Economics of biodiversity
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There have been a number of economic arguments advanced in favour of biodiversity.
Diverse ecosystems are typically more productive than non-diverse ones, because any set of species can never fully exploit all potential niches. Since human economic productivity is largely reliant on earth ecosystems adequate bioproductivity needs to be maintained.
The wealth of natural innovation found in biological organisms rivals all known technologies derived through synthetic means. A single human genome has some three billion bits of information but the human species also has many variations. There are many millions of species of life on the planet each with valuable information. Many chemical formulae and forty-five percent of all drugs have bio-origin. In the long run keeping genetic records of all species could, however, be just as useful in this regard.
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