Biodiversity Day 2025: five students on the threats and what young people can do

On 22 May 2025, the International Day for Biological Diversity, the Bangladeshi news site Jagonews24 published in its agriculture and nature section the views of five students on why the country's plants, animals and ecosystems are under threat and what young people can do about it. The feature was compiled by Kazi Maliha Akter. Four of the students study at Chattogram College and one at Brahmanbaria Law College. Their short pieces ranged from the loss of rural birdsong in fast-growing towns to global warming, invasive species, wildlife trafficking and the part young people can play in conservation.

The day marks the adoption of the agreed text of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at a conference in Nairobi on 22 May 1992. The work behind it had begun in November 1988, when the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) convened an ad hoc working group of experts on biological diversity. The Convention was opened for signature at the Rio "Earth Summit", the UN Conference on Environment and Development, on 5 June 1992. It had received 168 signatures by the time signature closed on 4 June 1993, and it entered into force on 29 December 1993, 90 days after the 30th ratification. Its three objectives are the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.

From 1993 to 2000 the day was observed on 29 December, the date the Convention took effect. In December 2000 the UN General Assembly moved it to 22 May, in resolution 55/201, to commemorate the adoption of the text; the change also took the day away from the crowded holiday season at the end of the year.

For 2025 the CBD Secretariat chose the theme "Harmony with nature and sustainable development". Its campaign highlighted the links between the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, describing them as two universal agendas that must be pursued in tandem. The Secretariat said that halting and reversing biodiversity loss is crucial to achieving the SDGs, and noted that both agendas had five years left before their implementation periods end, with the framework's 23 action targets set for 2030.

In his message for the day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres wrote that "biodiversity is the bedrock of life and a cornerstone of sustainable development", and that humanity was destroying it at great speed through pollution, the climate crisis, the destruction of ecosystems and short-term interests that fuel unsustainable use of the natural world. "No one country, however rich or powerful, can address it alone," he wrote. He called on governments to build on the progress made at the 16th meeting of the CBD's Conference of the Parties (COP16), to deliver domestic and international finance, to shift public subsidies away from activities that harm nature, and to deliver National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans that put the framework into effect.

Chattogram College is one of the oldest colleges in the region. According to Banglapedia, it began as Chittagong Zila School in 1836 and became an intermediate college in 1869. It closed within a year for lack of money and reopened in 1871 with a grant of Rs 10,000 from Roy Bahadur Golakchandra Roy of Dhum in Mirsharai upazila. The University of Calcutta registered it as a first-grade degree college in 1910. Bachelor's courses in zoology and botany were added in 1962.

Banglapedia records that the college teaches honours and master's courses in about 19 subjects, among them Bangla, botany, zoology, geography and economics, and gives its enrolment as about 17,000 students with 134 teachers. Its students and teachers took part in the Liberation War and in national movements. The fifth writer in the feature studies at Brahmanbaria Law College.

Saima Hasan, a student of the Bangla department at Chattogram College, wrote that much of the rural nature she had read about as a child, the animals and birds, trees and creepers, insects and rivers, had largely disappeared. She recalled an environment once just as poets and writers described it: green everywhere, the call of crickets, fireflies at night, birdsong and clear water in the canals and beels. Now, she wrote, there is only brick, concrete, rubbish and machinery, and in the age of urbanisation people move towards technology while losing countless forms of life.

In her view, urbanisation is clearing forests, filling in waterbodies and leaving thousands of animals without a home. Sparrows that once came to sit on the veranda, and the cuckoo whose song was heard in spring, are no longer seen, she wrote, while the balance of the environment is constantly upset and temperatures, pollution and natural disasters rise. "If we cannot save biodiversity, we will not survive either," she argued. She proposed rooftop gardens, the use of renewable energy, less pollution, small forests in cities and an end to bird hunting.

Her concern matches the findings of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), whose Global Assessment was released in May 2019. It found that urban areas had more than doubled since 1992, and it ranked changes in land and sea use as the largest direct driver of nature's decline, ahead of the direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution and invasive alien species. It also found that more than 85 per cent of the wetlands present in 1700 had been lost by 2000, and that wetlands were being lost about three times faster, in percentage terms, than forests.

