and informatics to the field's grand, overarching goal of predicting how a plant with a given set of genes will fare in different environments.
will be the engagement of ecologists, whose expertise is becoming increasingly valuable because even molecular biologists are flocking to learn more about how the genes
and processes they study function in natural environments. Stacey expects that summit participants like all plant scientists,
Some patients and clinicians who have already got wind of the alemtuzumab's efficacy seem unwilling to wait for clinical approval
Fuwen Wei, an ecologist at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing,
Environmental groups and a presidential advisory panel, the National Council for Food security and Nutrition, have called for more transparency in biotechnology science and decision-making,
a week before the United nations climate summit began in Durban, South africa. UEA vice-chancellor Edward Acton said that the university would investigate
As potent greenhouse gases, their regulation falls under the United nations climate framework, but many argue that they would be phased out faster
ruling that the government must prove that the crop poses major health or environmental risks.
Google says it still has more than US$850 million invested in other companies'wind, solar and geothermal products.
The Deepwater horizon disaster, shale-gas fracking and Arctic exploration are all on the agenda. www. 20wpc. com5-9 december Research on the magnitude 9. 0 earthquake that struck Japan
In Alberta, the Department of Environment and Water requires facilities to have their emission estimates
and dissemination of efficient wood stoves in Nigeria to reduce wood demand and deforestation. Some emissions trading schemes give preference to local projects.
The auditor-general criticized the Alberta Department of Environment and Water for allowing carbon credits for emissions-reducing activities that have become common practice.
In the case of Alberta, the auditor-general told the Department of Environment and Water that it had to offer better guidance to improve consistency in emissions estimates
These rice-fish co-cultures could lessen the environmental impact of agricultural chemicals and help make rice farming more profitable,
By regulating the amount of nitrogen in the ecosystem, the practice also minimised the need for applying fertiliser.
Summit urged to clean up farmingthe United nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), sponsor of the Durban meeting,
and argue that the problem deserves a larger share of international climate-change mitigation funding."
As well as Beddington and Mamo, they include Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research in S £o Paulo,
and Marion Guillou, president of The french National Institute for Agriculture in Paris. Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for the Environment and Development in London, hopes Benton is right.
who points out that these children have seen never a cigarette advertisement in their everyday environment.
since the earthquake and tsunami on 11 march have been allowed to restart. Of Japan's 54 nuclear reactors, 43 are currently offline.
How icebergs begin A seasonal ice-survey flight has spotted the birth signs of a large iceberg in West Antarctica:
a crack at least 18 miles long in Pine Island Glacier, which sticks out from the Amundsen Sea coast on the west of the continent.
The iceberg that eventually calves from the breaking ice shelf will cover around 880 square kilometres,
Pine Island Glacier is rapidly retreating, accounting for a large part of West Antarctica's ice loss.
and social and physical environments. This, the NRC said in a report published on 2 november,
and the brain. http://www. sfn. org/am2011/16 november The Commission on Sustainable agriculture and Climate Change ¢â a global task force of senior scientists and government advisers Â
This conclusion the result of a huge analysis of fossils, climate records and DNA hints that it could be more difficult than thought to identify the species at greatest risk of disappearing today.
Researchers who studied the fate of six species of'megafauna'over the past 50,000 years found that climate change
The end of an ice age and the habitat changes it wrought led other researchers to lay the blame on climate.
Asian and North american ranges of these animals (drawn from climate records and hundreds of fossils) and a rough approximation of their population size (based on ancient MITOCHONDRIAL DNA sequences) between 42,000 and 6, 000 thousand years ago.
As the climate subsequently warmed, woolly rhinos woolly mammoths and the Eurasian populations of musk oxen went extinct as populations became more and more isolated from one another.
Its dwindling range after the ice age suggests that climate change alone probably did for it in Eurasia.
Anthony Barnosky, a palaeobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees that ice-age extinctions might offer a preview of extinctions driven by a combination of climate change and human expansion today.
and ecology of individual species should offer clues as to which are under greatest threat. Others
Citizen scientists'climate-impact survey wraps upone of the biggest citizen-science projects ever conducted concludes this monthafter five years of data collection.
The wealth of information gathered will help researchers to understand how climate change is affecting forests.
