Most West Indies fans were thrilled to see and hear that their side had conquered

Located in a global hotspot for biodiversity, Los Angeles County is home to more than 4,000 distinct species of plants and animals, including 52 endangered species - more than any county outside of Hawaii. And with 1 million animal and plant species facing extinction due to human activity, according to the United Nations, efforts to better understand the factors that shape biodiversity in Los Angeles could help shape global conservation efforts.

Water scarcity, a socio-environmental threat to anthropogenic activities and ecosystems alike, affects large regions of the globe. However, it is often the most vulnerable and disadvantaged populations that suffer the severest consequences, highlighting the role of economic and institutional factors in water scarcity. In this way, researchers generally consider not only the physical constraints but socio-economic determinants as well.

A new study from University of Michigan climate researchers concludes that some of the latest-generation climate models may be overly sensitive to carbon dioxide increases and therefore project future warming that is unrealistically high.

In a ground breaking study, an international team of 21 scientists led by Sean Hoban, Ph.D., Conservation Biologist at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, evaluated five genera spanning the plant tree of life (Hibiscus, Magnolia, Pseudophoenix, Quercus and Zamia) to understand how much genetic diversity currently exists in collections in botanical gardens and arboreta worldwide.

A new way of looking at marine evolution over the past 540 million years has shown that levels of biodiversity in our oceans have remained fairly constant, rather than increasing continuously over the last 200 million years, as scientists previously thought.

Do biodiversity losses aggravate transmission of infectious diseases spread by animals to humans? The jury is still out but several scientists say there is a "biodiversity dilution effect" in which declining biodiversity results in increased infectious-disease transmission.

"The coronavirus pandemic has made abundantly clear that if life is to thrive on this Earth, human and nonhuman, we need cooperation at all scales-global, regional, binational, within a nation, interstate, and in our local communities. And we need to learn how to coexist with and have compassion for our nonhuman relatives-and acknowledge in the midst of this pandemic that bats are not our enemies."

Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve is one of China's most popular tourist attractions, drawing more than five million visitors per year to the sparsely populated mountains of north-western Sichuan. The reserve has been home to farmer-herders for thousands of years, but to conserve the biodiversity and scenic quality of the reserve, park policies prohibit residents from farming, herding and wood cutting.

When did you last see a glow worm? Most likely, quite some time ago. Depending on how young you are, you may have never seen one at all. Those light-emitting insects, Wordsworth's "earthborn stars", have been declining in the UK for decades. That means that scientists now see them in fewer places, and even in those pockets where conditions are right for them, there are fewer of them to be found.

And against the backdrop of threatened lives, crippled businesses and damaged economies, the UN chief warned the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are also under threat.

Global action is also a matter of self-interest for developed economies.

The world's two largest economies are both partners and rivals, deeply intertwined but also with divergent interests. How will these contradictions resolve themselves following COVID-19?

New Publication: Rules, Procedures and Mechanisms Applicable to Processes under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.

Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity Serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (Advance text)