YEREVAN, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- Your first glass of water today comes with an invisible bill.
Behind it is a vast network of life, from forests and wetlands to microscopic organisms, helping keep water supplies clean and reliable.
The United Nations calls this interconnected system the "web of life," on which we depend for food, water, medicine and a stable climate.
Biodiversity is the variety of life that makes up this web.
At the ongoing 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17) in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, countries are grappling with how to halt biodiversity loss and translate pledges into action.
VALUE OF BIODIVERSITY
From bacteria and fungi to forests and coral reefs, the biodiversity we see today is the product of 4.5 billion years of evolution, increasingly shaped by human activity.
Pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, sustaining food webs ... every species has a role to play in nature. Losing a single species can mean losing ecological relationships and genetic resources accumulated over millions of years of evolution.
The scale of the loss is alarming.
The 2026 Living Planet Report of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) shows that the average size of monitored wildlife populations shrank by 73 percent between 1970 and 2022.
Conservation, meanwhile, is making progress.
In Colombia, conservationists are breeding, reintroducing and monitoring the critically endangered Orinoco crocodile, aiming to restore self-sustaining wild populations rather than simply releasing more animals.
Armenia has applied for funding from the Kunming Biodiversity Fund to cover projects bolstering the biodiversity of Lake Sevan, including the protection of the Sevan trout, an endemic species, said Armenian Environment Minister and COP17 President Hambardzum Matevosyan.
And the projects go beyond saving a particular fish species. They aim to preserve genetic diversity, which helps species adapt to changing conditions.
Such diversity is practically valuable for humans: crop varieties may carry genes for drought or disease resistance, while natural organisms provide compounds used in medicine. According to the WHO, more than half of modern medicines came from nature.
INVISIBLE SERVICES
Scientists call the benefits nature provides -- including water purification, pollination and carbon storage -- "ecosystem services."
They rarely appear on household bills or business balance sheets, but their loss can bring very real costs, from poorer water quality to damaged crops and increased exposure to environmental disasters.
According to the United Nations, more than half the world's gross domestic product is moderately or highly dependent on nature. More than 1 billion people rely on forests for their livelihoods. And land and the ocean absorb more than half of all carbon emissions.
As COP17 opened, forest fires in Indonesia's Kalimantan region had affected more than 57,000 hectares, with haze reaching communities in Malaysia and Singapore, said Theiva Lingam, co-chair of Friends of the Earth International.
She described the fires as "a stark reminder of the deeper biodiversity crisis which is unfolding across the Global South."
The vulnerability of peatlands helps explain why such environmental damage can have consequences far beyond the areas affected.
Peatlands cover only about 3 percent of the world's land but store roughly twice as much carbon as all the forests on Earth. When drained or burned, these ecosystems can release large amounts of stored carbon while losing their ability to regulate water and support wildlife.
FOOTING THE BILL
The economic gains from activities that harm biodiversity are often shared globally, while the environmental and social costs fall disproportionately on developing countries and local communities, Lingam said.
To help redress this imbalance, Article 20 of the Convention on Biological Diversity requires developed countries to provide "new and additional financial resources" to help developing ones cover the agreed costs of implementing the convention.
Likewise, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022, calls for international biodiversity funding to developing countries to reach at least 20 billion U.S. dollars annually by 2025 and 30 billion dollars by 2030.
Preventing damage is particularly important as extinction is irreversible, while restoring degraded ecosystems can be costly and the outcome uncertain, experts said.
Celine Beaulieu, who works on biodiversity finance at the WWF, said funding must also translate into results, urging countries to "judge biodiversity finance not only by what is being pledged, but by what reaches implementation."
As Armenian Deputy Environment Minister Aram Meymaryan put it, conservation must be judged by results on the ground: Have threats been reduced? Have species' chances of survival improved? Are their populations recovering?
Nature may never send a bill, but the cost of losing the ecosystems behind it is real. Protecting biodiversity is not simply an act of generosity toward nature. It is an investment in the systems that sustain everyone's life. ■