The effort has been coordinated by Earthwatch, an environmental group and a member of the HSBC Climate Partnership,
which supports a range of environmental projects funded by the international bank. Earthwatch aimed to improve the way that temperate
Forests play a huge role in regulating climates at global scale and provide livelihoods for many millions of people,
and adapt to changing conditions is one of the most pressing environmental questions of our time,
head of climate-change research at Earthwatch. He says that this proves the value of protecting such secondary forests,
A survey of 12 one-hectare plots across a rainfall gradient that runs through evergreen and deciduous forests in the Indian state of Karnataka found a high density of trees producing'non-timber
Results from the survey published earlier this year1 show that about one-third of such forests are vulnerable to climate change.
Bebber adds that data from the project"have been crucial in framing the Indian government's response to climate change.
who joined Earthwatch to head the climate project, is a once-sceptical convert to the idea of citizen scientists.
head of climate impacts analysis at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK.""The large amounts of data being collected by the programme's citizen-science efforts will provide a significant benefit to further the scientific understanding of current and future potential impacts of climate change on global forests.
Earthwatch plans to continue monitoring the sites in Brazil, China and India by working with local institutes.
and very limited modelling studies on climate-change impacts, he says
Seven days: 16 22 december 2011cold shutdown The three reactors at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant that had meltdowns in early March have now been brought to a state of'cold shutdown,
Scientists fear that the altered'forest code'would weaken rules on tree-clearing that have reduced deforestation in the Amazon.
and climate-change minister Greg Combet was given responsibility for innovation and industry. See go. nature. com/6jaak5 for more.
a developmental endocrinologist at the National Museum of Natural history in Paris. Policy Durban deal After negotiations that ran into the early morning, tired politicians at the climate talks in Durban,
the world would negotiate a new climate treaty, which would require all nations to meet as yet-unspecified emissions targets
'which scientists fear will weaken strict rules on tree-clearing that have reduced deforestation in the Amazon.
and woodlands, says Daniel Nepstad, an ecologist who works with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brasilia.
F. Roberts/Alamyfracking worry The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) has said that chemicals associated with fracking, a controversial technique that involves pumping high-pressure fluids into shale to force out natural gas,
The EPA's draft report was released on 8 december and has yet to be reviewed peer; the agency is also working on a national study on fracking's impacts,
and to increase efforts to deal with the impact of climate change on stocks. With many fish stocks being harvested at unsustainable levels
which applies to thousands of NOAA employees conducting research on climate, oil spills, marine mammals and other sometimes controversial topics, prohibits agency employees from distorting science
Durban maps path to climate treatyin the darkest hours of the international climate-change negotiations in Durban, South africa,
and the scientific evidence for the potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change just keeps getting stronger.
the deal commits the world to negotiating a new climate treaty by 2015. Crucially, that treaty would legally require all nations including the two biggest emitters,
with the final term to be decided at the next annual conference of the United nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Doha, Qatar, at the end of 2012.
Many observers had expected the conference to continue down the path towards voluntary climate commitments that was paved at the climate summit in Copenhagen two years ago (see Nature 479,291-292;
says Alden Meyer, who heads climate policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists in WASHINGTON DC.
But the latest analysis of current pledges from climate scientists advising delegates in Durban suggests that the world is on course to see 3. 5 °C of warming this century (see The gigatonne gap).
India s environment and forests minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, gave an impassioned speech invoking the original 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change,
"Does climate change mean you give up equity? Natarajan asked.""India will never be intimidated by threats or any kind of pressure like this.
Connie Hedegaard, the EU commissioner for climate change, who was instrumental in pushing for a road map to a legally binding treaty,
Economic woes have diverted certainly attention from the climate threat and, in the United states, emboldened right-wing politicians who have blocked President Barack Obama s climate agenda.
The political situation may be no more favourable when treaty negotiations culminate in 2015, but"we need to start somewhere
however, make some progress in establishing a Green Climate Fund designed to help developing countries cope with global warming,
The talks also moved closer to establishing a system that would allow payments to countries that reduce carbon emissions by preventing deforestation,
And in answer to growing demands to consider agriculture as a separate sector within the UN climate framework (see Nature 479
whether the Durban Platform really can work as a global road map for climate-change action."
Brazilian bill weakens Amazon protectionwerner Rudhart/dpa/Corbisbrazil's propsed new forest code would weaken rules on deforestation.
which passed a version with even fewer restrictions on deforestation last May. Â The country s law governing forestry dates back to 1965
Annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is now far lower than it was in 1995 (see Amazon deforestation declines to record low.
