News & Comment

Big Tourism has co-opted the IUCN tourism subgroup to promote land grabs for private tourism development in public protected areas, detracting from IUCN’s conservation role. Recent political manoeuvres include a tourism-in-parks policy paper, proposed motions, and sessions at the World Conservation Congress 2025. We call upon IUCN to explicitly reject infiltration of industrial tourism into national parks, and recognise definitively that public protected areas are assets for conservation of biodiversity.

This article is an invitation to reflect on the reality of early-career researchers (ECRs), making science in unequal and precarious conditions. By inviting established researchers to use their stability to amplify younger voices and fight for fair working conditions, I propose a re-collectivization of science worldwide, allowing the experiences and demands of young scientists to be used as guides for the development of action plans and structuring changes in scientific production.

The EU institutions must align their visions for the future and decide if the EU will lead the transformative systemic change required to achieve the United Nations’ goals on climate, biodiversity, and sustainable development. If so, the EU must move beyond hesitation and inconsistency and commit to integrate coherent concrete actions across all sectoral policies and regulations to truly drive a genuine transformative change that ensures a thriving future for all.

We analyse political manoeuvres by global tourism industry associations, and responses by conservation organisations, that create new risks to biodiversity. There are a few tourism enterprises that make net positive contributions to conservation. Nature positive terms, however, are being used for marketing greenwash, to delay and avoid environmental fees and regulations, and to lobby for land grabs in public protected areas.

We compared global media coverage and internet search interest in COP15—which resulted in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework—with COP27, a climate-focused conference, and the popular American singer Taylor Swift. Despite the critical environmental and societal implications of biodiversity loss, COP15 received significantly less attention, even in highly biodiverse countries. Addressing this attention shortfall will be crucial for building the awareness and advocacy needed to achieve global biodiversity goals.

The commitment to protect 30% of the Earth’s terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030 under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has seen growing attention paid to ‘other effective area-based conservation measures’ (OECMs) to help achieve this target. However, there are a number of misconceptions of OECMs that commonly arise. We explore these misconceptions to aid in ensuring that OECMs are employed to meet their full potential.

This paper is a call to action. By publishing concurrently across journals like an emergency bulletin, we are not merely making a plea for awareness about climate change. Instead, we are demanding immediate, tangible steps that harness the power of microbiology and the expertise of researchers and policymakers to safeguard the planet for future generations.

The nascent Biodiversity Credit Market (BCM) aims to boost biodiversity funding but mirrors the flawed carbon credit market. To ensure success, BCM should (1) use dynamic baselines with control sites, (2) monitor the populations dynamics of a large array of vertebrate and invertebrate species, and (3) assign credits through an independent, transparent, and cost-effective validation process.

The diverse physiography of the Portuguese land and marine territory, spanning from continental Europe to the Atlantic archipelagos, has made it an important repository of biodiversity throughout the Pleistocene glacial cycles, leading to a remarkable diversity of species and ecosystems. This rich biodiversity is under threat from anthropogenic drivers, such as climate change, invasive species, land use changes, overexploitation, or pathogen (re)emergence. The inventory, characterisation, and study of biodiversity at inter- and intra-specific levels using genomics is crucial to promote its preservation and recovery by informing biodiversity conservation policies, management measures, and research. The participation of researchers from Portuguese institutions in the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) initiative and its pilot effort to generate reference genomes for European biodiversity has reinforced the establishment of Biogenome Portugal. This nascent institutional network will connect the national community of researchers in genomics. Here, we describe the Portuguese contribution to ERGA’s pilot effort, which will generate high-quality reference genomes of six species from Portugal that are endemic, iconic, and/or endangered and include plants, insects, and vertebrates (fish, birds, and mammals) from mainland Portugal or the Azores islands. In addition, we outline the objectives of Biogenome Portugal, which aims to (i) promote scientific collaboration, (ii) contribute to advanced training, (iii) stimulate the participation of institutions and researchers based in Portugal in international biodiversity genomics initiatives, and (iv) contribute to the transfer of knowledge to stakeholders and engaging the public to preserve biodiversity. This initiative will strengthen biodiversity genomics research in Portugal and fuel the genomic inventory of Portuguese eukaryotic species. Such efforts will be critical to the conservation of the country’s rich biodiversity and will contribute to ERGA’s goal of generating reference genomes for European species.

