The push for a new environmental crime has attracted high-profile backers including French President Emmanuel Macron, Pope Francis and Greta Thunberg. But we must get the details right.
During a 2015 heat wave, scientists watched as a coral reef died before their eyes. By the end of the century, almost all the world’s corals will be gone if climate change continues at this pace.
When something is free, people use a lot of it. Economists are urging governments to compute values for natural resources – wildlife, plants, air, water – to create motives for protecting them.
We may think of plants as passive life forms, but they can cooperate, share resources, send one another warnings, and distance themselves from their communities when survival depends on it.
This is not an imaginary future dystopia. It’s a scientific projection of Australia under 3°C of global warming – a future we must both strenuously try to avoid, but also prepare for.
Biosphere reserves are the living labs in which people and nature learn how to live and thrive together. Four pilot sites in Africa show the programme’s promise.
Debates centred on the role of recreational hunting in supporting nature conservation and local people’s livelihoods are among the most polarising in conservation today.
Iconic ecosystems, from coral reefs to Tasmania’s ancient forests, are collapsing across the continent and into Antarctica. It’s not too late to act — in fact, our lives depend on it.
World-first research finds human disturbances, on average, restrict an animal’s movements by 37%, or increase it by 70%. That’s like needing to travel an extra 11 km to get to work each day.
The spread of tawny crazy ants may be driven, in part, by their need for calcium. The calcium-rich limestone bedrock of the lower U.S. Midwest may provide ideal conditions for populations to explode.
Mar Benavides, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)
In the ocean, phytoplankton helped by diazotrophs play an outstanding role in withdrawing CO₂ from the atmosphere. But climate change is disturbing this delicate balance.
Millions of miles of fences crisscross the Earth’s surface. They divide ecosystems and affect wild species in ways that often are harmful, but are virtually unstudied.
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University