Deforestation accounts for about 15%of global greenhouse-gas emissions and 75%of Brazil s. Katia Abreu, a senator from the state of Tocantins and  president of the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture
and avoid deforestation. Most scientists, however, disagree. They argue that the new bill is complicated too to elicit compliance
an ecologist who works with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) in Brasilia, says that the new forestry measure could"unleash a wave of impunity to wipe out forests and woodlands.
an ecologist at the University of S £o Paulo in Piracicaba who has analysed the legislation for senators.
and not from the high water mark, which exists during seasonal flooding..Â"These are areas of extreme importance,
"They protect soils from erosion, they keep floods from becoming more harmful, and they keep rivers flowing with some quality.
not only accelerate climate change and further threaten the Amazon s fragile ecosystems, but also erode Brazil s reputation as a global leader in cutting greenhouse-gas emissions.
One key test of Brazil's resolve will come next June, when the country hosts the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20."
"On one side we re doing a heck of a good job curbing Amazon deforestation.
But at the same time we re sending the wrong message by changing the forest code in a way that will increase deforestation again
Flooding is the United kingdom's biggest climate threatsevere flooding that could affect millions of people is the United kingdom's most pressing climate-change risk,
 The first Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA), published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra), examines 100 potential consequences of climate change for the United kingdom. The study
draws on climate projection models from 2009, known as the UKCP09, and examines how different levels of greenhouse-gas emissions could affect sectors such as agriculture, health and infrastructure over the twenty-first century.
chairman of the Adaptation Subcommittee of the Committee on Climate Change in London, an independent body that advises the government,
The study was mandated by the 2008 Climate Change Act, which legally requires the United kingdom to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 80%from 1990 levels by 2050.
The report considers a number of climate scenarios. For instance, it projects that by the 2080s
Flooding currently costs the United kingdom around £1. 3 billion (US$2. 04 billion) per year, presents a serious threat to buildings and infrastructure and contributes to costal erosion.
Public health, business, agriculture and forestry, urban infrastructure and natural ecosystems are identified all as priority areas for early action.
But the report also draws attention to potential opportunities arising from climate change such as improved access to Arctic shipping routes owing to melting sea ice, increased wheat yields as a result of warmer conditions,
such as a flood at a power plant or the loss of crops due to pests. Jim Hall, director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, UK,
and a member of the Adaptation Subcommittee, says that the report is an improvement on previous impact studies.
"the climate-model uncertainties produce a range of possibilities that are quite broad. How the country will respond to the challenges laid out in the report depends in large part on a plan that will be developed over the coming year.
The National Adaptation Programme (NAP) will draw on the CCRA's findings to formulate a climate-change policy agenda and a timeline for implementation.
Pollutants key to climate fixbuses spew clouds of black exhaust fumes in Mexico city while, in India,
Methane leaks from gas pipelines in Russia and rice paddies in China, eventually breaking down in sunlight and contributing to the production of smog and ozone.
and next month a small coalition of countries is aiming to launch an initiative that would target these short-lived climate forcers.
such measures could boost global crop production by 1-4%.The United nations Environment Programme explored the potential gains in a detailed assessmentlast June (see go. nature. com/4wcwxf).
whereas cutting soot and methane would have immediate climate payoffs because they are purged quickly from the atmosphere.
the current target of international climate negotiations (see Rapid response). Source: D. Shindell et al. Science 335,183-189 (2012) The assessment shows that the benefits of such reductions far outweigh the costs,
Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, credits the study with building scientific consensus on the issue,
"The fundamental problem with long-term climate change is CO2, and anything that takes us away from addressing that doesn t really solve the problem,
They point out that the agenda for short-term forcers can move forward now without a global climate treaty,
which remains a distant prospect after last month s climate talks in Durban, South africa, delayed setting new targets for emissions reductions (see Nature 480,299-300;
and black-carbon mitigation are intentionally keeping the agenda separate from the UN climate negotiations.
who heads climate issues at the Swedish environment ministry.""Once we have launched this initiative other countries will be able to join.
"This is one of the most important climate agendas for the world right now. The initiative may seek to build on existing efforts.
