A University of Oxford study has determined that the widely used tools available to businesses for assessing their biodiversity impacts depend on broad assumptions and can have large uncertainties that are poorly understood or communicated. If used appropriately, they can be powerful tools to help guide effective action to address biodiversity loss – but if not, they can lead to misguided effort and can be insufficient for robust biodiversity strategy design.

To investigate the prevalence and consumption of endangered eels, a Yale-NUS College research team examined 327 individual eel products purchased across 86 retailers throughout Singapore. The team discovered prevalence of the Anguilla rostrata, commonly known as the American eel, in the sample. While not critically endangered like the European eel, the American eel is also considered an endangered species. The findings suggested a possible shift in trade and consumption of eel to the American eel. Given these findings, the research team called for specific attention to the American eel, with increased enforcement and monitoring needed as proactive steps necessary to avoid the same dramatic population declines that have been documented in other eel species like the European eel.