Topic description and stories

Life on Earth is at risk from an unprecedented rate of environmental change that threatens the natural resources on which we depend.

Tassie devil orphan

Second contagious form of cancer found in Tasmanian devils

28 Dec 2015

Transmissible cancers – cancers which can spread between individuals by the transfer of living cancer cells – are believed to arise extremely rarely...

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Silver Lake, Wasatch watershed, Utah

Opinion: Paying people to stay away is not always the best way to protect watersheds

24 Dec 2015

Libby Blanchard and Bhaskar Vira from Cambridge's Department of Geography argue that we need to consider alternative approaches in order to protect...

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Rougier Gabon

‘Traditional authority’ linked to rates of deforestation in Africa

24 Nov 2015

New analysis reveals a strong correlation between precolonial institutions in Africa and current levels of deforestation. Researchers suggest that...

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Madagascan President discusses conservation challenges with Cambridge experts

20 Nov 2015

The President of the Republic of Madagascar, Hery Rajaonarimampianina, today visited the University of Cambridge to discuss ways in which the...

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Lonely tap

Not a drop to drink

19 Oct 2015

A major research collaboration is looking at how small towns in the hills of India and Nepal are coping with increasing demand for water: who wins...

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Mid-19th-century map with a line linking Britain to India

Cambridge and India

05 Oct 2015

Cambridge’s engagement with India has evolved from scholars working on India to scholars working with , and increasingly, in India – on shared...

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Vast pivot irrigator shows farming encroaching on wilderness in New Zealand.

Paying farmers to help the environment works, but ‘perverse’ subsidies must be balanced

09 Sep 2015

First analysis of effectiveness of agri-environment schemes measured at a national level suggests that they work, but are still a drop in the ocean...

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Baby gorilla

Mountain gorilla genome study provides optimism about population numbers

09 Apr 2015

An international research project to sequence whole genomes from mountain gorillas has given scientists and conservationists new insight into the...

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Borneo rainforest

Pollution on the move – human activity in East Asia negatively affects air quality in remote tropical forests

31 Mar 2015

New analysis shows that pollution from human activity in East Asia is having a negative effect on air quality in tropical rainforests thousands of...

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Corn plantation nearby remaining forest in the Amazon region

Amazon deforestation ‘threshold’ causes species loss to accelerate

04 Mar 2015

One of the largest area studies of forest loss impacting biodiversity shows that a third of the Amazon is headed toward or has just past a threshold...

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Visitors in Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia

World’s protected natural areas receive eight billion visits a year

24 Feb 2015

Researchers say that the first study to attempt to gauge global visitation figures for protected areas reveals nature-based tourism has an economic...

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A Spirobid worm feeding

The winners and losers of ocean acidification

28 Jan 2015

The population balance of some marine ‘pests’ could be drastically changed as the world’s oceans become increasingly acidic.

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