Impacts of Climate Change on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Current Trends

Climate Change

In general, Climate change represent a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns and that change persists for an extended period (ex. for decades together). Factors that influence climatic variations are termed as climate forcing or forcing mechanisms which can be both internal (and natural to the climatic system itself) and external.

Of all the forcing mechanisms, the anthropogenic influences on climate change are considered more critical and relevant in the context of environmental policies at both national and global levels (Rabindranath etal., 1998). Anthropogenic climate changes often referred to as “global warming.” The term “global warming” became synonymous with climate change induced by human activity. However, there are intricate differences between global warming and climate change. The former term refers to surface temperature increases while climate change includes global warming and everything else that can be affected by increasing levels of greenhouse gases.

Biological Diversity and Biological Resources

Though these two expressions are used in an inter-mingling fashion, they have visible delineations.

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  Biological Diversity: Precise and widely acceptable definition of biological diversity is provided by the treaty of Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as under:

As a matter of fact, this kind of broader definition seeks to encompass the interactions between the human being and the rest of our nature. Nonetheless, it has been customary to consider the biological resource purely from an economic perspective (existing, potential or perceived) only. The following chart attempts to capture well known economic applications of biological diversity- specifically in the context of botanical species.

Figure 1.

Showing the known uses of biological resources

Source: (Bowker, 2000)