SciDev.Net

Advice for policymakers in southern Africa on how to improve pesticide use and reduce the risks they pose to human health and the environment.

An analysis of integrating disaster management in developing countries in the context of increased disaster risk from climate change.

What are the main issues that African nations face in forthcoming negotiations on biotechnology and biosafety?

Growing dryland populations are depleting their natural resources, while increasingly-settled agriculture ignores the traditional knowledge needed to tackle future uncertainties, says David Thomas.

Valuing the benefits ecosystems give us is a vital step in ensuring their sustainable use and conservation. Anantha Duraiappah shows how environmental economics offers the best way yet to tackle the job.

Ten years since the UNCCD came into force, the problems remain. Despite some successes, varying definitions and restricted finance limit the convention's effectiveness, as Lindsay Stringer explains.

Biodiversity in the world's drylands is fragile, easily disrupted and under threat. John Lemons sets out guidelines for tailoring policies to best protect these uniquely adapted species.

With water scarcity already affecting over a billion people, dryland populations should combine traditional and modern knowledge to manage water access sustainably, says Theib Oweis.

An overview of the various ways in which techniques that do not involve genetic modification can helping plant breeders to develop and propagate new crop varieties.

The allergy issue has raised many concerns about GM food, which have important implications. This policy brief by Clare Mills attempts to put concerns into perspective.

Two international instruments have recently changed the playing field regarding the international regulation of genetically engineered organisms. What are they, how do they work and how effective can they be?

How much real scope do developing countries have in the way they trade or use genetically modified foods or crops?

Recent years have seen rising interest in the commercial exploitation of indigenous knowledge. But there are serious concerns over who benefits from this knowledge. Anju Sharma puts this debate into context by describing how the issue is being played out at the global level.

Policy analyst, Stas Burgiel, charts the progress of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and discusses the relative successes and many difficulties it has had to weather.

Hannah Reid, Balakrishna Pisupati and Helen Baulch explore the inextricable links between biodiversity and climate, and explain why an integrated policy approach is required.

In recent times, agriculture and biodiversity have coexisted uneasily. Barbara Gemmill and Ana Milena Varela describe how the future of each is intimately bound up in the other.

Some environmental researchers take the view that species-rich ecosystems function better than those that are species-poor. Others disagree. Shahid Naeem assesses the arguments.

A growing number of critics of 'bioprospecting' complain that companies often fail to adequately compensate holders of traditional knowledge, and that patents on products developed in this way are actually a form of intellectual piracy.