Italian Institute for Environmental
Protection and Research

Search

Biodiversity

ape.jpg

The biodiversity can be defined as the life richness on the earth planet: it means the millions of plants, animals and microorganisms, the genes which they contain, the complex ecosystems that they compose in the biosphere. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 1, proposed during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, defines biodiversity as the variety and variability among living organisms and ecological systems in which they live, highlighting that it includes diversity at different level, such as genetic, specific and ecosystem. This variety does not only refer to the shape and structure of living beings, but also includes diversity in terms of abundance, distribution and interactions between the different components of the ecosystem. In conclusion, biodiversity also includes human cultural diversity, which also suffer the negative effects of these factors that act on the genetic biodiversity.