Biodiversity provides the very basis for the human race to survive and thrive. It not only affects the well-being of humanity and future generations, but also has a key bearing on the sustainability of global development, and potentially even the rise and fall of civilization.
Since the dawn of industrial civilization, mankind has created massive material wealth. Yet, it has come at a cost of intensified exploitation of natural resources, which has disrupted the balance in the Earth's ecosystem and caused severe ecological crises as manifested in biodiversity loss and environmental damage. with the global rate of species extinction accelerating, severe ecosystem degradation and loss of biodiversity pose major threats to human survival and development.
Globally, biodiversity loss can be attributed to five main causes --- habitat loss and degradation, overexploitation, climate change, environmental pollution, and invasive alien species. A key underlying driver exacerbating these problems has been the unsustainable pattern of energy development. Since the Industrial Revolution, long-term, large-scale development and utilization of fossil fuels has produced large volumes of greenhouse gases and other harmful substances, leading to temperature increases, environmental degradation, and resource shortages, and posing a serious threat to global biodiversity. At this rate, there is a real possibility -- especially with the climate crisis looming -- of the emergence of a global ecological crisis, disastrous for all life on Earth, sometime in the coming decades. To address this intensifying challenge, energy, the linchpin of the problem, must be addressed, and major efforts made to expedite the energy and electric power revolution, to mitigate and reverse the damage inflicted by fossil fuel use on biodiversity, and to promote coordinated energy and power development and biodiversity governance.
Global Energy Interconnection (GEI) is a brand-new energy system steering toward clean energy production, widespread energy allocation and electrification of energy consumption as well as an important platform for large-scale development, transmission and utilization of clean energy resources worldwide. Building GEI is an essential enabler of the worldwide energy and power revolution. It is a game changer to the current development path in which economies and societies rely on fossil fuels, a catalyst for a new energy development model characterized by "zero pollution, zero carbon emission and high efficiency", and a radical solution to the crucial problem of fossil fuels which has impacted and restricted biodiversity. GEI can promote the coordinated and sustainable development of energy and ecology, offer effective solutions to biodiversity protection, and inject new momentum into the development of ecological protection and the building of a shared future for all life on Earth.
