“Please tell me how I can make companies obey the law,” the official said. He was exasperated by the companies whose oil palm plantations saturated the subdistrict he headed in…
Illegal deforestation, wildcat mining, drug trafficking, and lethal violence: Name your scourge and the Amazon Basin seldom disappoints. But as an unusual compact between police officers, prosecutors, environmental protectors, and…
In South Los Angeles — right in the heart of the 10-million-person metro area — sits a sprawling 1,000-acre zone from another era: It’s the Inglewood Oil Field, a rolling scrubland…
The vulnerabilities in our global food system have never been more apparent than they are right now, during a moment some have described as a “poly-crisis.” Between international conflict in…
Growing up in Gällivare/ Váhtjer, a Swedish village in Sápmi, north of the Arctic Circle, the threats facing Sámi people were a daily reality. We are Europe’s only Indigenous people,…
In the fight against climate change, will the Metaverse be helpful or hinder environmental efforts? Essentially an updated internet and virtual world where participants can pose as avatars and interact…
A few years ago I was catching butterflies in a strip of rainforest in Panama. One day the camp welcomed a team of jet-lagged vagabonds dragging their rollers full of…
On the main road of the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas, two ocelots recently jumped out in front of a car. The mother ocelot then went back…
Brazil has an unprecedented opportunity to secure $10 billion dollars or more over the next four years to move the Amazon region towards an equitable, forest-maintaining economy. The very real…
As the founding Chair of the Executive Board of the Global Fund for Coral Reefs (GFCR), I have witnessed firsthand a groundbreaking effort to preserve one of Earth’s most essential…
Haiti is facing a profound political and economic crisis. Functional governance that serves the interests of Haiti’s people is largely nonexistent. One of the necessities to overcome this crisis is…
Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU), human rights abuses at sea and the collapse of ocean ecosystems are fundamentally intertwined. Fish populations have rapidly declined globally, with 35% of fish…
Our planet is in crisis. Human activity is driving accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss across the globe. The devastating impacts of both processes are disproportionately felt by women and…
When the palm oil industry began growing rapidly in Indonesia in the 1980s, the government developed a scheme aimed at ensuring communities would benefit. To gain subsidized funding, companies routinely…
Biodiversity conservation requires a fundamentally different approach to managing climate change, and their respective crediting systems need to accommodate that difference for technical, social and practical reasons. Carbon credits are…
Halting biodiversity loss is one of the great challenges of the 21st century, but our current approaches to global conservation are clearly not working. A good example of this is…
The Amazon rainforest and its people have gone through tough times recently. For the last four years, under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the region has experienced increasing deforestation and the…
Two days after the two-year anniversary of the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, copycat mayhem broke out in Brazil's own capital, Brasília. On that Sunday, newly-inaugurated Brazilian President…
The Amazonian Chief Raoni Metuktire visited the U.K. in January 2020, accompanied by Megaron Txucarramãe and other Indigenous leaders. This visit kicked off a global tour that held very special…
To achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, we must drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, decreasing our reliance on coal, oil and gas by…
As a group of plants, weeds are unloved by some people. However, this dislike is not universal. Weeds are colonizing, pioneering plants, with special botanical and ecological attributes that allow…
At the start of last month’s UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, UN Environmental Programme Executive Director, Inger Andersen, made the memorable statement, “we are at war with nature” and…
Floods, heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires – a changing climate is bringing with it ever more frequent and destructive so-called “natural” disasters, often impacting the most vulnerable areas and communities of…
Imagine having to choose between having water or a mining project in your backyard. Or between having a job or polluting your community. What would you choose? This dichotomy is…
“Deep inside the skull of every one of us there is something like a brain of a crocodile” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos. In science, reptiles have been considered to be…
The Pacific coast of the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica is one of the most remote destinations in the country, and the whole of Central America. The peninsula, which is…
In 2022, the public in Indonesia often talked about the energy transition as an effort to fight the future climate crisis. In fact, the climate crisis occurred in 2022 –…
With the world busy evaluating the conclusion of the latest meeting under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal (COP15), and the publication of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity…
At CITES CoP19, also known as the World Wildlife Conference, 54 requiem shark species, including tiger and bull sharks, six hammerhead shark species and 37 species of guitarfish were added…
1. Negotiations for historic global plastics treaty break ground Global leaders cheered to the strike of a recycled-plastic gavel in March, signifying a landmark decision by the United Nations Environment…
