Biodiversity

A large number of approaches have been developed over the last four decades for identifying places of significance for biodiversity, but unfortunately this requires looking at multiple, disconnected databases and other information sources to understand the sites of importance in a particular area.

The Protected Planet Report series, launched in 2012, helps track international progress towards achieving Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 - a target for the global protected area network and for other related targets. One of the key messages of the 2012 Protected Planet Report was that a better understanding and more complete overview of each element of Target 11 would be helpful.

This report offers a review of literature from various sources on the impacts of the production and use of liquid biofuels, which are used mainly in the transport sector. In 2009, Campbell and Doswald (2009) published a review similar to this one, focusing on the biodiversity impacts of biofuels, on behalf of UNEP-WCMC. This report reflects on the progress made since that review.

La Commission de la Sauvegarde des Espèces (CSE) de l'Union Internationale pour la Conservation de la Nature (UICN) décrit par la présente sa position par rapport à l'incidence et l'ampleur croissantes de l'utilisation de poisons qui a provoqué un déclin catastrophique des populations d'animaux sauvages en Afrique, au cours des dernières années. 

This position statement was published by the IUCN Species Survival Commission to outline its position in relation to the increasing incidence and scale of the use of poison causing catastrophic declines in wildlife populations across Africa in recent years. 

Le dispositif juridique français demande aujourd'hui à certaines entreprises de faire figurer dans leurs documents de reporting des informations relatives à la biodiversité. L'objectif est d'informer leurs parties prenantes des relations qu'elles entretiennent avec la biodiversité et des actions qu'elles engagent dans ce domaine.

Some companies are currently required by French legislation to include information on biodiversity in their reports, the aim being to inform their stakeholders about the company’s commitment to biodiversity conservation. However, these reporting documents vary in content, form and method, and some companies admit that they have difficulty writing their biodiversity reporting documents. This study is thus designed to improve companies’ biodiversity reporting methodologies and approaches.

Global spending on nature conservation is currently estimated at around US$50 billion per year. Most of this is public money, yet even this is far from sufficient to maintain biodiversity and the ecosystem services upon which our economies, livelihoods and well-being depend. For this reason, many governments are using payments for ecosystem services (PES) and related market-based instruments to encourage the private sector to do more to protect the environment.

The Journal publishes papers and notes in the field of natural history, broadly defined as the study of organisms in their natural state, relevant to the eastern African region. Of particular interest are contributions that add to our knowledge of the status and conservation of biological diversity in the region. Since the biological landscape is to a large extent shaped by man, papers on ethnobiology are also featured.