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Thirty-five years after launch, and 11 billion miles from the sun, Nasa’s Voyager 1 probe has become the first man-made object to leave the solar system, according to a study in Geophysical Research Letters.

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The author of Nature’s Fortune, to be published next month, Tercek is a champion of the idea of “natural capital” – putting an asset value on nature. His controversial approach is to work alongside some of the world’s biggest polluters to jointly preserve the environment, because “business objectives and those of environmentalists can overlap”.

This is starting to happen with biotechnology research. Marcelo Cardoso, vice-president of Natura, a cosmetics producer in Brazil, says: “Brazilian biodiversity will become our Silicon Valley.” Pursuing that idea, the Brazilian government is starting to finance laboratories to study biotech applications in various different biomes.

“Once biodiversity services are … incorporated in the value chain it will be natural for companies to invest in preservation of those services,” says Alexandre Meira da Rosa, who heads IDB’s infrastructure and environment division.

Some larger companies such as Femsa, the Mexico-based beverage group, are already investing in water projects in two of the world’s most biodiverse countries, Ecuador and Colombia, while HSBC funded part of Hall’s rainforest research in Panama.

Back in the green, misty hills along the eastern watershed of the Panama Canal, Hall keeps testing trees for their ability to act as “sponges”, hoping that his work can be replicated elsewhere.

“Agriculture needs clean water, cities need clean water, Coca-Cola needs clean water, a brewery needs clean water,” he says. “And that, certainly, has economic value.”

– Andres Schipani

Building roads to save the planet

Environmentalists generally react with horror to road-building – and often their fears are well founded. The estimated 100,000km of road criss-crossing the Amazon basin have caused catastrophic damage.

But in a paper in the journal Nature two professors of conservation science, Andrew Balmford at Cambridge university and William Laurance of James Cook University in Australia, put in a plea for more roads – as long as they are in the right place.

“Roads are like real estate,” says Laurance. “It’s ‘location, location, location’. In the right places roads can actually help protect nature.”

That means careful planning, keeping roads out of wilderness areas and concentrating them in places best suited for farming and development.

“In such areas roads can improve farming, making it much easier to move crops to market and import fertiliser,” says Balmford. “This can increase farm profits, improve the livelihoods of rural residents, enhance food security and draw migrants away from vulnerable wilderness areas.”

The pair call for a global mapping programme to advise governments and conservation organisations on where to put roads, where to avoid them and even where to shut down existing roads.

“By working together,” says Laurance, “development experts, agriculturalists and ecologists could provide badly needed guidelines on where to build good roads rather than bad roads.”

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Ecologists have long known that the human colonisation of remote Pacific islands over the past 3,500 years led to a catastrophic extinction of large flightless birds, but estimates of the number of species lost have varied widely.

An international study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences attempts to pin down the toll by using statistical modelling to fill in the large gaps in the fossil record. Most extinct species remain undiscovered because fossil hunting across several hundred Pacific islands has been patchy and incomplete.

The researchers, led by Richard Duncan at the University of Canberra, conclude that human settlement of Pacific islands wiped out about 1,000 species of “nonpasserine landbirds” – birds other than songbirds and seabirds – many of which had become flightless because land predators were absent. That compares with a current global total of about 10,000 avian species of all types.

The scientists started from 41 islands where there is good evidence of extinction from fossil and other sources; two-thirds of the bird populations here became extinct between human arrival and first European contact. Reasons for extinction include hunting, habitat loss and the introduction of vermin.

Extrapolating these results to all 269 Pacific islands that were large and isolated enough to have supported at least one “endemic” species (a bird that lives nowhere else) brings the total close to 1,000 extinctions, ranging from flightless waterfowl to pigeons.

Lydia Wetsi is one of three young women trained as pilots and community health professionals

Rosie Collyer Report: Ghana - 

Article published Wednesday 02 May 2012 - Latest update : Wednesday 02 May 2012 Radio France Internationale RFI