Changing the way farmers plough their lands could have a big impact on global emissions of greenhouse gases.

Changing farming practices could play an important role in averting dangerous climate change says the UN. In their annual emissions report, they measure the difference between the pledges that countries have made to cut warming gases and the targets required to keep temperatures below 2C. On present trends there is likely to be an annual excess of 8 to 12 gigatonnes of these gases by 2020.

Agriculture, they say, could make a significant difference to the gap. This is the fourth such report, compiled by the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) in conjunction with 44 scientific groups in 17 countries. It says the world needs to reduce total emissions to 44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020 to keep the planet from going above the 2C target, agreed at a UN meeting in Cancun in 2010. But when all the pledges and plans made by countries are added together, they show an excess of between 8 and 12 gigatonnes per annum in seven years time, very similar to last year's report. To put it in context, 12 gigatonnes is about 80% of all the emissions coming from all the power plants in the world right now.

African forest elephants decline by 62% in 10 years

 
African forest elephants face extinction if 'drastic measures' are not taken
 

Forest elephant numbers have decreased by 62% across Central Africa over the last 10 years, according to a study.

The analysis confirmed fears that African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) are heading for extinction, possibly within the next decade.

Conservationists said "effective, rapid, multi-level action is imperative" in order to save the elephants.

They are concerned the forest elephants are being killed for their ivory.

Results of the study, undertaken by researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), are published in the scientific journal PLoS One.

Over 60 co-authors contributed to the study, which was led by Dr Fiona Maisels, a WCS conservation scientist from the School of Natural Sciences, University of Sterling.

"Although we were expecting to see these results, we were horrified that the decline over the period of a mere decade was over 60%," Dr Maisels told BBC Nature.

Elusive giants

Scientists say billions required to meet conservation targets

 

 
The most threatened species tend to be relatively cheap to save because of small range sizes.
 

Reducing the risk of extinction for

threatened species and establishing protected areas for nature will cost the world over $76bn dollars annually.

Researchers say it is needed to meet globally agreed conservation targets by 2020.

The scientists say the daunting number is just a fifth of what the world spends on soft drinks annually.

And it amounts to just 1% of the value of ecosystems being lost every year, they report in the journal Science.

“Nature just doesn't do recessions, we're talking about the irreversible loss of unique species and millions of years of evolutionary history”

Donal McCarthy RSPB

Back in 2002, governments around the world agreed that they would achieve a significant reduction in biodiversity loss by 2010. But the deadline came and went and the rate of loss increased.

At a meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya that year governments re-committed to a series of targets to be achieved by 2020.

Great apes, such as gorillas, chimps and bonobos, are

running out of places to live, say scientists. They have recorded a dramatic decline in the amount of habitat suitable for great apes, according to the first such survey across the African continent. Eastern gorillas, the largest living primate, have lost more than half their habitat since the early 1990s. Cross River gorillas, chimps and bonobos have also suffered significant losses, according to the study. Details are published in the journal Diversity and Distributions     . "Several studies either on a site or country level indicated already that African ape populations are under enormous pressure and in decline," said Hjalmar Kuehl, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who helped organise the research.

At the Planet Under Pressure conference in London, Diana Liverman and Will Steffen present something of a contrasting couple.

The two professors have been working together on a State of the Planet

report, which has involved trawling through numerous reports and scientific

papers. At the end of it all, the message of one appears somewhat optimistic,

the other fundamentally pessimistic.

They agree that changes to the world since about 1950 have been startling -

rapid spread of the human population, accelerating exploitation of forests and

marine resources, surging economic growth in successive waves across the world,

and so on.

This radical reshaping of the natural world by a single species is certainly

unprecedented in Earth history, which a few years back led to scientists Paul

Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer coining a special name for our epoch - the Anthropocene.

If you accept the premise that we have entered the Anthropocene, one of the

over-arching questions is "what happens now?"; another is "can we get out of

it?"

Prof Liverman, who studies social aspects of global change at the University

of Arizona, has the task of assessing the societal trends that either indicate