Threatened Urban and Ocean Biodiversity: The Imperative of Resilience

Abstract

Humanity is already using the natural resources of almost 1.7 planets like the “Earth” to provide the goods and services needed each year, and this trend cannot lead to sustainable futures. The 2017 Earth Overshoot day was 2 August. In just 7 months the global community consumed all the resources that the planet can sustainably regenerate over an entire year. Authoritative studies highlight that the prevailing economic models led to overconsumption in multiple forms, resulting in disastrous effects for the environment and also for the economy and society, if examined from a longer-term perspective, and undermined the future of humankind.

Cities and seas are vital ecosystems able to mobilise scarce resources, nutrients, and materials, to ensure food security, and to offer sustainable goods and services. But the fundamental resources of air, water, and soil are under extreme pressure in many cities, whereas the global ocean suffers from pollution that often originates in cities. Urban air pollution continues to rise at an alarming rate and has become a critical risk for human health. Overfishing, pollution, and waste, especially plastics, put ocean health at risk. The essential nexus “water–food–energy,” to which many add health, is under particular stress in cities. Healthy oceans can contribute with seafood, renewable energy, and ecosystem services.

Resilience, the capacity to rebound, is critical for cities, major concentrators of resources, food, materials, and products supporting many diverse human activities in a condensed space of intense interactions. Eco-responsible cities try to reduce their ecological debts on land and in the sea and increase biocapacity, their ability to renew their assets. Some exemplary analyses and models of emission-neutral, waste-free, and ecological functional areas provide inspiration for reconciling the technosphere with the biosphere. They also highlight that communities and stakeholders take a cardinal role for the exploration, exploitation, and enhancement of their precious urban capital and the global commons, especially oceans.

Watercolour 4 Tokyo, the Largest and Among the Most Powerful Global Cities