Scientists know from a bevy of studies that the inclusion of indigenous peoples and local communities is critical to holding deforestation at bay across the tropics, even as a tide…
New research offers early evidence that the Arctic and tropics are no longer a world apart; melting sea ice may be intensifying equatorial trade winds and emergence of El Niño.
For many Himalayan pastoral societies, yaks are a cornerstone of their livelihoods as much as of their social and religious traditions. Climate scientists consider this cold-adapted creature a barometer of…
More than one-third of the world’s remaining pristine forests, known as intact forest landscapes, exist within land that’s either managed or owned by indigenous peoples, a new study has found.…
Global average temperatures on land and at sea in December 2019 were the second-highest recorded in the month of December since record-keeping began in 1880. That capped off a year…
2019 was the year the environment finally broke into the mainstream. Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s youth strikes and Extinction Rebellion, climate activism blossomed around the world, and green concerns were…
Rare plant species are far more likely to go extinct than common species, yet we know surprisingly little about global species abundance. Most efforts to quantify species abundance focus on…
Scientists believe they’ve uncovered a tipping point in the deforestation of landscapes across Earth: Once an area loses half its forest, the rest of the forest is often swift to…
Sri Lanka enters 2020 at a time of political transition. With a new president in office and a parliamentary election due in the next few months, public and media focus…
As the COP25 climate conference in Madrid, Spain came to a close with little progress earlier this month, the future of the Brazilian Amazon remained dangerously unclear. The Amazon is…
Meet Heng Kim Seng, Cambodia's bat man. In a few years, he went from rice to riches all because of bats. Under the Khmer Rouge, he hauled human waste to…
The discovery of a new-to-science species is always an awe-inspiring bit of news, filling us with hope. This year, researchers introduced us to several such species. Some were the result…
In Indonesia, a major producer and consumer of coal, politicians often argue that continued reliance on the highly polluting fossil fuel remains an economic necessity. Challenging this conventional wisdom, a…
Over the course of seven months in 2012 and 2013, more than 70 scientists collaborated to study and map the coral reefs around the islands of French Polynesia in the…
Grappling with the challenges of minimizing carbon footprints, memoirs of careers spent on the frontlines of conservation and stark warnings about the future inhabitability of our world, the roster of…
The Amazon worst-case scenario has arrived, say leading researchers, as predicted signs of a shift from rainforest-to-savanna begin to be seen in real time on the ground.
Scientists warn that escalating deforestation due to mining, agribusiness and other human disturbance is reducing the ability of intact tropical forests to sequester carbon.
According to reports, COP25, the UN climate negotiations that concluded in Madrid, Spain last week, did not yield any progress in terms of more ambitious emissions reduction pledges. But there…
Analysts are calling the COP25 climate summit in Madrid a colossal failure — undermining the carbon reduction goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, leaving the world in mortal danger.
JAKARTA — Indonesia has launched a campaign that government officials say should boost the reputation of the country’s palm oil industry, even as activists and experts warn it could make…
