Editor's note

You don’t need another reason to like elephants but here’s one anyway: they help fight climate change. That’s what a team of scientists realised when they looked at “forest elephants” in central Africa and how they affect the ecosystem around them. By choosing to eat certain plants and not others, the elephants promote big, woody trees over more flimsy ones, and this in turn means the whole forest stores more carbon – 7% more in fact.

Of course, a hundred thousand or so animals can’t do all that much in the grand scheme of things. Elephants aren’t about to reverse global warming – that’s up to us. But with African forest elephants disappearing much faster than their relatives in the savanna, this research gives us even more reason to protect them.

Declaring African forest elephants endangered might help. But for the time being they are officially lumped in with the more populous African bush elephant and marked only as “vulnerable”, even though genetic analysis long ago proved the two are separate species. Authorities point to the presence of hybrid populations which confuse things. It’s grey areas like this, Henry Taylor argues, that mean it might be time to abandon the concept of “species”.

Academic experts have also looked at why the Church of England should speak up on Brexit, and why Scotland’s death rate from drugs – three times that of the UK as a whole – is a national scandal.

Will de Freitas

Environment + Energy Editor

Top story

zahorec / shutterstock

Forest elephants are our allies in the fight against climate change, finds research

Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, University of Nottingham

A new study shows these elephants boost the carbon stored in their forests by 7%.

The Archbishop of Canterbury the Most Rev Justin Welby (right) with the Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu in February 2015. Nick Ansell/PA Wire/PA Images

The Church of England needs to speak out about Brexit – here’s why

Jonathan Chaplin, University of Cambridge

The church is itself divided on Brexit, but that doesn't mean it can't provide guidance for a polarised community.

Christopher Elwell/Shutterstock

Record drug deaths in Scotland – a national scandal

Alex Stevens, University of Kent; Andrew McAuley, Glasgow Caledonian University

More than 1,000 people died as a result of drugs in Scotland last year.

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