A/HRC/34/49 thus includes not only the millions of different species on Earth; 5 “it also consists of the specific genetic variations and traits within species (such as different crop varieties), and the assemblage of these species within ecosystems that characterize agricultural and other landscapes such as forests, wetlands, grasslands, deserts, lakes and rivers”.6 10. In the words of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, “biodiversity is the foundation of ecosystem services to which human well-being is intimately linked”. 7 Biodiversity supports ecosystem services and the human rights that depend upon them in many ways. In general, biodiversity contributes to the productivity and stability of ecosystem processes.8 More diverse ecosystems are more resilient to disasters and to longterm threats such as climate change. 9 More specifically, biodiversity contributes to particular ecosystem services that directly support the full enjoyment of human rights. The present report highlights some of those contributions with respect to: the rights to life and health; the right to an adequate standard of living; and the right to non-discrimination in the enjoyment of rights. 1. Rights to life and health 11. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (art. 3) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (art. 6) recognize the right to life. The Human Rights Committee has emphasized that the right to life should not be interpreted narrowly, and that the protection of the right requires States to adopt positive measures such as measures to reduce infant mortality and increase life expectancy. 10 The Constitution of the World Health Organization and article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognize the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has stated that the right to health “extends to the underlying determinants of health, such as food and nutrition, housing, access to safe and potable water and adequate sanitation, safe and healthy working conditions, and a healthy environment”.11 12. Of the many connections between biodiversity and healthy human life, the present report focuses on four, relating to medicinal drugs, microbial diversity, infectious diseases and mental health.12 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Although estimates of species vary widely, a recent estimate is that there is about 7.7 million species of animals and about 8.7 million eukaryotic species in all, of which only about 1.2 million have been catalogued. Camilo Mora and others, “How many species are there on Earth and in the ocean?”, PLOS Biology, vol. 9, No. 8 (2011), p. 1. World Health Organization (WHO) and Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Connecting Global Priorities: Biodiversity and Human Health — a State of Knowledge Review (Geneva, 2015), p. 28. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Biodiversity Synthesis (World Resources Institute, Washington, D.C., 2005), p. 18. Connecting Global Priorities, p. 34; Bradley J. Cardinale and others, “Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity”, Nature, vol. 486, (June 2012), p. 59. Connecting Global Priorities, p. 18. General comment No. 6 (1982) on the right to life, para. 5. General comment No. 14 (2000) on the right to the highest attainable standard of health, para. 4. A particularly useful resource is the 2015 report of WHO and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity cited above (see footnote 6), which contains a summary of the state of knowledge on biodiversity and human health and which is available at https://www.cbd.int/health/stateofknowledge. See also Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein, eds., Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity (Oxford University Press, 2008). 5