CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Could Climate Change threaten the future of the Winter Olympics?

As Russia prepares to host the 22^nd Olympic Winter Games, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has begun to release the findings of its Fifth Assessment Report.  If the climate projections of the IPCC report prove accurate, only six of the previous 19 host cities will be cold enough to host a reliable Games by the end of the century, according to a new study¹ published this month by the University of Waterloo and the Management Centre Innsbruck.

Outbreak of peace in the sweetener world

You might expect that producers of sugar and producers of other sweeteners would see each other as rivals, and there is indeed evidence of this. For example the ‘Truth About Splenda’ website, provided by the Sugar Association which represents sugar beet and cane farmers in the USA, emphasises the presence of chlorine atoms in the artificial sweetener sucralose (marketed as Splenda), and includes a link to a site comparing sucralose to bleach and DDT. On the other side of the debate, although www.sucralose.org doesn’t say anything very contentious about sugar (it’s true that sugar causes tooth decay and sucralose doesn’t), the sucralose industry has a history of arguably misleading advertising in the form of the slogan ‘made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar’.

Bear viewing more valuable than hunting

 

Image Source: Douglas Brown, Creative Commons License

According to research released on 7 January, bear viewing ecotourism in British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) "generates far more value to the economy" in terms of revenue, taxes, and jobs than the older and more well-established trophy hunting of grizzly and black bears.

Big predators in big trouble

Large carnivores, from lions to polar bears, are among the most iconic and charismatic species on earth. They also play vital roles in many ecosystems, restricting populations of herbivores from reaching levels where they degrade vegetation and prevent woodlands and forests from regenerating. But the world's top carnivores are in big trouble, with over three-quarters in decline and more than half now present in less than half their historical ranges. This is the message from a review paper published in Science yesterday. And the paper comes just a few days after another study found that the genetically-unique West African lion is down to just 250 breeding adults.