How is biodiversity threatened and how can we protect it?Maintaining biodiversity

The increase in the human population and waste it produces, deforestation, peat bog destruction and climate change are all reducing biodiversity.

Conservation helps reverse this. Conservation is the preservation of ecosystems and the organisms that live within them.

Scientists and concerned members of the public help maintain biodiversity by:

• breeding programs to help preserve endangered species
• protection and development of new endangered habitats, often by making national parks
• replanting hedgerows because there is higher biodiversity in them than the fields they surround
• reducing deforestation and the release of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane.
• recycling rather than dumping waste in landfill sites