Man-made environmental change is the predominant threat to global biodiversity. Amphibians seem to be particularly sensitive to these changes. In the first part of the talk the author examines, based on examples from the Afrotropics, how anthropogenic activities, such as selective logging, forest fragmentation, agriculture, and hunting, influence amphibian communities (i.e. species and functional diversity) in different forest types and savanna. The second part of the talk focuses on the potential adaptability of particular amphibian species to environmental change, thereby illustrating how limited our knowledge, even concerning European species, still is.