Biodiversity action plans as a way towards local sustainable development

Local action for biodiversity is essential to ensure better conservation status for biodiversity and maintain ecosystem services. In many places the rich biodiversity is still relatively untouched and represents an outstanding asset for local sustainable development. The loss of biodiversity occurs mainly because of rapid changes in land use, urban sprawl, infrastructure development, acidification, eutrophication, desertification, overexploitation, intensification of agriculture, tourism development and climate change. There is a clear need for a more flexible, people-oriented and visionary approach for sustainable use of biodiversity resources. This article concerns “Local Biodiversity Action Plans”, which provide a comprehensive and integrated approach to biodiversity and ecosystem services for the sustainable development of rural municipalities and their local communities. Although biodiversity action planning is not a new concept, bringing a plan to life has significant societal benefits with innovative solutions to help biodiversity conservation while entailing close interaction of science, policy and society. This approach was developed together with project partners and local communities in selected regions of the Western Balkans and it benefits from a range of stakeholders, including social and natural scientists, practitioners, elected representatives of the local communities and end users in the frame of a participatory approach. The conclusion of this article discusses the role of communication and outlines the critical success factors and the challenges ahead for the future.     

Potential Climate Change Health Risks from Increases in Heat Waves: Abnormal Birth Outcomes and Adverse Maternal Health Conditions

We investigate the risks presented by heat waves for adverse health conditions for babies and expectant mothers when these mothers have been exposed to heat waves during gestation or during the period just prior to conception. Rather than just birth weight and gestational age, we focus on less common metrics such as abnormal conditions in the newborn (fetal distress, reliance on a ventilator, and meconium aspiration) and adverse health conditions in the mother (pregnancy‐related hypertension, uterine bleeding during pregnancy, eclampsia, and incompetent cervix). We use monthly panel data for over 3,000 U.S. counties, constructed from the confidential version of the U.S. Natality Files for 1989–2008. Our models control for sociodemographic factors and include county, month, and state‐by‐year fixed effects to control for unobserved spatial and timewise heterogeneity in the data. Even within the United States, where there is widespread access to air conditioning, heat waves increase the fraction of babies with abnormal conditions related to maternal stress, as well as the fraction of mothers who experience pregnancy‐related adverse health conditions. The scope for these risks in developing countries is likely to be even greater.