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ma=86400 Geodiversity challenges for a sustainable future | Nature Geoscience
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Geodiversity challenges for a sustainable future

Nature Geoscience volume 17, page 948 (2024)Cite this article

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The world is facing many challenges, most of them in some way associated with nature. And yet, much of the focus on nature within these challenges has been solely on biodiversity, the biotic part of nature. Geodiversity, which encompasses the non-living elements of nature — including things such as rock, minerals, fossils, soils, and landscapes, as well as the processes that create, modify, and destroy such features — has received far less attention.

Geodiversity underpins every ecosystem and is therefore vital to biodiversity. The natural laboratory of geodiversity reveals how the environment, climate, and life have changed through time, which is essential to understand as society responds to anthropogenic climate change. Through mineral resources, geodiversity supplies us with the materials needed to produce the technologies that are essential for a greener economy. Geodiversity also influences cultural diversity and provides numerous non-material benefits, such as the landscapes we appreciate during leisure time. But it also has intrinsic value: imagine how different the world would be without geodiversity, if it was just a smooth spheroidal planet comprising a single mineral1?

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Oxford, UK

    Jack Matthews

  2. Institute of Geonics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, Czechia

    Lucie Kubalíková

  3. Faculty of Mining, Ecology, Process Control and Geotechnologies, Technical University of Košice, Košice, Slovakia

    Ľubomír Štrba

  4. Geography Research Unit, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Helena Tukiainen

Authors
  1. Jack Matthews
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  2. Lucie Kubalíková
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  3. Ľubomír Štrba
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  4. Helena Tukiainen
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Correspondence to Jack Matthews.

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Matthews, J., Kubalíková, L., Štrba, Ľ. et al. Geodiversity challenges for a sustainable future. Nat. Geosci. 17, 948 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01551-w

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