Temperate peatlands sequester tremendous amounts of carbon, but many have experienced extensive harm. Now, as climate change worsens, land managers are urgently moving to restore these vital ecosystems.
Brazilian scientist Antonio Donato Nobre has long been a student of the Amazon Rainforest. An agronomist with a master's degree in tropical biology and a Ph.D. in Earth science, Nobre…
Corporations see investments in voluntary carbon markets as a key part of their climate strategy, according to a new report from the environmental nonprofit Conservation International and the We Mean…
Previous studies have shown that Africa’s tropical forests store more carbon per hectare than Amazonian forests. But how they do so is still a puzzle. It turns out that elephants…
Imagine showers of little green sand grains drifting through the ocean: collecting on coral reefs, rolling off the backs of whales, sprinkling schools of tuna — and helping to save…
Tropical forests play a key role in our efforts to stabilize the global climate. As a readymade means of ameliorating our continued greenhouse gas emissions, tree-clad tropical landscapes provide us…
Pedro Brancalion is used to the roar of chainsaws. For years, he’s heard loggers tearing down rainforest giants in the Brazilian Amazon, and listened as ancient trees were toppled and…
An area of salt marsh twice the size of Singapore has disappeared since the turn of the century, NASA scientists determined by analyzing satellite images from around the globe. Severe…
In contrast to their reputation, big plant eaters such as elephants that disturb forest and grassland vegetation could help curb climate change.
On Dec. 6, legislators in Argentina’s southernmost province of Tierra del Fuego approved a law to permanently protect the land and sea of the Mitre Peninsula at the tip of…
Wildlife — as big as elephants and as small as spiders — are important players in the carbon cycle, and scientists say that supercharging ecosystems with animals could enhance terrestrial and marine carbon sinks.
In 2016, Bangkok opened its first waste-to-energy incinerator in the district of Nong Khaem, turning up to 500 metric tons of solid waste into electricity every day. The 9.8 megawatt…
A group of researchers from more than a dozen countries are calling for worldwide peatland protection and restoration. In a signed statement released Dec. 1, more than 40 scientists say…
For the first time ever at a climate summit, the final text of this month’s COP27 included a “forests” section and a reference to “nature-based solutions.” But it's premature to declare a victory for forests.
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — The first big news of the COP27 climate conference was a forest promise: UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a 26-nation partnership to conserve woodland…
It’s a stunning landscape with a prophetic name: Lisima lya mwono, or “the source of life” as it’s known in the language of the local Luchazi people. But that’s not…
More than three decades after the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu raised the issue at international climate talks, the question of who should pay damages for climate change-induced losses is…
The past decade has seen a paradigm shift in the way the world looks at lighting. Homes, offices and streets have turned off wasteful incandescent lights and fluorescent ones that…
In December 2004, the worst tsunami in recorded history devastated the region encircling the Indian Ocean, killing more than 200,000 people in 14 countries. One year later, researchers showed that…
Players in the carbon offset market say they offer a solution to the climate crisis. When an emitter releases carbon in one place, they can support a project elsewhere that…
At the heart of Brazil’s “arc of deforestation,” the São Nicolau Farm has become a demonstration reforestation project, designing and refining tropical reforestation techniques on 2,000 hectares of degraded pastureland.
Australian firm Invictus plans forest protection projects covering more than 300,000 hectares, or 741,000 acres, of indigenous forest in western Zimbabwe, which the company says will more than offset emissions…
A new map finds that roughly a third of U.S. mature forests are on federal lands, which President Biden appears eager to protect to store carbon. But much mature forest is also privately held, especially in the Southeast, and is at risk.
For decades, satellite images have clearly captured how rampant deforestation is destroying the Amazon rainforest. But what about the trees that remain standing? What do their dimensions tell us about…
While forest advocates had high hopes, the EU parliament voted this week not to declassify woody biomass as a renewable energy source, paving the way for more EU, U.S., and Canadian forests to be turned into wood pellets and burned.
Critics say that “the white rhinos of old-growth forests” in British Columbia are rapidly being felled by timber companies, even as the provincial government largely postpones its 2020 pledge to protect the remaining ancient forests.
Proponents of Swiss biomass are subject to an “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome,” expecting the public to believe in many impossible things, including that burning forest biomass is carbon neutral, sustainable and clean, critics say.
The death knell of coal has been proclaimed, but policy loopholes in Asia allow for cofired power plants, where coal and wood are combined as fuel. Both fuels produce lots of carbon emissions, but those from wood aren’t counted.
The world’s largest bank of the partially decomposed plant matter known as peat in the tropics is even more extensive than initially thought, according to a new study. The peatlands…
In the Indonesian village of Kun-kun, where illegal loggers once cut mangroves for timber, a new livelihood has come to the fore: crab fishing. “Without the mangroves, the crabs cannot…