"This is one of the most important climate agendas for the world right now, but it is appreciated not fully at the highest political levels what it can deliver
who led the development of guidelines for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on how to construct
but EPA officials continued to work on a database, which would still provide investors and consumers with statistics to help them pressure industry to cut emissions.
Just 2. 5%of the facilities that have submitted data to the EPA are responsible for 45%of the emissions, for example.
The flood of data does not mean that scientists can stop measuring greenhouse-gas emissions in the atmosphere.
Beijing smog Residents of China's capital can expect to get more realistic assessments of the city's air quality.
EPA research head The US Environmental protection agency's research head and chief science adviser, Paul Anastas, is leaving the agency after two years in charge.
Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart, both climate scientists at the University of Victoria in British columbia, listened to the rhetoric and decided to run some calculations.
But their work underscores evidence that the environmental impacts of producing the oil sands are primarily local rather than global."
Weaver and Swart tried to answer this question in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change1.
They modelled the effects on global climate of the carbon emissions that would result if all of the oil available in the Alberta reserves were to be burned.
A study published last week by researchers at Environment Canada in Toronto used satellite measurements to analyse emissions of nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide from the oil sands2.
the development has resulted also in concerns about water pollution and eventual reclamation. In situ production, by contrast, uses steam injection to liberate the oil underground,
whether to accept a proposed emissions value that would have banned effectively the fuel from being used in the EU. The lack of agreement means that the issue will now be passed to environment ministers,
says Nusa Urbancic from the environmental organization Transport and Environment in Brussels."All fuels need correct carbon accounting to count their contribution,
to reach the 6%greenhouse-gas reduction target, she says
Ash-covered forest is'Permian Pompeii'An ancient swampy forest full of long-extinct plant species has been brought to life through analyses of well-preserved fossils entombed in a layer of volcanic ash.
Palaeoecologists can usually only infer the richness of an ancient forest ecosystem by piecing together fossils of plant fragments of varying ages.
and ecology of the forest, says Hermann Pfefferkorn, a palaeoecologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Although floods can cover wide swathes of landscape with sediment in one fell swoop, they often bring in organisms from other areas and wash local inhabitants away.
The researchers reconstructed the ancient ecosystem by analysing the positions of individual plants across three sites that together cover more than 1, 000 square metres.
and clean up the plant after it was hit by a tsunami last year. But, Edano said,
See page 289 for more on the flu-virus debate. go. nature. com/pf7bwv20-24 february Marine scientists'responses to the Gulf of mexico oil spill in 2010 are discussed among topics at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Salt lake city, Utah
Because deforestation would intensify weathering the clay samples provide, in effect, a continuous record of the climate for the past 40,000 years.
When the researchers examined the sediment cores, they found that samples that were between 20,000 and 3,
500 years old showed weathering that was consistent with the patterns of rainfall in the region.
However, around 3, 000 years ago,"there was a complete decoupling between rainfall and the rate of weathering,
indicate that"climate could not be the only factor in explaining deforestation. The team suggests that Bantu-speaking peoples from present-day Nigeria and Cameroon
Alfred Ngomanda, director of the Research Institute in Tropical Ecology in Libreville, Gabon, also believes the prevailing view that climate change was largely responsible for the loss of rainforest from Central africa is correct.
and climate can affect the environment.""Humans can have a huge impact on natural processes, he says.
which deforestation and other human activities may be exacerbating the effects of climate change, says David Harris, deputy director of science at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, UK."
The findings paint the most detailed compositional picture yet of the'Local Cloud'Â the interstellar cloud of gas in
IBEX found the ratio of oxygen atoms to neon atoms to be lower in the Local Cloud than the average ratios for both the Solar system and the Galaxy as a whole
The team was also able to pinpoint the Sun s location at the edge of the Local Cloud.
the Sun is about to leave the Local Cloud for a neighbour, says Priscilla Frisch, an IBEX investigator at the University of Chicago."
but development can be catastrophic for ecosystems.""Even though a large investor would prefer to have his thousands or millions of hectares near a port or road, in reality,
In the past, the biggest pressures on locally held natural ecosystems have been agriculture and logging, but large mineral-extraction deals are now catching up."
and dice rural ecosystems, says White. Â But international efforts at sustainable development are also threatening these areas.
