Is sustainable development feasible in an age of mass extinction? Biodiversity conservation as the critical foundation for a sustainable future

Sustainability science, or the integrative application of the natural and social sciences to securing human well-being over multiple generations, forms the foundation for sustainable development.  A robust principle of sustainability science developed over the last decade is that the securitization of human well-being is linked to biodiversity conservation.  In spite of near worldwide support for this principle, as seen in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), in the Millennium Assessment, and in the recent adoption of the CBD’s 2010 targets to significantly reduce the loss of biodiversity into the U N Millennium Development Goals, considerable difficulty continues to surround how to incorporate biodiversity into the goals of sustainable development.  The difficulty rests with the relative intractability of biodiversity as an environmental property.  Compared to properties such as carbon storage, nutrient retention, water provisioning, or other environmental properties that lend themselves well to payment schemes, regulatory mechanisms, or other economic and policy instruments, biodiversity conservation as a key component to sustainable development lacks traction.  Recent advances in trait-based ecological research, however, provide ways of clarifying the role of biodiversity conservation in sustainable development.  To sensibly build biodiversity into sustainable development, however, will require an enormous effort to compile functionally annotated biotic inventories of ecosystems and to build working models that clearly link biodiversity to ecosystem functioning.  I will present TraitNet, a research coordinating network, whose five year plan is to begin this process and use its research to illustrate why development without biodiversity conservation is unsustainable.  Synthesizing taxonomic and functional diversity is not only the means by which we can achieve sustainable development, but the means by which we can invigorate commitment to the cessation of our current mass extinction.