News & Comment

As biodiversity net gain rises on the global agenda, Germany’s 50-year-old no-net-loss policy faces mounting resistance amid pressures to accelerate infrastructure development. We argue that the regulation remains essential for maintaining ecological integrity and that targeted reforms could make it more efficient, effective and transparent, and provide key lessons to inform global efforts.

Recent expanded Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) listings for sharks and rays are welcome — yet seizing this opportunity requires that international trade policy is treated not as an end point, but as a catalyst for wider regulatory and market-based reforms.

In this age of abundant remote-sensing data, global datasets are increasingly relied upon to analyse the planet at unprecedented scale and resolution. We offer three considerations on uncertainties and potential misapplications of global datasets, to ensure results appropriate for decision making.

A quarter of a century after its publication, the biodiversity hotspot concept remains one of the most cited and influential frameworks in conservation science. But its real-world impact is poorly documented in peer-reviewed literature, which hinders the development of new approaches for prioritizing conservation action.

Amidst the collective push to establish nature conservation initiatives, little attention has been paid to ensuring that they persist over time. The abandonment of conservation commitments is a blind spot that threatens progress towards global environmental goals.

Coral reefs are inextricably linked to their surrounding seascape, ecologically shaped by ocean circulation patterns and dependent on upwelled nutrients and planktonic subsidies. To better predict coral reef futures, we must more effectively quantify and incorporate these fundamental biophysical interactions.

Growing evidence suggests that timescales for plastic degradation have been vastly underestimated. The fossil record of plastic-like biopolymers might provide a perspective on plastic fossilization in deep time.

The effective conservation of soil biodiversity and ecosystem services in the face of global-change threats requires improvements in national monitoring. We outline the Global Soil Biodiversity Observatory, an initiative that aims to develop standardized indicators and enhance national monitoring capacities to support evidence-based policymaking and facilitate global assessments.

Deep-pelagic ecosystems are critical for climate regulation, food security and global economic activities, yet the focus of deep-sea research and conservation remains on seafloor-associated ecosystems. We discuss the overlooked deep-pelagic ecosystems and call for their recognition as social–ecological systems.

Resilience in production forests can be achieved through natural ecological processes or repeated intensive interventions. We caution that ‘coerced’ resilience derived from intense and repeated human inputs may exacerbate biodiversity loss, narrow the range of ecosystem services provided and limit general resilience (that is, the capacity of production forests to recover from unforeseen disturbances).

Achieving inclusive and sustainable ocean economies, long-term climate resilience and effective biodiversity conservation requires urgent and strategic actions from local to global scales. We discuss fundamental changes that are needed to allow equitable policy across these three domains.

Forests are spatially and temporally dynamic, such that forest degradation is best quantified across whole landscapes and over the long term. The European Union’s forest degradation policy, which focuses on contemporary primary forest conversion to plantations, ignores other globally prevalent forestry practices that can flip forests into a degraded state.

The Anthropocene has been rejected as a formal epoch by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Moving on and recognizing the deeper and more complex roots of human impacts on our planet will enable us to better, and more fairly, address them.

The current and fervent uptick in the natural sciences of seeking to engage with Indigenous partners signals a change in attitudes towards Indigenous knowledge systems and Peoples as well as their rights, but comes with a substantial amount of risk, burden and peril. To aid scientists in conducting research ‘in a good way’, we offer key insights and guidance that are rooted in our own scientific training and communities of practice.

The Brazilian Society of Palaeontology (BSP) has recently taken steps to become more involved in the repatriation of fossil specimens — a central issue in the global palaeontological community, as interest in combating scientific colonialism grows — both through collaboration with researchers and other Latin American scientific associations. We discuss our experience, including the challenges we have faced and how we have overcome them, in the hope of inspiring other scientific societies to play their part.

The causation of sexual orientation is likely to be complex and influenced by multiple factors. We advocate incorporating a broader cultural view into evolutionary and genetic studies to account for differences in how sexual orientation is experienced, expressed and understood in both humans and nonhuman animals.

Participants in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s processes for implementing the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework need clarity on what makes biodiversity information useful to national decision-makers. Here we present seven preconditions of useful biodiversity information and describe how these can be supported through regional support centres and south–south cooperation.

For the concept of nature positive to succeed as the lodestar for international action on biodiversity conservation, it must build upon lessons learned from the application of the mitigation hierarchy — or risk becoming mere greenwash.

The rate and extent of global biodiversity change is surpassing our ability to measure, monitor and forecast trends. We propose an interconnected worldwide system of observation networks — a global biodiversity observing system (GBiOS) — to coordinate monitoring worldwide and inform action to reach international biodiversity targets.

The majority of power generated by photovoltaic energy infrastructure is derived from ground-mounted solar arrays that prioritize energy production, minimize operating costs and, at best, accommodate limited ecosystem services. We argue that co-prioritizing ecosystem services and energy generation using an ecologically informed, ‘ecovoltaics’ approach to solar array design and operation will have multiple benefits for climate, biodiversity and the restoration of degraded lands.