Industrial-scale mining in Africa to support global supply chains is leading to unprecedented deforestation across the continent, with 34 hectares of forest removed for every hectare of active mine site.
Seven outstanding Cambridge researchers have this year been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences.
Field trials in India show that bio-fertilisers containing naturally occurring soil fungi enhance growth in rice plants. This may offer a pathway to reducing farmers’ reliance on synthetic fertilisers, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in rice farming.
The global food system is more productive than ever, but it's pushing natural systems out of balance in the extreme. Can science help farmers produce the food we need in a more sustainable way?
Payments that enable landowners to rewild ecologically degraded land - in the form of biodiversity credits bought by investors wishing to offset their impact on nature - could be an effective component of the emerging market for nature recovery, but will not work as a stand-alone approach.
Meet the winners of the Cambridge Awards 2025 for Research Impact and Engagement and learn more about their projects.
An international group of researchers says that biodiversity conservation and scientific research are not benefiting from the vast knowledge about the world’s plants held by botanic gardens, because of fragmented data systems and a lack of standardisation.
Dr Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert investigates the deaths of giant tropical trees. After rediscovering her connection to tropical plants, her work now illustrates the shifting character of our forests – and what we can do to save them.
Human-driven changes to landscapes worldwide are ‘thinning out’ the ecological services supplied by wild birds, eroding the functions that support stable and resilient ecosystems.
In the largest ever survey of rainforest birdlife, scientists have discovered that deforestation to create pastureland in Colombia is causing around 60% more damage to biodiversity than previously estimated.
© 2026 University of Cambridge
