When biodiversity has a problem, humanity has a problem. Biodiversity is the living fabric of our planet. It underpins human well-being and its rapid decline threatens ecosystems and society alike. May 22 is the International Day for Biological Diversity [IDB] established by the United Nations in 2000 during the official adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity, in Nairobi. It’s an occasion to celebrate the richness of life on our planet and the vital importance of preserving it. .
This year’s theme of “Acting Locally for Global Impact” highlights that halting and reversing biodiversity loss on a global scale depends on actions taken at the tier of neighbourhoods and individuals. Major changes often begin on a small, local scale, and more than ever conservation success depends on the readiness of communities and governments to work together at a grassroots level.
Biological resources are the pillars of civilisation, but the loss of biodiversity threatens everything that we rely on, including our personal health. While there is a growing recognition that biological diversity is a global asset of irreplaceable value, an enormous number of species are being significantly hindered by human activity. As the international community is called to re-examine our relationship to the natural world; despite all our technological advances we are completely dependent on functional and vibrant ecosystems for our way of life. Applying a whole-of-society approach includes enlisting, enabling and empowering and the contributions of actors (other than national governments) at the local level – including indigenous peoples and communities, cities, authorities, women and youth groups, businesses and financial institutions, and the mesh of civil organisations – all contributing towards biodiversity conservation.
Scientists estimate that there are at least 8 million species of plants and animals living on earth today. The ecosystems in which these species live are incredibly complex and every piece of it depends on the others – adversely impacted by habitat loss, pollution, urbanisation, natural resource exploitation and climate change. About half of the world’s Gross Domestic Product [GDP] is dependent on natural resources, while nature provides at least USD 125 trillion worth of services annually. According to the latest global assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services [IPBES], human activities are driving biodiversity loss at an unprecedented rate – though also indicating that solutions do exist and that it’s not too late to act. This year’s goal is to connect individual initiatives with the 23 global targets outlined in the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework [KMGBF]. The framework has set objectives for 2030 to stop and reverse the loss of nature: restoring 30 percent of degraded ecosystems, conserve 30 percent of land, waters and seas, reducing the settlement of invasive alien species by 50 percent, and mobilising USD $200 billion per year for biodiversity, by the time this decade is out. In aid of this, the Convention on Biological Diversity [CBD] pursues three main objectives: the conservation of biological diversity; the sustainable use of its components; and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of these genetic resources.
Unfortunately, the negative human impact on biodiversity has reached an unprecedented scale. About 75 percent of the terrestrial environment and 66 percent of the marine environment has been significantly altered by our actions. Approximately 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, with current negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystem loss undermining the progress towards our Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs].
For this year’s IDB, South Africa is hosting a global flagship event. The first United Nations member state requested to offer the official consultative conference by the Secretariat of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity; the gathering highlights how local, indigenous knowledge and sustainable agriculture supports climate resilience and food security. This is particularly conspicuous as fertiliser shortages harshly affect hard-hit African communities due to the ongoing armed conflict around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. South Africa is broadly recognised as one of the world’s most biologically diverse countries – with relatively high species richness, endemism and globally important ecosystems. This event has come at a critical time as South Africa finalises the revision of its National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan [NBSAP] 2026 – 2035, the country’s principal instrument for implementing the CBD at the national level. The updated NBSAP aims to align with the KMGBF’s goals and will serve as the main national vehicle to translate global ambitions into concrete, measurable actions – mandating a shift towards a whole-of-society approach. These initiatives demonstrate that biodiversity conservation is central to resilience, food and water security, tourism, job creation and sustainable economic growth.
Over the past 20 years, South Africa’s Biodiversity Stewardship Programme has secured approximately 2.76 million hectares across 469 sites, accounting for around 90 percent of terrestrial protected area expansion since the promulgation of the National Environmental Management: Protected Areas Act. Through biodiversity stewardship, communities and landowners are playing a direct role in conserving ecosystems, protecting water sources, restoring landscapes and creating opportunities for sustainable livelihoods. Recently CapeNature reported that 20 new nature reserves have been integrated into the Western Cape province alone over the past year, increasing its protected area network by 81,715 hectares from the Garden Route to the Cederber.
Africa is one of the most biodiverse continents and South Africa is home to the Cape Floral Kingdom – both the smallest and richest of the six floristic regions of the world. At the same time there are over 750 invasive alien plant species in South Africa, with around 380 alien taxa confirmed to be aggressively spreading in the wild, listed by the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act [NEMBA]. In a 2016 report, the United Nations Environment Programme wrote: “Africa is immensely rich in biodiversity. Its living organisms comprise around a quarter of global biodiversity and it supports the earth’s largest intact assemblages of large mammals, which roam freely in many countries. There are many examples of success and innovation in the conservation of Africa’s biodiversity, yet Africa is also experiencing unprecedented rates of population growth, urbanization and agricultural development, which create immense challenges in reconciling human well-being with environmental and economic prosperity.”
