Green Week 2006, the open doors week of the Directorate General of Environment was dedicated to biodiversity to attract attention to the alarming rates of disappearance of species on earth. Green Week 2005 was dedicated to climate change, attracting attention to global warming - on average some 0,7-2°C - and the kick start of the Kyoto Trading Mechanism where CO2 became money. (Carbon Is Money ... get it ? ;) )

Press: Biodiversity loss "as serious as climate change" 30/05/06 The threat to humanity and the planet posed by biodiversity loss is as great as the dangers presented by climate change, EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas claimed on Tuesday. Mr Dimas was opening the European commission's annual Green Week event in Brussels, which this year is devoted to biological diversity. "Stopping the loss of biodiversity and limiting climate change are the two most important challenges facing the planet," he said. "In one fundamental way biodiversity loss is an even more serious threat, because the degradation of ecosystems often reaches a point of no return - and because extinction is forever."

Interlinkages

BioDiversity has a main function in the regulation of precipitation and (drink)water-quality, soil-structure and temperature and therefore in various ways regulates the climate. Furthermore, biodiversity plays an important role air-filtering and therefore air-quality, and stores large amounts of carbon. Biodiversity is therefore a necessary condition for the climate to be functioning in a 'natural' way. However, biodiversity loss due to human activities is one of today's largest environmental problems.

Not only biodiversity is affected by interventions in the landscape, but also interventions in the air, increasing emissions cause the average global temperature to rise more rapidly than ever before inducing also an unstable climate involving extreme draughts or precipitation at unexpected moments and places (see ClimateChange). A few degrees difference may seem little for species like mammals (including humans) that can regulate their own body temperature. However biodiversity (amongst which ecosystems like forests) develop and grow according to the micro-climate present at specific places. Small organisms at the basis of the food-chain like micro-organisms or fungi grow because of specific a-biotic conditions. Their presence in turn creates (dis)opportunities for species higher in the food chain. Small changes in the climate affect in this way whole ecosystems/biodiversity (more info: climate change and biodiversity: observed and projected impacts). Climate change does therefore not only affect human's direct environment, but affects also and in particular that of biodiversity, which in fact has a climate-regulatory function itself!

(Micro-)climatic conditions influence biodiversity; biodiversity influences/regulates the climate. Humans are affecting both the climate (through industry carbon emissions) and biodiversity (mainly through land-use change), while they depend (particularly in the long-run) on a stable condition of both. The need for regulation of (human intervention in) the climate and biodiversity has become evident in a multitude of policies and multilateral environmental agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1994).

Integrating the two Main Environmental Issues: Background of the BD in CC Think Tank