Rooftop gardening, the first of her suggestions, had been growing in the capital. In November 2020 The Business Standard reported, citing the Agriculture Information Service, that Dhaka had about 4.5 lakh (450,000) roofs covering more than 4,500 hectares, most of them left empty, and about 30,000 rooftop gardens. The Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) had begun a three-year project in 2018 to create 600 rooftop gardens in the capital, and its project director said about 500 had been set up by then. The Kunming-Montreal framework carries the same idea in its Target 12: to enhance green spaces and urban planning for human well-being and biodiversity.

Nusrat Jahan Jerin, a student of Brahmanbaria Law College, wrote about global warming. People live on a beautiful planet, she wrote, but warming is affecting biodiversity: the beauty of nature is vanishing day by day, the life cycles of animals are losing their rhythm, and a world meant for peaceful living is becoming unbearably hot. Unchecked tree felling, deforestation, toxic gas emissions and the growing use of fossil fuels are changing biodiversity, and in Bangladesh the change in the seasons is noticeable, with lack of rain, drought and heat increasing.

She contrasted the wooden houses built in developed countries with Bangladesh's growing use of brick and stone for housing, and blamed the filling of rivers and waterbodies, toxic emissions from factories and vehicles, and heaps of rubbish for polluting the climate. In the name of modernity, she wrote, the natural environment is being ruined. Keeping the world beautiful and liveable is everyone's responsibility and in everyone's own interest, so the causes of global warming must be identified and the problem solved.

Climate change is one of the five direct drivers of biodiversity loss named by IPBES. Its Global Assessment, compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries with 310 contributing authors and based on a systematic review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources, found that around one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, many of them within decades. "The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever," said the IPBES chair, Sir Robert Watson, when it was released.

The assessment found that more than 40 per cent of amphibian species, almost a third of reef-forming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals were threatened; for insects the evidence supported a tentative estimate of 10 per cent. Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66 per cent of the marine environment had been significantly altered by human actions, and the average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats had fallen by at least 20 per cent, mostly since 1900.

Toiyaba Khanam of Chattogram College divided the threats into natural and man-made ones. Among the natural causes she listed climate change, earthquakes, drought, tsunamis and other disasters. Trees once acted as a shield against natural disasters, she wrote, but there are now far too few of them to play a significant role, so tree felling must stop and planting must increase.

Among the man-made causes she named heavy use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, pollution, and the invasion of species that arrive from elsewhere. Many laws and strict measures had been announced to conserve biodiversity, she wrote, but lax enforcement was making people more prone to offend. The destruction of biodiversity threatens human existence as well as animals, and everyone must come forward to conserve it and keep the world clean and liveable.

IPBES found that the number of invasive alien species per country had risen by about 70 per cent since 1970. Bangladesh's best-known example is water hyacinth, a floating aquatic plant native to Latin America. Banglapedia records that it was reportedly brought to Bengal from Brazil by a tourist in the late 19th century and that by the 1920s it had spread across Bengal's waterbodies, blocking river navigation and making it hard to grow deepwater aman paddy and jute. The Water Hyacinth Act of 1936 barred householders from keeping the plant on their land and made helping government clearing drives a civic duty. Today its decayed heaps are used as fertiliser and as floating beds for crops, and its leaves serve as fodder in the floodplains when feed is scarce.

The Kunming-Montreal framework addresses both of her man-made causes. Target 6 aims to reduce the rate of introduction and establishment of known or potential invasive alien species by at least 50 per cent by 2030 and to eradicate or control them, especially in priority sites such as islands. Target 7 aims to cut the excess nutrients lost to the environment by at least half, to cut the overall risk from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals by at least half, and to work towards eliminating plastic pollution. IPBES had reported that fertilisers entering coastal ecosystems had produced more than 400 ocean "dead zones", that plastic pollution had increased tenfold since 1980, and that 300 to 400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other industrial wastes were dumped every year.

