The value of biodiversity must be accounted for, says Pavan Sukhdev. It is time for governments to invest to secure the flow of nature's 'public goods'.
While species losses mount worldwide, conservationists in Brazil have made great strides towards saving the golden lion tamarin and its forest habitat from destruction.
With nations admitting that they will fail to achieve their goal of significantly cutting biodiversity loss by 2010, a flurry of work is under way to develop new, more robust targets and ways of monitoring progress. These must be ready by next October, when the 193 parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD) meet in Nagoya, Japan.
Palaeontologists must model the causes of biodiversity rather than simply cataloguing fossils, says Douglas Erwin, as they curate the only record of ecosystems undamaged by humans.
The study of stable oxygen isotope ratios (delta18O) of Precambrian cherts suggests that ocean temperatures during the Archaean era (about 3.5 billion years ago) were between 55
Projects in Madagascar could provide a model for stemming deforestation. But first these efforts must deal with the poverty and political upheaval that threaten forests, reports Anjali Nayar.
