Short answers, pulled from the story.
Biodiversity is the variability of life on Earth. Biologists most often define it as the totality of genes, species and ecosystems of a region. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defined it in 2019 as the variability among living organisms within and between species and the ecosystems they belong to.
Estimates by Mora and colleagues in 2011 put the figure at roughly 8.7 million terrestrial species and 2.2 million oceanic species. Broader estimates of global species diversity range from 2 million to 100 million, with a best estimate near 9 million. A 2016 report suggested 1 trillion species, of which only one-thousandth of one percent has been described.
Biodiversity is greater in the tropics because of the warm climate and high primary productivity near the equator. Diversity increases steadily from the poles toward the equator in a pattern called the latitudinal gradient in species diversity, and the deepest cause is the higher mean temperature at the equator. Tropical forest ecosystems cover less than one-fifth of Earth's terrestrial area but contain about 50% of the world's species.
The sixth mass extinction, also called the Holocene extinction, is the ongoing biodiversity loss driven primarily by human impact on the environment. Species are being lost at a rate 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background rate. It was estimated in 2007 that up to 30% of all species could be extinct by 2050.
The term biological diversity was first used by J. Arthur Harris in 1916 in an article titled The Variable Desert in Scientific American. The contracted form biodiversity was coined by W. G. Rosen for the National Forum on BioDiversity, held in September 1986, according to Edward O. Wilson.
At least 50% of pharmaceutical compounds on the US market derive from plants, animals and microorganisms, and about 80% of the world's population depends on medicines from nature for primary healthcare. In 1997, Robert Costanza and colleagues estimated the global value of ecosystem services not captured in markets at an average of $33 trillion annually. Roughly 80 percent of humanity's food supply comes from just 20 kinds of plants, though humans use at least 40,000 species.
On the 19th of December 2022, nearly every country signed an agreement at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference to protect 30% of land and oceans by 2030, known as 30 by 30. There are over 238,563 designated protected areas worldwide, covering 14.9 percent of Earth's land surface. The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity opened in 1992 and has held 16 Conferences of the Parties, most recently COP 16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.