Deforestation is haunting the African continent as industrial growth paves over public commons and puts more hectares into private hands.
Overcoming hunger and malnutrition in the 21st century no longer means simply increasing the quantity of available food but also the quality.
Polish farmer Slawek Dobrodziej has probably the world’s strangest triathlon training regime: he swims across the lake at the back of his house, then runs across his some 11 hectares of land to check the state of the crops, and at the end of the day bikes close to 40 kilometres to and back from a nearby town for some shopping.
Attempts to genetically modify food staples, such as crops and cattle, to increase their nutritional value and overall performance have prompted world-wide criticism by environmental, nutritionists and agriculture experts, who say that protecting and fomenting biodiversity is a far better solution to hunger and malnutrition.
Some of the Earth’s most delicate tropical paradises are being disfigured by the by-products of the modern age - marine debris: plastic bottles, carrier bags and discarded fishing gear.
Amid warnings that Kenya’s agricultural water use is surpassing sustainable levels and adversely affecting food security, biodiversity researchers say that agrobiodiversity should be considered as a vital tool to combat this.
When my children were born it was a clear commitment: all clothing would have to carry the “organic” seal. It was an expression of a lifestyle, a commitment to the Earth.
Worms and termites are not likely to win hearts and minds, but they, along with lichens and microbes, are vital to food security, say biodiversity specialists who attended this month’s United Nations conference on the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in this south Indian city.
“With more than 60 percent of the world projected to be urban by 2030 why not prepare for it and build cities that include biodiversity preservation into planning?” asks Kobie Brand of ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability in Cape Town, South Africa.
With negotiations to mobilise resources for preservation of biodiversity at a major United Nations conference going nowhere, the Group of 77 and China have hinted at possible suspension of the ‘Aichi targets’ under the Nagoya Protocol.
India’s National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) is actively promoting decentralised grassroots livelihoods as the best way to conserve biodiversity as mandated by the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing (ABS).
Indian civil society organisations see in the 11th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP11) to the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), underway in this south Indian city, a rare opportunity to highlight alleged neglect of biodiversity along the country’s extensive coastal and marine areas.
Conservationists see the decimation of pangolins (scaly anteaters) in Pakistan as a sign of the callousness with which this country’s rich biodiversity is being traded away for commercial gain.
After more than a century of fighting sea erosion by massively dumping granite boulders along the beaches of southern Kerala state, environmentalists and administrators are beginning to see that this has been a costly and ineffective solution.
Impoverished Laos is unlikely to cancel a Thai project to build a mega dam across the Mekong River at Xayaburi, despite warnings from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that it could devastate the region’s rich biodiversity.
This year’s floods, one of the worst in Philippine history, destroyed a staggering 57 million dollars worth of crops, pushing this climate vulnerable country to implement disaster risk reduction measures.
With Pakistan’s last major stands of deodar (cedar) threatened by a ‘timber mafia’, the local people in the Chitral district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province are resorting to direct action to stop the denudation of their picturesque alpine homeland.
Twenty two-year-old Ajay Kallu, hailing from the Bakultala village in northern Andamans, was devoured by an estuarine crocodile when he waded waist deep into a creek to fish on the morning of Aug. 1, marking the fifth fatal crocodile attack in 28 months in the remote Islands that lie at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.
When four men were sentenced to eight months in jail in March for the ‘murder’ of orangutans, it was the first time that people associated with Indonesia’s booming palm oil industry were convicted for killing man’s close relations in the primate family.
Humanity is living beyond its means with the growing demand for food, medicines and other nature-based products, making sustainable consumption and conservation a matter of life and death. This is according to the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network, the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The protection and conservation of biodiversity figure among the most daunting challenges posed by climate change in the Caribbean islands, home to a wealth of endemic species of flora and fauna.