Sustainability

12Biodiversity and Sustainability

Akshaya K. Verma¹, Prangya R. Rout², Eunseok Lee², Puspendu Bhunia³, Jaeho Bae², Rao Y. Surampalli⁴, Tian C. Zhang⁴, Rajeshwar D. Tyagi⁵, Pengzhi Lin⁶, and Yu Chen⁶

¹Department of Civil Engineering, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan, Bhubaneswar, India

²INHA University, Incheon, Republic of Korea

³School of Infrastructure, Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, India

⁴Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Omaha, NE, USA

⁵INRS, Université du Québec, Québec, Canada

⁶Key State Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

12.1 Introduction

Biodiversity is defined as the variability in life forms and their interactions on the planet. The Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) at the United Nation Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), “The Earth Summit” at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 articulated biological diversity as “the variety and variability among living organisms from all sources and the ecological complexes in which they occur including diversity within species, between species and of ecosystem” (UNEP 1992). It encompasses all the variation of life forms expressed in genes, individuals, populations, species, communities and ecosystems. These dimensions are closely interlinked, influencing the existence, services and productivity of the ecosystem (Schneiders et al. 2012), making biodiversity not only an ecological, but also a socio-economic entity (Laurila-Pant ...