Side Event

Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity Book Launch

Organizer
SCBD and Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School

Date and Time
15 February 2008 13:15 - 14:45

Meeting
Second meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group on Protected Areas (WGPA 2)

The Earth’s biodiversity is disappearing at an alarming rate, and while some of the ramifications of this loss have been explored in other works, Sustaining Life is the first to examine the full range of potential threats that diminishing biodiversity poses to human health. At this side event, join physicians Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, who are the editors and lead authors of this book, published by Oxford University Press, as they present a comprehensive view of how human medicines, biomedical research, the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, and the production of food depend on biodiversity. With a foreword by E.O. Wilson and a prologue by Kofi Annan, and co-sponsored by UNEP, UNDP, the IUCN, and the Secretariat of the CBD, Sustaining Life has been called by Al Gore “the most complete and powerful argument I have seen for the importance of preserving biodiversity.