, fuel, or fiber that can improve local livelihoods and reduce poverty or be sold to finance restoration activities; however, they also need to restore landscapes to produce public goods like watershed protection, disaster risk reduction, and biodiversity conservation.
In the Philippines children worked together with adults to restore degraded mangrove ecosystems, resulting in livelihood gains, protection of spawning grounds for fisheries, biodiversity gains, disaster protection from typhoon winds and storm surges, adaptation to climate change impacts, and the removal of atmospheric greenhouse gases that cause climate change (Tanner et al. 2009).
With accelerating climate change, and its associated impacts on livelihood opportunities, disasters, food prices, health, biodiversity, and the risk of conflict, coupled with increasing resource consumption, it would be strange indeed if these challenges were not embedded in the post-2015 development goals.
The GEOSS portal is a large metadata base service containing resources of agriculture, biodiversity, climate, disasters, ecosystems, energy, health, water as well as weather data.
Greenhouse gases are directly implicated in the rise of average global temperature over the last century, which has widespread effects on ocean levels, biodiversity, crop production, natural disasters, and other aspects of the ecosystem [2].
In the more adverse "disaster" scenario — which entails vast deforestation, dramatic biodiversity declines and increasing extreme weather — the global index falls by 15 percent, with the deepest losses felt in poor regions.
A national moratorium on peat clearing must be installed to prevent further disasters with massive impacts on people and biodiversity.
Biodiversity can protect against costly disasters.
