Feature Article

Uncontrolled medical treatment in Asia and Africa costs lives and money. David Peters and Gerald Bloom call for governments, firms and citizen groups to get involved.

More than 2 y have passed since the BP–Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, yet we still have little understanding of its ecological impacts. Examining effects of this oil spill will generate much-needed insight into how shoreline habitats and the valuable ecological services they provide (e.g., shoreline protection) are affected by and recover from large-scale disturbance. Here we report on not only rapid salt-marsh recovery (high resilience) but also permanent marsh area loss after the BP–Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

It has been proposed that fragments of an asteroid or comet impacted Earth, deposited silica-and iron-rich microspherules and other proxies across several continents, and triggered the Younger Dryas cooling episode 12,900 years ago. Although many independent groups have confirmed the impact evidence, the hypothesis remains controversial because some groups have failed to do so. We examined sediment sequences from 18 dated Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) sites across three continents (North America, Europe, and Asia), spanning 12,000 km around nearly one-third of the planet.

Willem Takken and colleagues argue for the expansion of insecticide monotherapy in malaria control by taking lessons from agriculture and including more sustainable integrated vector management strategies.

A single large glacier can contain tens of millions of times the mass of a small glacier. Nevertheless, very small glaciers (with area ≤1 km2) are so numerous that their contribution to the world's total ice volume is significant and may be a notable source of error if excluded. With current glacier inventories, total global volume errors on the order of 10% are possible. However, to reduce errors to below 1% requires the inclusion of glaciers that are smaller than those recorded in most inventories.

This study addresses the extrapolation of in-situ glacier mass balance measurements to the mountain-range scale and aims at deriving time series of area-averaged mass balance and ice volume change for all glaciers in the European Alps for the period 1900–2100. Long-term mass balance series for 50 Swiss glaciers based on a combination of field data and modelling, and WGMS data for glaciers in Austria, France and Italy are used. A complete glacier inventory is available for the year 2003.

Depleting energy resources, rising cost of energy and the threat of climate change have elevated the demand for sustainable energy initiatives globally. In the context of modern day businesses, effective energy management through energy efficiency has assumed a strong strategic value. While energy efficiency initiatives have been initiated by most businesses, the next generation solution would require a nuanced approach for maximizing the value of these initiatives.

Palm oil was once touted as a social and environmental panacea — a sustainable food crop, a biofuel that could help to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and a route out of poverty for small-scale farmers. In recent years, however, a growing body of research has questioned those credentials, presenting evidence that palm-oil farming can cause damaging deforestation and reduce biodiversity, and that the oil’s use as a biofuel offers only marginal benefits for mitigating climate change.

Occupying only 7% of their historical range and confined to forested habitats interspersed in a matrix of human dominated landscapes, tigers (Panthera tigris) typify the problems faced by most large carnivores worldwide. With heads of governments of tiger range countries pledging to reverse the extinction process and setting a goal of doubling wild tiger numbers by 2022, achieving this target would require identifying existing breeding cores, potential breeding habitats and opportunities for dispersal.