ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the vital asset (and resource) that is biodiversity, discussing briefly its importance and role in maintaining life and how its protection can be enhanced by spatial planning in circumstances of changing climates. Biodiversity is a word of relatively recent coinage, an abbreviation of biological diversity which came into use in the 1990s, following the signing of the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD – see Section 12.2.1). A 2007 opinion poll across the EU showed that two-thirds of citizens did not understand the word ‘biodiversity’ or the main threats to it (EEA, 2009e, p. 8). The term encompasses a set of ideas:
• The diversity of plants, animals and microorganisms (with an estimated 3 to 100 million species on Earth (CBD, 2000)).
