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Global trade has made it easier to buy things. But our consumption habits often fuel threats to biodiversity - such as deforestation, overhunting and overfishing - thousands of miles away. Now, scientists have mapped how major consuming countries drive threats to endangered species elsewhere. Such maps could be useful for finding the most efficient ways to protect critical areas important for biodiversity, the researchers suggest in a new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. For example, the maps show that commodities used in the United States and the European Union exert several threats on marine species in Southeast Asia, mainly due to overfishing, pollution and aquaculture. The U.S. also exerts pressure on hotspots off the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and at the mouth of the Orinoco around Trinidad and Tobago. European Union's impacts extend to the islands around Madagascar: Réunion, Mauritius and the Seychelles. The maps also revealed some unexpected linkages. For instance, the impact of U.S. consumption in Brazil appears to be much greater in southern Brazil (in the Brazilian Highlands where agriculture and grazing are extensive) than inside the Amazon basin, which receives a larger chunk of the attention. The U.S. also has high biodiversity footprint in southern Spain and Portugal, due to their impacts on threatened fish and bird species. These countries are rarely perceived as threat hotspots.

Microsoft became the first company to purchase carbon credits generated by the Makira conservation project in Madagascar, which intends to preserve 320,000 hectares of forests and prevent 32.5 million metric tons of carbon emissions.

Ice cream brand Breyers committed to sourcing 100% of its vanilla from sustainable sources in Madagascar, in partnership with the Rainforest Alliance. The company built on this commitment by creating a policy that restricts the use of milk and cream from cows treated with artificial growth hormones in its products.

Last month, the first comprehensive study on global bush meat consumption found that 113 species in Southeast Asia have dwindled to precarious numbers, primarily due to bush meat hunting and trapping. But while this region may be one of the worst affected, the study, published in Royal Society Open Science, reports that bush meat hunting is driving many of the world's mammals to the brink of extinction. "The large mammals are much more threatened than the small ones," says William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University and lead author of the study. "This is likely because there is more meat on large mammals."