Umme Salma of Chattogram College wrote that most of the world's biodiversity is at risk from human use and other activities, which disrupt ecosystems and sometimes destroy them. She named the reckless use of natural resources, soaring pollution, climate change, and the illegal trafficking and killing of wildlife as causes for which human activity is directly responsible. Because ecosystems are bound up with biodiversity, she wrote, this is a global problem. She proposed four remedies:

• encourage the conservation and growth of biodiversity;
• develop natural forests as sanctuaries for wildlife;
• stop harvesting trees from natural forests;
• build awareness among everyone alongside government action.

Her call for sanctuaries is the subject of the framework's best-known goal. Target 3 asks countries to ensure that by 2030 at least 30 per cent of land, inland waters and coastal and marine areas are effectively conserved and managed through protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and Target 2 asks that at least 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems be under effective restoration.

In Bangladesh, besides the forests and parks managed by the Forest Department, the Bangladesh Environment Conservation Act 1995 allows the government to declare an Ecologically Critical Area (ECA) where an ecosystem has reached, or is threatened to reach, a critical state, and to specify which activities may not be started or continued there. Banglapedia records that the first ECAs, declared in April 1999, covered about 40,000 hectares of wetland areas. Its list includes Hakaluki Haor, Sonadia Island, St Martin's Island, the Teknaf peninsula with the Cox's Bazar beach, Tanguar Haor, the Marjat baor oxbow lake in Jhenaidah, and a 10-kilometre belt outside the Sundarbans Reserved Forest.

The Sundarbans, in the Ganges delta in the south, hold the country's mangroves. Banglapedia gives their dominant tree as the sundari (Heritiera fomes) and records that the Bengal tiger, once widespread in the country, is now confined to these mangrove forests in the south-west. The CBD's country profile for Bangladesh describes St Martin's Island as the country's only coral-bearing island, protected as a marine park, names Tanguar Haor as a Ramsar site, and states that habitat loss is considered "the single largest threat to biodiversity" in Bangladesh.

Tanjina Akter Choiti of Chattogram College, whose piece gave the feature its title, described biodiversity as the main driving force of life on Earth: the variety of all living things, plants, animals and micro-organisms, and whole ecosystems. Biodiversity, she wrote, is not just the beauty of nature but one of the main elements of human survival, yet deforestation, climate change, the modernisation of technology, excessive pesticide use and plastic pollution threaten it. She also cited figures on species at risk worldwide and in Bangladesh; the published national figures are set out in the next section.

In this situation, she wrote, the role of young people is very important: not just observing International Biodiversity Day, but making everyday work environment-friendly. Young people can raise awareness in society, as a group named "Green Savers" had done, and by planting trees, taking part in conserving local species, cutting their use of plastic and organising workshops they can bring real change. "Young people's small daily steps can be a big tool for protecting biodiversity," she wrote.

The feature did not describe the group further. An organisation called Green Savers that builds and maintains rooftop gardens was described by The Business Standard in November 2020 as having built 6,000 roof gardens and having about 300 gardens in Chattogram.

Her definition follows the Convention itself. Article 2 of the CBD defines biological diversity as "the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems". An ecosystem, in the same article, is "a dynamic complex of plant, animal and micro-organism communities and their non-living environment interacting as a functional unit".

Young people have a place in the global plan as well. Target 22 of the Kunming-Montreal framework calls for the participation of children and youth, among others, in decision-making on biodiversity and for their access to justice and information. When the IPBES assessment was released in 2019, Sir Robert Watson said the first stirrings of action and initiatives for transformative change had already been seen, especially among young people worldwide.

The most complete national assessment of animal species available in May 2025 was the IUCN Red List of Bangladesh. First published in 2000, it was updated over about 30 months and the new edition, dated 2015, was unveiled in Dhaka on 22 June 2016. The work was a sub-project, "Updating Species Red List of Bangladesh", of the Forest Department's Strengthening Regional Cooperation for Wildlife Protection programme, funded by the World Bank, and involved IUCN, the Forest Department, universities and research institutes.

