significant social, political, and economic challenges to conserving biodiversity while enhancing human well-being. The sub-Sahara region is the less developed regions in the world, where the poorest people who are most vulnerable to biodiversity loss live, are also regions where threats to biodiversity are the highest. The Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region is a good illustration of such a developing region that is at the forefront of priorities in terms of conservation as well as development needs. The SSA region is also home to almost one-quarter of the biodiversity hotspots, areas around the world where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat
Biodiversity is an umbrella term that covers all variety of life on the planet, from the genetic level to terrestrial, freshwater, and marine habitats and ecosystems. Biodiversity is also considered to be a global public good. It is estimated that 25 to 50% of the pharmaceutical industry relies on genetic diversity for drug developments, and that about US$ 650 billion per year is derived from genetic resources. The total economic value of pollination
American Journal of Biological and Environmental Statistics 2020;: 24-30 25 worldwide amounted to US$ 153 billion, 9.5% of the value of the world agricultural production in 2005. For the entire biosphere, the economic value of 17 ecosystem services has been approximated to be an average of US$ 33 trillion per year.
The increasing effect of humans on the Earth's ecosystems has resulted in its abrupt reduction often referred to as the mass extinction because projected rates of species loss are 100–10,000 times higher than background rates. The main driver of biodiversity loss is land-use change, followed by climate change, nitrogen deposition and biotic exchange. The need to conserve biodiversity has become by now a broadly acknowledged societal goal reflected in international,
national and local policies and in a wealth of policy documents educational material and media campaigns. Despite an initial emphasis on moral, ethical or spiritual motivations, often grounded on forceful arguments the dominant view emphasizes nowadays the tangible benefits
that biodiversity provides to human society often expressed in economic terms. Indeed, biodiversity is considered the backbone of multiple ecosystem services (erosion control,
soil formation, nutrient cycling, pollination, biological control, as well as the regulation of atmospheric composition, climate, water and disturbances) with an average global value
of US$33 trillion per year. Furthermore, biodiversity loss represents a major threat to health and food security.
In contrast to the dynamic evolutionary flux that characterizes life our view on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has been predominantly static trying to conserve biodiversity as it is and preferably as it was. However, the intensity and speed of human alterations to the planet's
ecosystems are yielding this view obsolete. Human actions often result in unforeseen evolutionary pressures that trigger fast evolutionary responses, while drastically affecting
(depleting) the raw material of short-term evolutionary responses. At the same time, the dismantling and reshuffling of existing biotic communities, caused by the combination of
habitat, climate and biotic changes, results in the ongoing establishment of new communities and co-evolutionary networks for which we lack past analogues. These processes are responsible for the generation, maintenance and (often) erosion of biodiversity in the real (anthropogenic, rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected) world. The need for effective and cost-efficient policies that steer anthropogenic changes towards sustainability places an increasing emphasis on the generation and transference of evolutionary knowledge. Therefore, the objective of this review is to provide literatures about factor affecting the implementation of biodiversity policy in sub-Sahara region.
A Guest Editorial