Biodiversity: the overlooked source of human health

Biodiversity sustains life on Earth, and its conservation is imperative for the survival of our species. Biodiversity provides essential service to humans (including medicine). Its alarming rate of decline urges us to take action to ensure our survival.There is a fine balance between the use of wild medical plant populations and their conservation. If plant populations are harvested below a threshold, the species reproductive capacity becomes irreversibly reduced, which is leading to the alarming decline of known medicinal plants.Degradation of ecosystems due to human activity (e.g., agriculture, urbanization, mining) is a main driver of emerging infectious diseases and zoonotic outbreaks.Synthetic biology may provide effective solutions to restore and preserve biodiversity as well as to increase the volume of active compound production with reduced environmental impact. Biodiversity is the measure of the variation of lifeforms in a given ecological system. Biodiversity provides ecosystems with the robustness, stability, and resilience that sustains them. This is ultimately essential for our survival because we depend on the services that natural ecosystems provide (food, fresh water, air, climate, and medicine). Despite this, human activity is driving an unprecedented rate of biodiversity decline, which may jeopardize the life-support systems of the planet if no urgent action is taken. In this article we show why biodiversity is essential for human health. We raise our case and focus on the biomedicine services that are enabled by biodiversity, and we present known and novel approaches to promote biodiversity conservation.