Two thirds of plants and half of animals under threat from climate change if no mitigation actions are taken. Mitigation could avoid ~60% of biodiversity loss.

“We always say that crop wild relatives are important and that they’re threatened…what this (new) study does is takes those general statements and puts some good evidence and documentation behind them.”

This post was first published on 6 September 2012 on the CCAFS blog. Read the original post here. By Flora Mer The Climate Analogues tool is back, and showing its versatility once again. At the beginning of this year, Bioversity International showed an interest in using the tool, developed by CCAFS, within their newly launched
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Crop Wild Relatives (CWR), like many plant species worldwide, face increasing threats in many regions from habitat destruction, transitions in agricultural practices, and invasive species, among other factors.  Although the weedy nature of many CWR may make this group of plants more resilient to human impacts than more sensitive plant groups, a substantial proportion of
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Last week, the Atlas of Guatemalan crop wild relatives was officially presented at the “VIII Simposio Internacional de Recursos Genéticos para América Latina y el Caribe“  held in Quito, Ecuador. The Atlas was prepared for being used with Google Earth (download the file here), enabling users to explore the places and surrounding areas where the
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A new paper in Applied Soil Ecology by researchers from CIAT and the University of Western Australia reports that smallholder agroforestry systems can retain relatively abundant, diverse populations of soil invertebrates

On the 10th of December, the Global Crop Diversity Trust announced that Norway pledged US 50 million for the conservation of wild genepools of major crops. Read the official press release here, and take a look at Cary Fowler’s (Executive Director of the Trust) talk on the TED Global Conference, clever and encouraging: CIAT and
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Last week’s UN Biodiversity Summit ushered in a landmark set of important targets aimed at reducing species and habitat loss and promoting biodiversity goals. This new United Nations strategy has specific implications for agriculture and food security including obligations to conserve genetic diversity of cultivated crops and their wild relatives.

Last week I had the pleasure of a day and a half in Cartagena (Colombia) attending the Latin American Congress of Chemistry.   Yes – chemistry.  The irony of the fact that I dropped chemistry at 14 years of age having not understood a quarter of what they taught me was not lost.  But the
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Last week, Jeff Price, a WWF scientist member of The Wallace Initiative had a meeting in Tanzania, with conservationists and policy makers, pretty much similar to the meeting we held at CIAT a couple of months ago. During that meeting, Jeff used much of our modeling outputs to teach how biodiversity conservation should be done
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