"The Age of Nature", new BBC series with Malgorzata Blicharska

2021-02-16

(Image removed) Malgorzata Blicharska, Senior lecturer/Associate Professor, Natural Resources and Sustainable Development, is one of the researchers in the series.

The new BBC series "The Age of Nature" (in Swedish Naturens revansch") examines humanity's relationship with nature and wildlife and how scientists and conservationists study ways to restore the planet.

Malgorzata, why are forests and biodiversity so important?
- Most of us know that trees can sequester carbon, which is of course good for climate change mitigation. However, what not everyone thinks about is the importance of biodiversity in the forest. Diverse forests, with natural dynamics and structures that provide habitats for many different species are more resilient, more stable. They can better withstand the environmental changes, such as climate change and help us adapt to that.

What is really meant by biodiversity?
- Convention on Biological Diversity defines biological diversity' as the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are a part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems”.

This means that biodiversity is not only about how many species we have, but also about genetic diversity and diversity of higher levels of organisations, such are communities and ecosystems. Biodiversity defines what processes can happen in the ecosystems and what functionality the ecosystems have. What we humans get from ecosystems, like the different ecosystem services, e.g. carbon sequestration, water holding capacity, air purification or recreational values, depends on this complexity of in nature and functioning of ecosystems. Also, the richer the ecosystem is, the more species it has, there is a higher chance that some of them will survive future environmental changes and thus give us continuity in provision of important services. One can thus say that biodiversity provides us with insurance for the future.

Here you can watch the series "Naturens revansch" in Swedish.
(Malgorzata appears in the third episode at around 13:40.)