In Pope Francis’ nearly 200-page climate change encyclical, Laudato SI, published earlier this year, he explicitly calls for a “dialogue with all people about our common home.” A group of leading social scientists provide a scholarly foundation for that dialogue in a special series of commentaries published online this week in Nature Climate Change.

A new study co-authored by scientists at Drexel University, published in the most recent issue of Biological Conservation, reveals the devastating impact of illegal logging on bird communities in the understory layer of Ghana’s Upper Guinea rain forests, one of the world's 25 “biodiversity hotspots” where the most biologically rich ecosystems are most threatened.