Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology basically says it all: Everything Is Connected to Everything Else. In this session, Prof. Dr. Klaas van Egmond will bring together the “spherical” SOS’s from a systems ecology perspective and give us insights into what the connections are. He will also talk about what the implications for our civilisations are.

Our present-day crops for food and agriculture have once been developed from wild plant species through adaptation by humans, a process that is known as domestication. This process resulted in crops in which only a subset of the wild genetic diversity was represented, a concept that is referred to as the domestication bottleneck.

Due to habitat destruction, pollution, poaching, illegal hunting and fishing, and climate change, species around the world are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. This is best recorded by the IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, in its periodical Red List.

In the past decades the relationship between forests and climate change has focused on the amount of carbon stored in forests and the amount of carbon dioxide released when forests are converted in other land uses. Only recently we begin to understand the relationship between patters of rainfall and forest cover.