Biodiversity

"United Nations members gather Monday in New York to resume efforts to forge a long-awaited and elusive treaty to safeguard the world’s marine biodiversity."

"Those melancholy tunes sung by humpback whales may really be a sign of loneliness. Scientists who tracked humpback whales in Australia noticed that fewer whales wailed to find mates as their population grew."

"On Monday, in a low-lying tract of southern Georgia’s pine belt, a half-dozen workers planted row upon row of twig-like poplar trees. These weren’t just any trees, though: Some of the seedlings being nestled into the soggy soil had been genetically engineered to grow wood at turbocharged rates while slurping up carbon dioxide from the air."

"With many developing nations facing a triple whammy of rising debt loads, climate change and nature loss, conservationists say the answer could lie with a financial instrument enabling them to tackle all three at once: "debt-for-environment swaps".

"Researchers have found that planting hedgerows helps farmers sequester carbon in the soil, manage pests, and provide habitat for pollinators and other wildlife."

"As temperatures rise, many tropical species once confined to the warmest parts of the globe are expected to climb to higher altitudes and creep farther from the equator. That already may be happening with mosquitoes carrying malaria, one of the world’s most devastating diseases and one that already kills more than 600,000 people a year."

"The U.S. has pledged to work with Brazil to strengthen the protection of the Amazon, including offering “initial support” to the recently revived Amazon Fund. Reports claim the U.S. will initially donate $50 million toward the fund, inciting disappointment among some experts who claim billions, not millions, are required to eliminate deforestation."

"Like so many of the planet's natural habitats, wetlands have been systematically destroyed over the past 300 years. Bogs, fens, marshes and swamps have disappeared from maps and memory, having been drained, dug up and built on. Peatlands, a particular type of wetland, store at least twice the carbon of all the world's forests."