"Offsetting" habitat destruction has widespread appeal as an instrument for balancing economic growth with biodiversity conservation. Requiring proponents to pay the nontrivial costs of habitat loss encourages sensitive planning approaches.

Reports that the geological record of erosion indicates a fourfold increase in global sedimentation rates during the past 5 million years merited a global explanation. Explanations offered include an increased rate of mountain formation and global cooling.

Increased erosion associated with the rise of the world's great mountain ranges has been held to be the cause of a prolonged episode of past climate cooling. That connection is now brought into doubt.

Hundreds of millions of indigenous women and men throughout the world manage their forests and crops sustainably, and in this way contribute to the sequestration of greenhouse gases. However, maintaining control over their land and forests in the face of colonial and corporate attempts to nationalise or privatise them has been a historic struggle.