The "ESG Innovation and High-quality Enterprise Development Forum" hosted by Yabuli Forum was held online on June 14, and Ho Kwok-chun, Director of the Jockey Club Institute for Global Corporate Sustainability at the University of Hong Kong, delivered a speech.

We are now in what scientists call the sixth mass extinction, and nearly 500 species of vertebrates have gone extinct in the wild over the past 200 years, Ho said.

Why is biodiversity important? He Guojun explained that in general, biodiversity provides three very important types of services and values. The first category is that it can directly provide our society with the supply of ecological products, such as some of our raw materials, food, clean water, etc.;

The second type is to provide a regulation and maintenance function in our ecosystem, including regulating the local and macro climate, affecting the environment of diseases, etc.; The third category is its cultural value, for example, a species like the giant panda provides us with very high cultural value in addition to its own ecological value.

He believes that among these three types of functions and values, the supply of ecological products and cultural value are relatively easy to perceive and calculate, but the regulation and maintenance functions of species for ecology are very difficult to quantify, and the difficulties mainly come from two aspects. First, the effect is usually far away from our immediate experience, so we may not think of it. The second is that many of the effects are not visible in the short term, so longer data is needed to support them.

In addition, he told the story of wolves, vultures, urban forests, and more to illustrate how the disappearance of key species affects human production and life. It can be seen that the impact of biodiversity on humans is often very subtle and even unexpected, so the loss of biodiversity may have a relatively large and lasting impact on our society.

Source: Insight Economy