It's been seven years since the last significant El Niño — one of the strongest on record. It triggered disease outbreaks, caused changes in weather conditions that affected fisheries and…
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn was a fellow. *Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from…
The founding CEO of the world’s most prominent standards organization for carbon credits sold on voluntary markets will step down. David Antonioli will leave the U.S.-based nonprofit standard-setting organization Verra…
It's easy to miss the mosses, the ubiquitous green, silver and brown carpets that drape across nature's surfaces, from forest to fen. It’s also easy to underestimate just how big…
A group of Indigenous-led organizations released a letter May 9 supporting forest protection efforts known collectively as REDD+ projects. They argue that REDD+, short for “reducing emissions from deforestation and…
Environmental groups doled out general praise, with caveats, for a new inventory by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that identified 112.8 million acres (45.6 million…
Reliant on its fisheries, Japan has long known the importance of maintaining healthy forest watersheds so as to protect coastal fisheries. It’s a lesson other nations could benefit from as the global environmental crisis worsens.
It was down to the wire for the GEDI mission, but it now seems like the force may have prevailed. In a last-minute decision, NASA has decided to extend the…
As bison, lynx and other wildlife return to European forests, conservationists debate whether biodiversity-enhancing reintroductions add to carbon storage and ecosystem resilience against climate change.
Revisions to the long-debated European Union Renewable Energy Directive (RED) have been approved. Those policies still support the burning of wood pellets to make energy, despite evidence of harm to forests and climate, say NGOs.
When it comes to climate solutions, your first thought may not be the wildebeest. But in the Serengeti, these buffalo-looking antelopes are the key to carbon capture. Wildebeest eat large…
An independent governance body has released a set of rules aimed at boosting the “integrity” of the global carbon market for the exchange of credits meant to address the climate…
The dry season of 2015 was a devastating one for Indonesia, with around 100,000 fires engulfing thousands of hectares of tropical rainforests and carbon-rich peatlands on the islands of Sumatra,…
As biomass burning to make energy surges, nations are setting standards that fail to count carbon emissions at power plant smokestacks, worsening climate change even as those same countries dub biomass “carbon neutral.”
Scientists and activists have tirelessly campaigned for the protection of forests to mitigate rising global temperatures and preserve humanity’s future. For some local Amazonian communities, who depend on logging, mining…
Many of the people archaeologist Dulma Karunarathna interviews in rural Sri Lanka have never been interviewed before. And many of them, representing a variety of religions and languages, tell her…
Analysis of 40 years of climate temperature data shows a connection between Amazon tree loss and Tibetan snow decrease via a 20,000-kilometer oceanic and atmospheric pathway. West Antarctica is also impacted.
Only about 10% of the exchanges, brokers, resellers and cryptocurrency vendors that buy and sell voluntary carbon market credits share the precise commissions and profits they make in these exchanges,…
Warmer temperatures could significantly diminish the ability of tropical forests to siphon carbon from the atmosphere by intensifying dry seasons, according to a recent study. The tropics pack away an…
Eight conservation and Indigenous organizations have released a detailed guide for companies looking to invest in tropical forest carbon credits. The groups first published the Tropical Forest Credit Integrity (TCFI)…
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…
Large trees in older forests that hold significant amounts of carbon located within U.S. national forests are vulnerable to logging, according to a new study published Jan. 6 in the…
Last July, as the Ukraine war raged, the EU barred all Russian woody biomass imports; even as South Korea took in Russia’s supply. Illicit woody biomass may also still be flowing to the EU from Turkey, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Wild canids around the world are at risk, though some reintroductions are seeing good results. Conserving canids is not only good for ecosystem health, it can even potentially help curb climate change.
A Mongabay story featuring a whistleblower who debunked the green claims of Enviva — the world’s largest wood pellet maker — has prompted the Dutch to ban subsidies to biomass firms who make false sustainability claims.
An existing regulation designating the burning of forests to make energy as being renewable has been reversed in Australia. That decision seems unlikely to alter the EU’s heavy commitment to biomass burning.
Record fires, climate change, large-scale agriculture, deforestation and a proposed industrial waterway collectively threaten the world’s largest tropical wetland — a biodiversity hotspot and home to jaguars.
The answer is, it depends. A multitude of conditions must be analyzed, and forests properly managed long-term, if they’re to curb climate change-intensified flooding, landslides, and even stand up to a tsunami.
BONTHE, Sierra Leone — As the sun rises over Bonthe, a small city on the coastline of Sierra Leone’s remote Sherbro Island, echoes of a not-so-distant colonial past bathe in…
