Too many roads: Roads have done much to help humanity spread across the planet and maintain global movement and trade. However, roads also damage wild areas and rapidly contribute to habitat degradation and species loss. Ibisch et al. cataloged the world's roads. Though most of the world is not covered by roads, it is fragmented by them, with only 7% of land patches created by roads being greater than 100 km ² . Furthermore, environmental protection of roadless areas is insufficient, which could lead to further degradation of the world's remaining wildernesses. Science , this issue p. 1423

A wide range of insects affect crop production and cause considerable yield losses. Difficulties reside on the development and adaptation of adequate strategies to predict insect pests for their timely management to ensure enhanced agricultural production. Several conceptual modelling frameworks have been proposed, and the choice of an approach depends largely on the objective of the model and the availability of data. This paper presents a summary of decades of advances in insect population dynamics, phenology models, distribution and risk mapping. Existing challenges on the modelling of insects are listed; followed by innovations in the field. New approaches include artificial neural networks, cellular automata (CA) coupled with fuzzy logic (FL), fractal, multi-fractal, percolation, synchronization and individual/agent-based approaches. A concept for assessing climate change impacts and providing adaptation options for agricultural pest management independently of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emission scenarios is suggested. A framework for estimating losses and optimizing yields within crop production system is proposed and a summary on modelling the economic impact of pests control is presented. The assessment shows that the majority of known insect modelling approaches are not holistic; they only concentrate on a single component of the system, i.e. the pest, rather than the whole crop production system. We suggest system thinking as a possible approach for linking crop, pest, and environmental conditions to provide a more comprehensive assessment of agricultural crop production

Most agricultural pests are poikilothermic species expected to respond to climate change. Currently, they are a tremendous burden because of the high losses they inflict on crops and livestock. Smallholder farmers in developing countries of Africa are likely to suffer more under these changes than farmers in the developed world because more severe climatic changes are projected in these areas. African countries further have a lower ability to cope with impacts of climate change through the lack of suitable adapted management strategies and financial constraints. In this study we are predicting current and future habitat suitability under changing climatic conditions for Tuta absoluta, Ceratitis cosyra, and Bactrocera invadens, three important insect pests that are common across some parts of Africa and responsible for immense agricultural losses. We use presence records from different sources and bioclimatic variables to predict their habitat suitability using the maximum entropy modelling approach. We find that habitat suitability for B. invadens, C. cosyra and T. absoluta is partially increasing across the continent, especially in those areas already overlapping with or close to most suitable sites under current climate conditions. Assuming a habitat suitability at three different threshold levels we assessed where each species is likely to be present under future climatic conditions and if this is likely to have an impact on productive agricultural areas. Our results can be used by African policy makers, extensionists and farmers for agricultural adaptation measures to cope with the impacts of climate change.

Economic sectors relying on the use of biological organisms, processes, and principles to create products and services are expected to experience accelerated growth due to innovation in the bioeconomy. Associated benefits and risks for sustainable development are increasingly subject to societal debate. We compiled expectation patterns from a global survey with bioeconomy experts and a systematic literature review identifying areas of consensus and controversy across dimensions of the sustainable development goals (SDG). Positive connotations dominated in both expert opinions and the scientific literature, but the level of consensus varied across sectors of the bioeconomy and in relation to applied methodological approaches (scientific literature) and type of employer (experts). In both sources, we found more differentiated views on potential impacts of bioeconomic development pathways on sustainability in more established bioeconomy‐related discourses, which indicates that expectation patterns in more recent fields of bio‐based innovation are subject to early “hype cycle” dynamics. Our findings suggest the need to systematically mainstream sustainability risk appraisals across relevant application contexts in technology impact assessments for the bioeconomy.