Genomes and genetics as tools in biological sustainability

Sustainability is a buzzword in many contexts, ranging from ecology to economy. Larger urban societies may have moved far away from the nature, both in concrete, figurative, and intellectual sense. Still, humans do live from biological resources, some of them coming from farmed organisms (whether plants or animals) and other organisms harvested in the wild. Also, many of our raw materials come from biological resources, and in the greener future, biological resources will replace oil as a starting point for making materials. The consequence is that the pressure on biodiversity and nature is increasing rather than decreasing. To exploit biological resources in the most sustainable way, we need to take care of the species (and its habitat), but also the subpopulations and the genetic variations within the species, as long has been recognized in biology and ecology. This has now also become recognized by international biodiversity policy, like the Kunming-Montreal Global Diversity Framework adopted in December 2022. Protecting the genetic diversity in a species is also to protect the maximum capability of adapting to changed environmental conditions, including climate change. Genome sequencing gives, by far, the most detailed information about genetic variations in a species. It is the best fundament to establish both the total amount of genetic variation in a species and determine whether there are subpopulations that ought to be independently managed. Indeed, the genome sequence from a single individual can give a proxy, indicating whether the total amount of genetic variation in the species is large or small.