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A report from nature.com discusses the challenge of quantifying the global trade in wildlife, noting researchers' efforts to assess its scope. The underlying source page provided limited content beyond a browser-compatibility notice, offering no further detailed figures or findings.
A climate-themed issue of Nature Biotechnology highlights research suggesting gene editing and germplasm mining could help crops withstand warming while reducing the need to expand farmland. The issue arrives alongside UN reports confirming that global warming will exceed the 1.5°C Paris limit and that biodiversity loss continues unabated, as COP31 convenes in Antalya, Turkey. Cultivated land has grown by about eight million hectares annually between 2015 and 2024, a trend scientists say must be reversed to avoid further emissions from land clearance.
Research cited by Nature finds that as Japan's countryside empties and small farms are abandoned, populations of butterflies, fireflies, frogs, birds and native plants are declining rather than rebounding. A 2025 study found biodiversity stable only where human populations remained stable, while depopulated areas saw species losses. Researchers note similar patterns in rural Spain and China, and a separate study of Germany's Lake Constance region found plant diversity peaked under medieval-era small farming, exceeding both earlier closed forests and later industrial agriculture.
Two years after UN biodiversity talks created the Cali Fund to collect payments from companies using publicly available genetic sequence data, only a handful of small biotech firms have contributed, totaling $10,588. The fund had been projected to potentially raise as much as $1 billion annually, but actual contributions remain minimal, according to Amber Scholz, a microbiologist involved in negotiating the fund. Prozomix, a UK biotech firm, has given $5,000, the largest single contribution so far.
Nearly 200 countries meeting in Yerevan for COP17 acknowledged that conservation efforts have fallen short of the 2030 goal to protect a third of the world's land and seas under the 2022 Kunming-Montreal framework. Delegates agreed on the 'Yerevan Pathway,' a plan to speed up action before the next summit in Ecuador in two years, focusing on cutting harmful subsidies, boosting support for developing nations, and improving monitoring.
In 2025, environmental historian Natascha Otoya cycled more than 200 miles across western Bahia and Tocantins in Brazil's Cerrado savanna as part of postdoctoral research with the Universidade Evangélica de Goiás. She filmed the journey, contrasting vast monoculture farmland with a remaining intact stretch of the biome's grasslands, woodland and forest habitat.
A biodiversity research team organized by the China Association for Scientific Expedition brought DEEP Robotics' Lynx M20S quadruped robot on a trip into China's Ailaoshan Mountains, according to the Global Times. The robot carried field and imaging equipment and helped with route scouting, image recording, and data collection, including footage of a rare parasitic plant and forest gibbons.
A Quanta Magazine podcast episode features evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam discussing her lab's research into mycorrhizal fungi, which partner with roughly 80% of plant species and help sequester about 13 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide annually. Kiers explains how her team uses tools like fluorescent quantum dots and imaging robots to study how these fungi, despite lacking brains, appear to discriminate among trading partners and reallocate resources across their networks.
Researchers built a sampling method covering 10% of the world's land area, selecting sites based on ten factors including biomes, elevation, government effectiveness, income levels and population density, broken into 89 distinct features. Using the Marxan conservation-planning software, they identified a representative sample of countries and territories to measure how much land is actually under conservation protection, building on an earlier study's methodology.
WWF's Living Planet Report 2026, released October 7, found vertebrate wildlife populations it tracks have fallen 73% between 1970 and 2022. The findings come ahead of the UN's COP17 biodiversity conference in Yerevan, where nations are reviewing progress on 2022 Montreal targets, including protecting 30% of land and water by 2030 and raising $30 billion annually for low-income and island nations by decade's end. A separate study published October 14 in Nature suggests official figures may be undercounting how much land is actually protected.
A new analysis reports that land under conservation management worldwide covers a greater area than earlier figures suggested. The research recalculates global terrestrial conservation coverage using updated data sources and methods.
A new scientific assessment finds that global progress toward protecting 30% of the planet's land and ocean by 2030 is further along than earlier figures indicated, according to researchers cited by Nature. The revised estimate reflects updated data on areas already under conservation or indigenous management that were previously undercounted.