Home > Context > Biodiversity

Active conservation of biodiversity gives priority to retaining and enhancing habitats and species, particularly those at greatest risk of loss.

The inter-relations between different species and between species and habitats are vital. Particularly given our limited understanding of the processes, we interfere with them at long-term risk to ourselves and to the planet and everything on it. Moral and aesthetic arguments add to the practical, social and economic reasons for promoting biodiversity.

The UK minerals industries may well be able to contribute to each of three levels of biodiversity cited as relevant at the Biodiversity Convention in Rio in 1992:

• diversity between and within ecosystems and habitats
• diversity of species
• genetic variation within individual species.