Putting a Number on Biodiversity
Since the first designation in 1976 there are currently 784 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves globally, across 142 countries and 6 continents, covering more than 5 percent of the Earth’s land surface. In South Africa there are 10 biosphere reserves, with 5 of these in the Western Cape. The Gouritz Cluster Biosphere Reserve [GCBR] along the Garden Route is the largest in the country, high in endemic plant species and uniquely the only place in the world where three biodiversity hotspots converge. Serving the needs of the GCBR, the Friends of the Biosphere connects businesses, volunteers and community groups through financial support and nature-positive collaborations on environmental awareness, education, restoration, alien clearing and conservation efforts.
Says Gill Simpson, Executive Director of the Wild Rescue nature reserve, “Scientifically proven, this region supported a wide variety of species going back to the height of the Blombos Cave occupation as far as 100,000 years ago, with the earliest known human artworks depicting the area’s various animals. Our rich diversity of fauna and flora persists to this day and many indigenous plant species have great medicinal and nutritional value. However, Hessequa Municipality is not immune to the global drivers of biodiversity loss and greater efforts need to be made to manage and conserve our beautiful species, in order to prevent their extinction.”
South Africa is home to incredible diversity for a land that only occupies 2 percent of the world’s terrestrial surface. It’s officially ranked as one of the world’s “megadiverse“ nations with approximately 67,000 animal species, over 21,000 plant species and exceptional rates of endemism – largely credited to the Cape Floristic Region, the Succulent Karoo, and the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany biodiversity hotspots. The country stretches across 9 terrestrial biomes and hundreds of distinct ecosystem types, including 3 ocean realms. However, apart from challenges in mapping biodiversity (as we shall see), rankings between countries are nuanced and a single metric doesn’t tell the full story. How biodiverse is your country? It really all depends on how you ask the question. One 2025 ranking assessment for the average share of all biodiversity by country for land & sea places South Africa at 13th, and at 20th for land species. Surprisingly, the country is not listed within the top 30 nations for general species density, though ranking at 25th and 26th respectively for megadiverse countries only. In 2016 South Africa was ranked as 12th for earth’s most biodiverse countries, by the same organisation. South Africa does however rank 5th in the world for vascular plants, though well behind giants Brazil and China each with over 30,000 species apiece. Turns out they’ve got more than just pandas behind that Great Wall.
With that said, these kinds of rankings have their inherent technical limitations and aren’t completely indicative. Nature doesn’t recognize the artifice of human-drawn lines and using political borders to define biodiversity zones is quite problematic. For example, some biomes span multiple countries and various islands rich in biodiversity are politically subsumed into calculations for larger nations. This tabulation trick isn’t immediately obvious and certainly skews the results. The fact is that comprehensive biological surveys are expensive and unevenly distributed, with wealthier countries benefiting more from meticulous cataloging. Due to a lack of resources and security issues, Africa and parts of Asia are statistically underrepresented. Enter the Nature Conservation Index [NCI] – a more comprehensive benchmark and higher-resolution diagnostic tool on how nations worldwide protect their natural heritage. In 2025 they added a new contextual dimension called the Biodiversity Intactness Index [BII] that shifts the conversation from quantity to quality, measuring the proportion of original, wild biodiversity remaining in an area relative to a pre-industrial baseline. This reveals whether a country’s ecosystems function near their natural capacity, maintaining complex interactions among the fauna and flora that sustain life – instead of just how many square kilometers were designated as national parks or marine reserves, with no real reference to ecosystem integrity. As a more authentic assessment, it exposes “paper parks” – those regions that are protected as reserves on a map, but that are actually degraded – while favourably viewing nations that prioritise more holistically on conservation endeavours, reporting and overall wilderness wellness.
We cannot protect what we don’t know. A 2020 study showed that species in huge swathes of Africa remain undocumented and unaccounted for. Historical practices have been insufficient to adequately classify and map African biodiversity. Comprehensive data is crucial to identifying species and their boundaries, understanding biodiversity patterns and effectively promoting species conservation. To better address this research, funding should actively promote projects that aim to sample areas where baseline biodiversity data is lacking. Another issue is that biological sampling in Africa has largely been carried out by foreign institutions, with a greater need for collaboration with local universities and experts. That said, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility at least aggregates and provides open-access data that is available – however incomplete – from worldwide governments and museums.
