Making the benefits of biodiversity conservation visible and real: institutional aspects in a biodiversity research programme

摘要

The problem of biological diversity conservation essentially is not so much that of preserving all currently existing species, but rather of how to protect the ability of ecosystems to provide life support in a more general sense, including the ecological services on which humanity depends. That requires the development of the informational, institutional as well as economic conditions in which the use of environmental resources will be sustainable—that is, maintaining a level of diversity, as well as a scale of economic activity that will respect the resilience of the ecosystems at least in so far as these matter in supporting human production and consumption (Perrings and Opschoor, 1994). Diversity conservation may go beyond this minimum, if (internationally) there is a willingness to invest in the conservation of ecosystems for non-instrumental reasons, e.g., based on existence values.