Extreme weather has made 2023 virtually certain to be the warmest year on record, signaling unprecedented climate and biodiversity crises. Brazil, the world’s most biodiverse country, with two hotspots and complex social and economic layers, has experienced escalating environmental degradation over the past years. Alarming rates of native vegetation loss, wildfires, severe and prolonged droughts, and heatwaves have adversely impacted several Brazilian ecosystems and societies. Despite the country’s decisive role in global carbon neutrality, bridging the gap between Brazil’s discourse on the international stage and its concrete actions at home remains a significant challenge. This correspondence, a collective plea from scientists across various sectors, underscores the urgent imperative for national engagement and commitment to halt and mitigate these crises. We aim to catalyze a robust international public debate, influencing Brazilian decision-makers to chart a concrete sustainable pathway. Aligned with global initiatives, we emphasize the crucial interplay between national and international efforts in combating climate change and the conservation of biodiversity and socio-biodiversity.

It is widely perceived how research institutes have been adopting the discourse of champions of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) in recent years. Despite progress in diversity and inclusion in the academic environment, we highlight here that nothing or, at very best, little work has been done to overcome the scientific labor division in academic research that promotes neocolonial practices in academic recognition and jeopardizes equity. In this piece, we bring secondary data that reinforce biased patterns in academic recognition between Global North and South (geographical markers and citation bias), and propose three actions that should be adopted by researchers, research institutes, journals, and scientific societies from the Global North that allows for a fairer recognition of the academic expertise produced by the Global South.

A key question in ecological research is whether biodiversity is important for ecosystem functioning. After approximately three decades of empirical studies on this topic, it is clear that biodiversity promotes the magnitude and stability of ecosystem functioning. However, the majority of early biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) experiments concluded that there is a saturating relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, seemingly supporting the ‘redundancy hypothesis’ of biodiversity. This hypothesis may suggest that many species can be lost from an ecosystem before any changes in functioning can be detected under the current environmental conditions. Here, we argue that the term functional redundancy (1) may have been overused from an ecological perspective and (2) can be dangerous and misleading in scientific communication. Rather, we propose to use the term ‘functional similarity’, which better highlights the unique contributions of all coexisting species to ecosystem functioning, gradients in niche overlap and has a less negative connotation. In a world where increasing anthropogenic stressors are accelerating biodiversity change and loss and thus threatening ecosystem integrity, important political and societal decisions must be taken to combat the joint climate and biodiversity crisis. We should therefore reconsider and carefully choose terminology in biodiversity science for value-neutral communication.

Designing restoration projects requires integrating socio-economic and cultural needs of local stakeholders for enduring and just outcomes. Using India as a case study, we demonstrate a people-centric approach to help policymakers translate global restoration prioritization studies for application to a country-specific context and to identify different socio-environmental conditions restoration programs could consider when siting projects. Focusing, in particular, on poverty quantified by living standards and land tenure, we find that of the 579 districts considered here, 116 of the poorest districts have high biophysical restoration potential (upper 50th percentile of both factors). In most districts, the predominant land tenure is private, indicating an opportunity to focus on agri-pastoral restoration over carbon and forest-based restoration projects.

Expansive farmlands in Europe and elsewhere are either already abandoned or projected to become abandoned. Afforestation on these abandoned farmlands is highly popular, but it only addresses the climate crisis, not the biodiversity emergency. An alternative to afforestation is rewilding, which would contribute to combating both the biodiversity and climate crises while also facilitating socio-ecological sustainability by increasing ecosystem resilience.

The astronomical number of individual microorganisms that exist on Earth provides an immeasurable trove from which potential microbial-based solutions can be drawn upon to drive the development of sustainable industries. However, there is little information documenting the spectrum of global microbial biodiversity and how human activity has impacted the taxonomic and functional diversity of microbial communities. Here, we discuss how promoting microbial innovation can encourage environmental, social, and corporate governance investments towards protecting global biodiversity for all life whilst meeting the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.