News by Subject Policy & Ethics

Over the past 300 years, 79 plants have been confirmed extinct from three of the world's biodiversity hotspots located in South Africa -- the Cape Floristic Region, the Succulent Karoo, and the Maputuland-Pondoland-Albany corridor. According to a study published in the journal Current Biology this week, this represents a shocking 45.4% of all known plant extinctions from 10 of the world's 36 biodiversity hotspots.

The best option for adaptation to a rapidly changing climate, at least for some, may be to flee -- a process called 'managed retreat.'

University of Saskatchewan researchers have found that as major wildfires increase in Canada's North, boreal forests that have acted as carbon sinks for millennia are becoming sources of atmospheric carbon, potentially contributing to the greenhouse effect. The results were published Aug. 21 in the prestigious journal Nature.

California leads the nation in the adoption of rooftop solar systems, but information on which communities do, and do not, benefit from these installations has been limited. The adoption of distributed solar -- rooftop installations as opposed to industrial-scale operations like solar farms -- is closely correlated with socioeconomic status and health, environmental and demographic indicators. The study, published online August 20, 2019 in Energy Policy, is the first peer-reviewed analysis of distributed solar adoption in disadvantaged communities.

Speeding is the riskiest kind of aggressive driving, according to a unique analysis of data from on-board devices in vehicles.

A two-year randomised controlled trial in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology will be the largest of its kind to date to assess whether hiding author details during peer review reduces bias against underrepresented groups in the science publishing process.