Demonstrations of coupled phenotypic and demographic responses to climate change are rare. But they are much needed in formulating predictions of the effects of climate change on natural populations.
As the US Senate gears up to debate the latest incarnation of proposed climate legislation next week, a blue-ribbon panel has released what it hopes will be a definitive guide to the consequences of climate change for lawmakers and the public. In offering a degree-by-degree breakdown of the potential impacts of temperature change, the report aims to highlight the effects of stabilizing greenhouse gases at a chosen target level.
A once-in-a-century drought struck much of the Amazon rainforest in 2005, reducing rainfall by 60–75% in some areas — and giving scientists a window on to a future coloured by climate change. The drought foreshadowed the Amazon drying that many climate modellers expect to see in a warmer world.
Suggestions that poorly performing conservation areas should lose their protected status, and the money saved used to better effect elsewhere, tend not to go down well with conservationists or local lobby groups. But according to a study of the performance of the nearly 7,000 protected areas in Australia, that may well be the best policy in the long run.
A Cambodian group has developed a pioneering community-based approach to HIV and TB care and research. Amy Maxmen describes how this powerful model is being expanded to other war-torn countries.
There is more to combating HIV in the developing world than providing affordable drugs. T. V. Padma looks at the innovative new strategies being employed.
The US government must make the Department of Defense a key customer for energy technologies and make greenhouse-gas reductions a public good, say John Alic, Daniel Sarewitz, Charles Weiss and William Bonvillian.
