Lecture

Biodiversity and Infrastructure: Eco-services

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Description

This lecture explores the concept of biodiversity and its importance in providing ecosystem services, such as food, climate regulation, water regulation, and pollination. It delves into the economic valuation of these services and the policies needed to safeguard them. Additionally, it discusses the impact of infrastructure on natural resources, highlighting the need for sustainable financing and policies for a circular economy.

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Building expertise on developing sustainable and resilient infrastructure

Drawing on the most recent developments in the area of social and environmental science as well as the expertise of practitioners this course will help you to understand what constitutes sustainable and resilient Infrastructure and teaches you how to achieve sustainable and resilient development goals through infrastructure development. In this context you will be introduced to SuRe®, an international voluntary standard for infrastructure and you will learn how SuRe® helps to make infrastructure more sustai

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Related concepts (31)

Biodiversity

Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic (genetic variability), species (species diversity), and ecosystem (ecosystem diversity) level. Biodiversity is not distributed evenly on Earth; it is usually greater in the tropics as a result of the warm climate and high primary productivity in the region near the equator. Tropical forest ecosystems cover less than 10% of earth's surface and contain about 90% of the world's species.

Ecosystem service

Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystems, and aquatic ecosystems. These ecosystems, functioning in healthy relationships, offer such things as natural pollination of crops, clean air, extreme weather mitigation, and human mental and physical well-being.

Biodiversity loss

Biodiversity loss includes the worldwide extinction of different species, as well as the local reduction or loss of species in a certain habitat, resulting in a loss of biological diversity. The latter phenomenon can be temporary or permanent, depending on whether the environmental degradation that leads to the loss is reversible through ecological restoration/ecological resilience or effectively permanent (e.g. through land loss).

Measurement of biodiversity

Conservation biologists have designed a variety of objective means to empirically measure biodiversity. Each measure of biodiversity relates to a particular use of the data. For practical conservationists, measurements should include . For others, a more economically defensible definition should allow the ensuring of continued possibilities for both adaptation and future use by humans, assuring environmental sustainability. As a consequence, biologists argue that this measure is likely to be associated with the variety of genes.

Ecosystem

An ecosystem (or ecological system) consists of all the organisms and the physical environment with which they interact. These biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Energy enters the system through photosynthesis and is incorporated into plant tissue. By feeding on plants and on one another, animals play an important role in the movement of matter and energy through the system. They also influence the quantity of plant and microbial biomass present.

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