We’ve long known Australia’s main environmental protection laws aren’t doing their job, and we know Australians want better laws. Labor was elected promising to fix them. But yesterday, the government walked back its commitments, deferring the necessary reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act indefinitely in the face of pressure from the state Labor government in Western Australia and the mining and resources industries. Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek was on the front foot yesterday, promising the new national agency Environment Protection Australi ..read more

L'IPBES, ou GIEC de la biodiversité, appelle à des changements transformateurs de nos modes de vie pour préserver la planète. cattan2011/Flickr, CC BY Taking action on climate change or biodiversity is harder than it looks. We saw this last November when the conflict of interest of Sultan al-Jaber, president of both the COP28 and of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, were there for all to see. Sultan al-Jaber was accused of taking advantage of the world climate summit to strike backroom business deals for his company. He also claimed that there was no scientific evidence to justify t ..read more

Rhett Butler, Author provided One of Brazil’s top scientists, Eneas Salati, once said, “The best thing you could do for the Amazon rainforest is to blow up all the roads.” He wasn’t joking. And he had a point. In an article published today in Nature, my colleagues and I show that illicit, often out-of-control road building is imperilling forests in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. The roads we’re studying do not appear on legitimate maps. We call them “ghost roads”. What’s so bad about a road? A road means access. Once roads are bulldozed into rainforests, illegal loggers, miners, po ..read more

Lush underwater forests formed by large brown seaweeds known as kelp are among the most abundant and productive coastal ecosystems in Canada. Kelp forests help to support fisheries, draw down carbon and improve water quality — in the process contributing billions to the global economy. Unfortunately, climate change is now a major threat to kelp forests. Kelp forests require cool water temperatures, and recent ocean warming has placed these valuable ecosystems in hot water. In our new study, we highlight by just how much some of Canada’s kelp forests along the Pacific coast have declined. We al ..read more

South Africa’s government is calling for public comments on an updated version of its existing biodiversity economy plan. The National Biodiversity Economy Strategy aims to conserve biodiversity while also contributing to job creation and economic growth. It proposes to do this by promoting sustainable use of the country’s natural resources. The strategy is being revised so that the country’s national policy is better aligned with recent international policy developments in the biodiversity sphere. The most important of these is the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Kunming-Montreal Global ..read more

Problems in Canada’s food system are being felt from field to fork — and they are increasingly hard to swallow. After a year of skyrocketing food costs, Canada’s Food Price Report 2024 predicts a further increase of 2.5 to 4.5 per cent for grocery store price tags. One cause for these higher prices — apart from corporate greed — is attributable to more difficult environmental conditions for farmers. Severe weather events, like flooding and drought, as well as extreme temperatures, are making farming livelihoods increasingly precarious. Read more: How nature-based knowledge can restore local ec ..read more

Hanna Taniukevich/Shutterstock Policy alignment sounds dry. But think of it like this: you want to make suburbs cooler and more liveable, so you plant large trees. But then you find the trees run afoul of fire and safety provisions, and they’re cut down. Such problems are all too common. Policies set by different government departments start with good intentions only to clash with other policies. At present, the Albanese government is working towards stronger environmental laws, following the scathing 2020 Samuel review of the current Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. T ..read more

The island of Jersey is known for its picturesque scenery and mild climate. However, its proximity to the European continent has placed it in the path of an invasive predator: the Asian hornet, Vespa velutina. This is bad news for the island’s wildlife, but makes Jersey an ideal location for testing new methods to combat the hornets. Using the island as a testbed, our team of biologists and data scientists have developed an AI system that can automatically detect Asian hornet invasions into new regions, enabling their eradication before they can gain a foothold. The system, VespAI, identifies ..read more

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – models that process large and diverse datasets and make predictions from them – can have many uses in nature conservation, such as remote monitoring (like the use of camera traps to study animals or plants) or data analysis. Some of these are controversial because AI can be trained to be biased, but others are valuable research tools. Biologist Daniele Silvestro has developed an AI tool that can help identify conservation and restoration priorities. We asked him to tell us more about how it works and what it offers. How does your artificial intelligence tool for ..read more

Sundry Photography, Shutterstock Australia has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to halt and reverse biodiversity loss through ambitious law and policy reform. The federal government is currently rewriting our national environmental laws and updating the overarching Strategy for Nature. The updated strategy will include, among other things, goals for the restoration of degraded areas. Part of the impetus for this reform is the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This 2022 United Nations treaty was signed by almost 200 countries committing to address the biodiversity crisis. It inc ..read more