By Prof. Norberto Ovando*
Nature provides us with many compounds for our medicines and other benefits. The nations of the world have agreed to a historic package of measures considered critical to addressing the dangerous loss of biodiversity and restoring natural ecosystems.
On December 19, 2022, in Montreal, Canada, convened under the auspices of the UN, the “15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity” ended, where 196 countries adopted the “Kunming Global Biodiversity Framework -Montreal”, which includes four goals and 23 targets for achievement by 2030.
“We are finally beginning to forge a peace pact with nature”, said the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres
Biodiversity encompasses the different kinds of life you can find in an area: the variety of animals, plants, fungi, and even microorganisms like bacteria that make up our natural world. Each of these species and organisms work together in ecosystems -like a network- maintaining balance and life. Biodiversity underpins everything we need to survive in nature, including clean water, medicine, food, and security.
Some main objectives and goals:
- The integrity, connectivity and resilience of all ecosystems are maintained, enhanced or restored, substantially increasing the area of natural ecosystems by 2050;
- Human-induced extinction of known threatened species is halted, and by 2050, the extinction rate and risk of all species is reduced tenfold, and the abundance of native wild species is increased to healthy and resilient levels;
- Genetic diversity is maintained within populations of wild and domesticated species, safeguarding their adaptive potential.
- Biodiversity is sustainably used and managed and nature’s contributions to people, including ecosystem functions and services, are valued, maintained and enhanced, and those currently in decline restored, supporting the achievement of the sustainable development, for the benefit of present and future generations by 2050. .
A living laboratory: Most of the medicines prescribed in industrialized countries come from natural compounds produced by animals and plants. One billion people in the developing world depend on traditional medicinal plants for primary health care.
Many nature cures are familiar: painkillers such as morphine from opium poppies, the antimalarial quinine produced from the bark of the opium Cinchona officinalis from South America, is found in the rain forest of the Peruvian Amazon or the penicillin antibiotic discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming that generates microscopic fungi, while microbes discovered in the soil of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile ) fight heart disease by lowering cholesterol.
Other treatments, on the other hand, are not as well known by the general public, but AZT, for example, one of the first drugs against HIV/AIDS, it came from a large shallow-water sponge that lives in the Caribbean, which happens to be the same sponge that produced antivirals to treat herpes and serves as the source of the first marine-derived cancer drug licensed in the United States.
A crucial reservoir for future treatments:
To date, only about 1.9 million species have been identified, many of which have barely been studied. It is believed that there are millions more that are completely unknown.
Everything alive is the result of a complex “living laboratory” that has been conducting its own clinical tests since life began approximately 3.7 billion years ago. This natural pharmaceutical library is home to countless cures yet to be discovered, if we don’t destroy them before they are recognized.
Consider the polar bear, now classified as an endangered species. As its arctic habitat melts due to climate change, the world’s largest land predator has become an icon of the dangers posed by rising temperatures around the globe.
But it could also be an icon for health.
Solutions to diabetes, osteoporosis and kidney failure: Polar bears have naturally developed “solutions” to problems like Type II diabetes, osteoporosis, and kidney failure, all of which cause millions of people misery.
For example, polar bears accumulate large amounts of fat before hibernating. However, despite having fat to a degree that would be life-threatening to humans, they are apparently immune to type II diabetes.
Also, they remain immobile for months, but their bones remain unchanged.
And, while they’re inactive, they don’t urinate, but their kidneys aren’t damaged. If we understood and could reproduce how bears manage their fat, care for their bones, and detoxify waste while they hibernate, we could treat, and perhaps even prevent, Type II diabetes, osteoporosis, and kidney failure in humans.
Just to give us an idea of what their benefit could be, if we can uncover these secrets before the polar bears disappear, just point out that:
- Currently, 13% of the world’s population is clinically obese, and the number of patients with type II diabetes is projected to rise to 700 million by 2045.
- Over the course of their lives, one in three women over the age of 50 and one in five men will experience osteoporosis-related bone fractures.
- In the United States alone, kidney failure kills more than 82,000 people and costs the economy $35 million a year. In Argentina, one in eight people suffers from some degree of chronic kidney disease (CKD), which is equivalent to more than 5 million Argentines.
Coral reefs and morphine: Another example is that of coral reefs, sometimes called “rainforests of the sea” due to their high biodiversity.
Among the innumerable inhabitants of these reefs are the so-called cone shell snails, a predatory mollusk that hunts with darts containing 200 different toxic compounds.
The drug Ziconotide copies exactly a toxic peptide from one of these snails, and is not only 1,000 times more potent than morphine, but also prevents the tolerance and dependence that opioids can cause.
To date, of all 700 leafcone snail species, only six have been examined in detail, and of the thousands of unique compounds they harbor, only 100 have been studied in detail.
Coral reefs and all of their occupants are being destroyed at alarming rates.
Healthy planet, healthy humans: Biodiversity losses influence human health in many ways. Ecosystem disruption and biodiversity loss have major impacts on the emergence, transmission, and spread of many human infectious diseases.
The pathogens of 60% of human infectious diseases, for example malaria and COVID, are zoonotic, meaning they have entered our bodies after living in other animals.
Conclution: A key challenge for organizations working to preserve biodiversity is convincing policy makers, and the general public, that humans and our health are fundamentally dependent on the animals, plants and microbes we share on this small planet.
We are totally dependent on the goods and services provided by the natural world, and we have no choice but to preserve it.
Humans cannot exist outside of nature..
The Global Framework should be celebrated as a historic step towards transforming the way we approach biodiversity conservation, but if countries are unable to make the necessary policy changes, there is a risk that the new Global Framework will fail.
Source: ONU/PNUD/AAPN
* Expert World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) and,
Education and Communication (CEC)
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)