Planting trees in dryland regions can negatively impact biodiversity, and policies must promote the practice on a smaller scale.

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

Involving local communities in biodiversity protection from the outset can boost both conservation and empowerment of local people.

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

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.

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.