Degraded Lands News

KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh — Where a year ago there were only the desolate remains of a forest scythed from hills to house hundreds of thousands in the world's largest refugee camp,…

JAYAPURA/JAKARTA — Rain-triggered flash floods and landslides that struck Indonesia’s easternmost province this past weekend have killed nearly 90 people and driven thousands from their homes. The country’s disaster mitigation…

Thirteen conservation organizations have banded together to ask policymakers to protect the world’s last wilderness areas by setting aside nearly one-third of the Earth for conservation. “The planet is losing…

MAKASSAR, Indonesia — Days of torrential rain in an eastern Indonesian province last week unleashed flash floods and landslides that killed dozens of people. In the wake of the emergency,…

JAKARTA — Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono began his first term as president of Indonesia in 2004 with a pledge to plant a million trees a year, in an effort to make…

It was an ambitious project from the start: to capture the Congo Basin rainforest in the pages of a book. Stretching across an area larger than Saudi Arabia, the world’s…

The construction of a hydroelectric dam in Thailand in the 1980s devastated the area’s wild birds, leaving behind just a few of the many species that once inhabited the region,…

African leaders came together on Nov. 13 to back the restoration of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of degraded ecosystems ahead of the start of the U.N. Biodiversity Conference.…

DEBRETABOR, Ethiopia – At a tree nursery in Ethiopia’s Meket district, young men and women pack small plastic bags with soil. The indigenous and exotic species grown here were previously…

In the town of Turkwel in Kenya’s vast Rift Valley region, 45-year-old Esther Aboi is busy placing pieces of wood inside her homemade kiln. The smoking firewood is an invasive…

The 2018 Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) Africa Conference is set to kick off in Nairobi, Kenya this week, bringing together representatives from both the public and private sectors, as well…

Deforestation rates in southern Africa’s woodlands are five times higher than prior estimates, according to recent research published Aug. 2. More deforestation, combined with widespread degradation of these savannas, translates…

The government of Brazil has announced that it has cut its climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions to the point that it has met a long-established goal three years ahead of time.…

Scientists seeking the tools necessary to tackle climate change need to better understand both the current interplay between carbon and tropical forests and how those forests will respond as temperatures…

LA CEIBA, Honduras — In the small, sky-blue studio at the Faluma Bimetu community radio station, 32-year-old Cesar Benedict reaches for the controls and slowly fades out the fast percussive…

PUERTO CONCORDIA, Colombia — Councilman Ricardo Vargas* sits at the bus depot in the riverside hamlet of Puerto Concordia where narco-inspired corridos play on the radio and a sea of oil palm expands…

The government of Tanzania is casting aside Maasai communities to make way for lucrative high-end safari tourism and hunting, says the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, in a report…

Venezuela’s ongoing economic crisis has helped trigger an illegal invasion by squatters into a University of the Andes research forest, a refuge of the Critically Endangered brown spider monkey.

A small community, far from Venezula’s Orinoco Mining Arc, discovers gold, leading to an incursion by illegal miners, environmental devastation and an allegedly deadly army raid.

Rising human populations and widespread industrial agriculture have hemmed one of the least-understood cats on the planet into ever-smaller patches of forest on the island of Borneo, a recent study…