Although the official carbon market made little progress in last year s United nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South africa,
In the 20 years since the first United nations Conference on Environment and Development was held in Rio de janeiro, Brazil,
Now a consortium of scientists, environmentalists and industries is expanding the focus from preserving forests to tackling the main driver of deforestation:
The United nations forestry initiative known as REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation was seen originally as a way of changing frontier economics by attaching a monetary value to standing forests,
and stabilize the climate. Carbon payments would make it easier for landowners to earn a living without clearing more land.
a US ecologist who heads the international programmes for the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM),
agricultural biotech giant Monsanto and retailer Walmart together with producers and environmentalists to negotiate environmental certification standards for products such as soya beans, palm oil,
and include limits on deforestation. The idea is that producers who sign up and implement best practices will be able to increase productivity,
where Amazon deforestation has declined by 78 %since a 2004 peak even as agricultural production continued to climb.
says Holly Gibbs, an environmental geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.""I don't know that it's a sea change yet,
Nonetheless, even advocates acknowledge that it is difficult to achieve consensus on environmental standards in a room of producers, major food companies and environmentalists, all with competing agendas.
This has led to some criticism that round tables provide political cover for companies that wish to avoid making stronger commitments to the environment."
to enforce their zero-deforestation commitments. Companies that want to halt deforestation should pressure their suppliers directly,
Poynton says.""The model is there, he says, "and it doesn't require the vast billions of dollars everybody is talking about.
Instead, the round tables are intended to help propagate minimum environmental standards across the entire world.""It takes a
Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Peru and Mexico has launched its own initiative, the Governors'Climate and Forests Task force.
It is working to set up mechanisms that would allow companies in participating regions to offset emissions by paying to reduce deforestation.
"I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg and such reassortments are surely going on worldwide,
director of research for the climate change and agricultural Copenhagen-based programme led by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
Seufert's next project is to analyse existing research on the environmental impacts of organic and conventional agriculture.
and sequence DNA left in the environment, in everything from soil to leeches stomachs.""I am almost sure that in ten years all the research on biodiversity will be done with DNA,
and co-editor of the April issue of Molecular Ecology, which is devoted to the emerging field of studying environmental DNA.
says Nicholas Wilkinson, a Vietnam-based wildlife ecologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who is working with the conservation group WWF.
Surveying leech blood is just one of many ways to collect environmental DNA that have emerged in recent years.
In the Molecular Ecology special issue, various research teams worked out the diet of a leopard by sequencing DNA in its faeces3;
assessments of environmental DNA have matched up well against more conventional surveys. His team found that DNA surveys of water samples from a Canadian river identified the same invertebrate species as visual surveys7.
Researchers refer to environmental DNA studies as meta-bar-coding, because they rely on DNA bar codes:
But much of the DNA recovered from environmental sources such as soil or faeces has been shredded into short strands,
Cash reward for saving Australia's watera contentious plan to reduce the amount of water that can be taken from the rivers in Australia s Murray-Darling Basin would reap billions of dollars in ecological benefits,
However, the plan is still likely to fail to address all of the region s environmental problems,
with many environmentalists worrying that the plan does too little to protect the environment, and farmers expressing their anger about the potential damage to agriculture.
what the ecological and economic benefits would be if the plan goes ahead in its current form.
who is science director of the CSIRO Flagship research programme Water for a Healthy Country, a group of hydrologists, ecologists,
economists and other scientists analysed how the plan would affect water flow and ecosystem services in the basin.
Combining the direct economic benefits of things such as better water quality with figures based on surveys of people s willingness to pay for healthier environments
because not all environmental benefits could be given a monetary value, Prosser notes. Prosser told  Nature that he hoped the report s findings would balance the public debate over the plan,
what the benefits would be to the environment, he says.""It was lopsided.""We found that there would be substantial ecological benefits,
he notes. The largest benefits would come to the Murray river, including the downstream Lower Lakes and Coorong regions, in the form of increased tourism and improved water quality, for example.
800 gigalitres a year does not meet all environmental targets. Mike Young, an environmental economist at the University of Adelaide, South australia, welcomed the report."
"I think it s very important that we try to do a proper cost-benefit analysis, he says.
and actually coming up with a figure for cost-benefit of the environment is next to impossible, Tom Chesson,
Subject to their response, it will go to the federal environment minister for approval. Only when he is satisfied will the plan be presented to Parliament.
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