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Private-sector capital is needed to scale-up forest and landscape restoration initiatives globally. To ensure the delivery of social and environmental restoration objectives, investors need to be matched appropriately to different types of restoration projects, while policies need to realign investment incentives away from degradation-driving activities.
Much research and policy effort is being expended on ways to conserve living nature while enabling the economic and social development needed to increase equity and end poverty. We propose this will only be possible if policy shifts away from conservation targets that focus on avoiding losses towards processes that consider net outcomes for biodiversity.
The past half century has seen a move from a multiregionalist view of human origins to widespread acceptance that modern humans emerged in Africa. Here the authors argue that a simple out-of-Africa model is also outdated, and that the current state of the evidence favours a structured African metapopulation model of human origins.
Currently honeybees are the sole model insect pollinator for regulatory pesticide risk assessments globally. Here we question whether this surrogacy approach provides adequate protection against potential non-target impacts of pesticide exposure for the wide diversity of insect pollinators on which agricultural production and wild plant ecosystems depend.
States at the United Nations have begun negotiating a new treaty to strengthen the legal regime for marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. Failure to ensure the full scope of fish biodiversity is covered could result in thousands of species continuing to slip through the cracks of a fragmented global ocean governance framework.
Metastatic disease remains invariably fatal. Until truly curative therapies are developed, can clinical oncology benefit from lessons learned in pest management?
Land policies around the world tend to focus on support for agricultural output. We argue that this leads to ineffective public expenditure, environmental harm and missed opportunities for the use of rural resources. Applying thinking centred on ecosystems services to the governance of rural land would secure greater social value.
As Bolivia approaches presidential elections in October 2019, the country’s environmental leadership is at stake. We discuss urgent challenges and opportunities for reconciling conservation and societal needs in this mega-diverse country.
Current mangrove planting schemes aimed at reversing global losses are prioritising short-term increases in area over long-term establishment. Without sound, evidence-based restoration policies, this approach could accelerate the demise of mangrove forests and the ecosystem services they provide.
The inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s new president has heralded a rapid acceleration of the erosion of environmental protection measures in the country. Brazil’s scientific community should rally to provide evidence that this is economically and socially unwise.
New antibiotics are urgently needed to combat rising rates of resistance against all existing classes of antimicrobials. We highlight key issues that complicate the prediction of resistance evolution in the real world and outline the ways in which these can be overcome.
Macroscopic organisms from the late Ediacaran period have often been described as failed experiments in the history of life. We argue that the field of Ediacaran palaeobiology should dispense with unhelpful historical classification schemes and embrace phylogenetic systematics if we are to establish the evolutionary relevance of these fossils.
Since its inception, the East African Association for Palaeoanthropology and Palaeontology has brought together scholars and researchers who conduct research in palaeoanthropology, archaeology and palaeontology, creating a balanced forum for the study of human heritage in Africa.
Researchers in various contexts have long struggled with an apparent disconnect between an individual’s level of understanding of biological evolution and their acceptance of it as an explanation for the history and diversity of life. Here, we discuss the main factors associated with acceptance of evolution and chart a path forward for evolution education research.