It assessed 1,619 animal species and placed 390 of them in threatened categories: 56 Critically Endangered, 181 Endangered and 153 Vulnerable. Thirty-one species were classified as Regionally Extinct, meaning they are no longer found in the country, and 278 were listed as Data Deficient. The groups assessed were 138 mammals, 566 birds, 167 reptiles, 49 amphibians, 253 freshwater fishes, 141 crustaceans and 305 butterflies.

An IUCN analysis published in April 2017 gave the breakdown by group. The threatened species numbered 38 mammals, 39 birds, 38 reptiles, 10 amphibians, 64 freshwater fishes, 13 crustaceans and 188 butterflies. Of the 31 regionally extinct species, 11 were mammals, 19 birds and one a reptile; the 2000 list had counted 10 mammals, two birds and one reptile as regionally extinct. These figures differ from those in the student's piece, which attributed to the Department of Environment a figure of 31 mammal and 15 bird species heading for extinction over two decades.

For plants, Banglapedia records more than 6,000 species in Bangladesh, about 300 of them exotic and eight endemic, including 3,611 flowering plants, with 95 vascular plants rated as threatened. The CBD's country profile describes five broad types of ecosystem in the country: coastal and marine, inland freshwater, terrestrial forest, hilly, and the man-made homestead. It calls the haor wetlands the most important natural ecosystem of Bangladesh, names Hakaluki Haor as the largest haor, says hill ecosystems cover about 12 per cent of the land, and records that about 6,000 rice varieties are known to have existed in the country. Farm diversity is shrinking worldwide too: IPBES found that more than 9 per cent of all domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and agriculture had become extinct by 2016.

Bangladesh has been a Party to the Convention on Biological Diversity since 1 August 1994. It became a Party to the Convention's Cartagena Protocol on biosafety on 5 May 2004 and to the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing on 10 April 2023. Its first National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan was completed in 2004, with 16 strategies and 128 action programmes.

At home, Article 18A of the Constitution, in its fundamental principles of state policy, includes the conservation of biodiversity. The Bangladesh Biodiversity Act 2017 (Act No. 2 of 2017, dated 19 February 2017) was made, in the words of its preamble, to conserve biodiversity, to ensure the sustainable use of its components and to share fairly and equitably the benefits from the use of biological resources and related knowledge, in line with the country's commitment as a Party to the Convention.

The Act sets up a national biodiversity committee and a technical committee, and biodiversity management and monitoring committees for city corporations, districts, upazilas, municipalities and unions. It provides for grassroots biodiversity management groups or associations, for fair sharing of the benefits from genetic and biological resources, for a national biodiversity strategy and action plan, for declaring heritage sites rich in biodiversity, and for banning activities that harm endangered animals or biological resources. Its eighth chapter sets out offences and penalties, among them carrying out biodiversity-related activities without prior approval and carrying out activities that harm endangered species, which bears on the point about enforcement that Toiyaba Khanam raised.

Photo: Risadul Islam (Foisal) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The top picture shows the front of the red building at Chattogram College, as background; it is not a picture from the feature.

Sources: Jagonews24 ("জীববৈচিত্র্য সংরক্ষণে তরুণদের করণীয়", 22 May 2025, read from the Internet Archive copy of 23 May 2025), Convention on Biological Diversity (International Day for Biological Diversity 2025 pages; the UN Secretary-General's message for 22 May 2025; history of the Convention; Article 2; the COP15 press release of 22 December 2022 and the Global Biodiversity Framework targets; Bangladesh country profile), IPBES (Global Assessment media release, May 2019), IUCN (Red List of Bangladesh 2015, 15 July 2016; Red List Indices blog, 25 April 2017), Banglapedia (Biodiversity; Ecologically Critical Area; Water Hyacinth; Chittagong College), Laws of Bangladesh (Bangladesh Biodiversity Act 2017), The Business Standard ("Rooftop gardening grows in pandemic", 16 November 2020), Wikipedia (International Day for Biological Diversity).