Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The final week of the year will bring low tides to San Diego’s coastline, giving tide poolers one more chance this month to participate in a statewide quest to find sea stars—otherwise known as starfish. The Solstice Sea Star Search along the California coast is an initiative from the California Academy […]
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Ecologists have devised a new framework to classify how biodiversity credit operators define what a unit of nature is. The new analysis demonstrates the challenges involved with devising a biodiversity credit market to fund nature recovery, and the risks of relying too heavily on ‘offsetting.’ Nature conservation faces an estimated $700 […]
Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World Peter Godfrey-Smith William Collins (2024) Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has devoted his career to examining how animal minds evolved. He blends formidable analytical skills with a deep curiosity about the natural world, mostly experienced at first hand in his native Australia. While writing his […]
In 2023, governments adopted an agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction, known as the BBNJ agreement (see go.nature.com/4fehwo7). This agreement is essential to define and enforce the target laid down in the Convention […]
RESEARCH BRIEFINGS 13 November 2024 Whether rising carbon dioxide concentrations affect terrestrial species diversity around the globe is, surprisingly, almost unstudied. A 24-year field experiment shows that adding nitrogen to grassland plots reduces species richness, and that increasing the level of carbon dioxide amplifies this effect, tripling the reductions caused by nitrogen addition.
CALI, Colombia — In the face of extreme and accelerating wildlife declines, government officials from nearly every country have agreed to a groundbreaking new deal meant to funnel more money and other resources into conservation, especially in poor regions of the world. If it works, the deal — finalized Saturday morning at a United Nations […]
Workers plant trees in the outskirts of Bogotá as part of a reforestation project.Credit: Florian Kopp/imageBroker/Shutterstock This year’s Global Risks Report from the World Economic Forum ranked ‘biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse’ as one of the three most severe risks that societies face over the next ten years, alongside ‘extreme weather’ and ‘critical change to […]
I relocated from California to Placencia, on the coast of southern Belize, in 1995, when there were no paved roads, no vehicles and everybody walked around barefoot. Back then, I was working as a research assistant and scuba-diving instructor. That meant that I had access to Belize’s stunning coral reefs, but also that I began […]
The COP16 biodiversity conference opened in Cali with Colombia’s Environment Minister Susana Muhamad (C) taking over the presidency. The world’s biggest nature protection conference opened in Colombia on Monday with calls for urgent action and financing to reverse humankind’s rapacious destruction of biodiversity. With about a million known species worldwide estimated to be at risk […]
The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund was created last year to help countries achieve agreed UN targets to ‘halt and reverse’ the loss of nature by 2030. The world’s biggest nature protection conference opens in Colombia Monday with the United Nations chief calling for countries to “convert words into action” and fatten a fund seeking to […]
