Feature Article

An Australian law intended to make the packaging of cigarettes less appealing to consumers again came under fire at the WTO last week, with developing country tobacco producers arguing that the measure could curtail competitiveness in the tobacco market and is inconsistent with multilateral trade rules.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) could soon find itself butting heads with Brussels over how best to tackle emissions from international shipping, analysts say, after the UN shipping body was unable to make "tangible progress" in this area at last week's major meeting.

Oil spills represent a major environmental threat to coastal wetlands, which provide a variety of critical ecosystem services to humanity. The U.S. Gulf of Mexico is a hub of oil and gas exploration activities that historically have impacted intertidal habitats such as salt marsh. Following the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we sampled the terrestrial arthropod community and marine invertebrates found in stands of Spartina alterniflora, the most abundant plant in coastal salt marshes.

Proliferating diesel cars are a public health risk and drain the exchequer. The Union Budget of 2012-13 needs to take the urgent decision to tax diesel cars higher to prevent misuse of the under-taxed and under-priced fuel in cars. The government and the oil marketing companies cannot continue to shoulder the burden of subsidies and under recovery for luxury use. Increased use of diesel by cars will also increase public health risks.

Knowledge of the responses of soil nitrogen (N) availability, fine root mass, production and turnover rates to atmospheric N deposition is crucial for understanding fine root dynamics and functioning in forest ecosystems. Fine root biomass and necromass, production and turnover rates, and soil nitrate-N and ammonium-N in relation to N fertilization (50 kg N ha−1 year−1) were investigated in a temperate forest over the growing season of 2010, using sequential soil cores and ingrowth cores methods.

The afforestation of abandoned farmland significantly influences soil organic carbon (OC). However, the dynamics between OC inputs after afforestation and the original OC are not well understood. To learn more about soil OC dynamics after afforestation of farmland, we measured the soil OC content in paired forest and farmland plots in Shaanxi Province, China.

Present trends suggest that many of the poorest countries in the world, including many in sub-Saharan Africa, will not meet the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially MDG 4 (reducing under-five mortality) and MDG 5 (reducing maternal mortality). Even in those countries that are on track to meet health MDGs, striking inequities exist among countries and among socioeconomic groups within them, despite effective and cost-effective interventions being available to improve population health, including that of vulnerable groups.

This research aims to foster discourse about the extent to which gender is important to consider within the context of participatory approaches for biological conservation. Our objectives are to: (1) gender-disaggregate data about stakeholders' risk perceptions associated with human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in a participatory conservation context, and (2) highlight insights from characterizing gendered similarities and differences in the way people think about HWC-related risks.