Traditional knowledge can inform strategies for improving nutrition and help vulnerable populations cope with environmental change.

Traditional medicine can seem to be at odds with a modern healthcare system. But, as many countries with well-established — and much used — systems of indigenous medicine are now realising, the integration of traditional medicine into the modern health infrastructure can be a way to get the best of both worlds. Sibongile Pefile discusses the efforts of the South African government in creating legislation for — and therefore making more formal — the country's traditional medicine.

With much of the developing world reliant on traditional medicine, and its increasing acceptance in the developed world, the need for universal standards for indigenous medicines is greater than ever. Darshan Shankar and Padma Venkatasubramanian investigate the standards that currently exist, and suggest methods for developing standards in the future that are sensitive to the cultures from which the medicines originated.

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.