A landmark 2025 Nature study led by Dr. Hayley Clements revealed that sub-Saharan Africa has lost 24 percent of its pre-industrial biodiversity, with 80 percent of remaining wild plants and animals persisting outside formally protected areas and massive declines in “heavily modified landscapes.” The study provides the most comprehensive assessment of biodiversity intactness yet produced for the subcontinent. Here they mapped the Biodiversity Intactness Index [BII Africa] across the continent to compare current species abundances to previous baselines. Certain groups, such as large mammals, have faced catastrophic declines exceeding 75 percent. Countries dominated by large-scale intensive croplands, such as Nigeria and Rwanda, exhibit the most severe losses. Biodiversity is not a given and can’t be taken for granted as species decline into low populations, low genetic diversity, and spiraling down toward critically endangered status.
Diversity is in the Details
China, scoring high in plant species diversity – as aforementioned – has a BII score of only 46, ranking a mediocre 104th out of 177 countries listed globally due to the fragmentation of their natural habitats from rapid urban expansion, intensive agriculture, and aggressive infrastructural development. South Africa stands in close proximity to its BRICS partner, ranking at 108th with a score of 45.
It pays to conserve biodiversity. More than just aesthetics and environmentalism; nature is good for business. Healthy ecosystems underpin large parts of the global economy, from agriculture and forestry to tourism and food production. As Professor Herman Daly put it in “Ecological Economics in Four Parables”: “the economy is “a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.” While nature’s contribution to business remains hard to quantify, new research has shown that firms operating in areas with richer biodiversity are measurably more productive. This suggests that biodiversity is not simply an environmental concern – ecosystem health is associated with measurable differences in business performance. Globally, the services ecosystems provide to business are already estimated to be worth trillions of dollars annually. Nature translates essentially into economic value. When we say that economics are ultimately green, we’re not just referencing the colour of money, but rather our total dependence on nature.
Simultaneously troubling and promising is the fact that biodiversity in Africa is relatively poorly studied, with research from the continent contributing to less than 1 percent of global scientific output, according to findings by the World Bank. This is somewhat explained by limited investments in research as governments in sub-Saharan Africa allocate on average only about 0.4 percent of their gross domestic product [GDP] to research and development, compared to the 2.6 percent global average. Salary disparities between African scientists and their international counterparts are also meaningful barriers, restraining their ability to conduct fieldwork. There is a direct connection: countries where researchers earn less produce less scientific output and rely more on studies led by foreign institutions. Africans often earn only a fraction of what their collaborators from higher-income countries receive, even while local researchers often possess critical insider knowledge of their regional biodiversity, languages and unique environmental challenges. This financial inequality shifts the sceptre of decision-making abroad, with foreign researchers determining which ecosystems are studied, how conservation priorities are defined and which questions get asked about what species.
Unbalancing the scales even further, conservation funding and research has typically been biased towards charismatic species such as large mammals, in favour of other taxonomic groups and less picturesque habitats that remain relatively poorly studied. Visual appeal counts when it comes to human attention, and investment. Though international collaborations are essential, research capacity in African institutions remains limited and there is a continent-wide need to improve funding for biological sciences. Africa Day on May 25 commemorates the founding of the Organisation of African Unity – emphasising cultural heritage and shared prosperity; now is the time to make greater commitments to the study and conservation of the continent’s biodiversity. In 2026 our national attitude towards nature is particularly salient as this year’s Africa Day theme of ‘Assuring Sustainable Water and Safe Sanitation Systems’ is – in the end- reliant on healthy ecosystems to supply, purify and protect freshwater resources – providing resilience in times of drought and flooding.
In keeping with ‘Acting Locally for Global Impact’, new technologies offer opportunities for crowdsourcing and democratising biodiversity conservation, with free-use platforms such as iNaturalist helping engage people in nature while expanding the data availability for researchers. Participants use a mobile app or desktop browser to contribute their own nature observations, which is then identified and verified by experts in the community. All the data gathered is essential to the detection and understanding of global biodiversity; including the discovery of new species, tracking endangered species, monitoring invasives and the impacts of climate change. Research-grade observations on iNaturalist are also utilised by the South African Biodiversity Institute [SANBI] and the Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers [CREW] in their work. Those interested in participating can join a special iNaturalist project between 15 – 31 May, to observe local species and create a valuable snapshot of life on earth for this year’s International Day for Biological Diversity.
In the vast tapestry of life, every species and ecosystem is a vital thread. For most of recorded history, humanity has viewed nature as a backdrop to progress – a resource to manage and exploit, or at best a scenic view to preserve and perhaps monetise. As we move into the future, the narrative is shifting from extraction to survival – as we necessarily begin to progress from ‘human-centric’ to ‘eco-centric’ thinking.
