Editorial content

Why we're talking about diversity...

Cures for AIDS and some cancers could be at our fingertips if we did a better job of looking after biodiversity, says Eric Chivian.

The commercial use of biodiversity has become a highly contentious area of policy, marked by mistrust and misunderstanding. Sarah Laird and Rachel Wynberg say the arguments are far from being settled.

When three undergraduates set off on an expedition in 1965 to trap moths on Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, little did they realise that they were establishing the groundwork for a study of the impacts of climate change. New research led by the University of York has repeated the survey 42 years later, and found that, on average, species had moved uphill by about 67 metres over the intervening years to cope with changes in climate.

Greenhouse gases are putting the world’s oceans at risk of becoming too acidic to support coral reefs and marine life, warned over 150 scientists who today called on governments to take immediate action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions in a declaration drafted as a result of a United Nations conference.

A major cause for biodiversity may be biodiversity itself, says evolutionary ecologist Andrew Forbes of the University of California, Davis, whose newly published research shows that when the apple maggot shifted hosts from the hawthorn to the apple, that triggered a cascading effect on the ecosystem.