TIếng Anh 12 - Listen and read 47 protecting biodiversity the other environmental emergency

Nội dung text: TIếng Anh 12 - Listen and read 47 protecting biodiversity the other environmental emergency

1. When IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science­Policy Platform on Biodiversity LISTEN AND READ 47 and Ecosystem Services, similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Protecting biodiversity Change) published its assessment of the state of global biodiversity in 2019, it THE OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL EMERGENCY offered a sobering picture. Roughly 1 million animal and plant species were deemed to be at risk of extinction, more than at any other point in human history. Loss of biodiversity poses as great a risk to humanity as climate change. These included many that are used in farming. At least 9% of the 6,200 breeds Technology has a growing role to play in monitoring, modelling and of domesticated mammals that humans eat, or use to produce food, had become extinct by 2016, and at least 1,000 more are threatened. More than one­third of protecting ecosystems, writes Catherine Brahic continental land area and nearly three­quarters of freshwater resources are used HUMAN SOCIETIES depend on healthy ecosystems. People consume their to produce crops or livestock, but environmental degradation has damaged the products in the shape of fish, meat, crops, timber and fibres such as cotton and land’s ability to support these activities. And one­third of marine fish stocks silk. Medicines may be directly harvested from the natural world or inspired by were being unsustainably exploited in 2015. molecules and mechanisms found within it. The ecosystems that crops depend The biodiversity crisis poses as great a risk to human societies as climate upon are regulated by living things. Through photosynthesis, trees and other change. Yet it has a fraction of the public profile. In part that is because the loss plants take in carbon and pump out oxygen. In doing so they remove roughly 11 of biodiversity cannot be neatly quantified, as climate change can, into parts per billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, equivalent to million of carbon dioxide, or degrees above pre­industrial average temperatures. 27% of what human industry and agriculture emits (the oceans absorb a further And the webs that link species within and across ecosystems are even more 10 billion tonnes). complex than the processes that drive climate change. The services that ecosystems provide to humanity depend, inmturn, on there Understanding a problem, however, is a necessary step towards solving it. And being a diversity of living things. More than 75% of global food­crop types, that is where technology can help. This Technology Quarterly will consider its including coffee, cocoa and almonds, are pollinated by animals. The complex role in monitoring, preserving and restoring ecosystems and species. Only by web underpinning every food chain and ecosystem means that the narrow range measuring the state of ecosystems can their health be assessed, losses be of species that humans eat and exploit cannot be sustained without the existence quantified, and the effectiveness of interventions be evaluated. of a much greater diversity of animals, plants and bacteria. As well as monitoring biodiversity, technology can also be deployed to protect More diverse forests store more carbon than monocultures. Skipjack tuna it. And in some cases it may even be able to reverse losses, by bringing extinct makes up roughly half of the global tuna catch for human consumption. As species back from the dead. Ironically, it is humanity’s use of technology, young animals, they eat zooplankton, which is to say very small floating whether in simple forms such as chainsaws or dragnets, or more complex ones animals like tunicates, ctenophores and small crustaceans as well as the larvae such as modern agriculture and transportation, that is chiefly responsible for of larger animals. As adults, they eat smaller fish, squid and crustaceans. To biodiversity loss. The challenge now is to deploy it so that it is not just part of conserve the skipjack, all this diversity in its food chain must also be conserved. the problem, but part of the solution.  [The Economist US, 19.06.2021] Since the 1990s, alarmed by studies showing rapid declines in animal and plant species around the globe, ecologists have talked of an impending mass Notes: extinction. It would be the sixth in the Earth’s history, but one unlike any that - to pollinate: thụ phấn - zooplankton: loài phù du has come before. Surveys show that the loss of biodiversity is the result of a - tunicates: loài có vỏ (sò, hến, trai ) combination of factors: climate change, pollution, human exploitation of land, - ctenophores: loài phiến lược (= tấm bơi, như cá đuối) sea, plants and animals, and the displacement of some species into new - crustaceans: loài giáp xác territories where they play havoc with existing ecosystems. Uniquely in Earth’s history, each of these drivers of ecological change is caused by a single species: Homo sapiens. Thẩm Tâm Vy, 2021 LISTEN ANDREAD 47