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…
When it comes to habitat quality and ecosystem services, research has shown that natural landscapes do it best. A new study, published today in Nature, adds fodder to this argument,…
A recent study finds that when parks and reserves don’t do a good job of safeguarding the forest they contain, they’re more likely to be stripped of their status as…
Over the past 10 years many areas of once-forested land degraded by cattle in the Amazon have been converted to oil palm. To measure how the oil palm plantations may…
As nations try to stem emissions to keep the world from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius in line with their commitments towards the Paris Accord, replacing fossil fuels with…
340+ people have died since 2008, communities have been ravaged, rivers contaminated, drinking water polluted, and fisheries ruined by mining tailings dam failures. Future accidents could be prevented says UN report.
The government of Nigeria has announced its plans to restore four million hectares, or nearly 10 million acres, of degraded lands within its borders. The West African nation is now…
When it comes to restoring deforested landscapes, letting them regenerate naturally through passive means is generally cheaper than human-driven, so-called “active,” restoration techniques like re-planting. But a new study finds…
Last Thursday, at the UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany (known as COP23), the World Resources Institute (WRI) announced that $2.1 billion in private investment funds have been committed to…
JAKARTA — After a year in which it destroyed over 1,000 hectares of peat swamp forest in violation of its own sustainability policy, palm oil giant Felda Global Ventures said…
JAKARTA -- The Indonesian government is struggling to collect fines from companies found guilty of damaging the environment, leaving trashed rainforests and peat swamps to stay barren as restoration work…
Planet Earth is barreling through its sixth mass extinction right now, and there’s little doubt among scientists that we humans are responsible. Despite the challenges we face, the encouraging twist…
Scientists and conservationists have long believed that the rapid loss of Southeast Asia’s old-growth, “primary” rainforests in recent decades would leave one of its most iconic inhabitants, the orangutan, with…
Trees from one of South America’s fastest-disappearing landscapes are ending up as charcoal on the shelves of European supermarkets, according to a report by the NGO Earthsight. The London-based watchdog…
Part of Brazil’s most altered landscape has proven that it's capable of regenerating after the effects of farming, timber plantations and ranching, according to a recent study. The research demonstrates…
BAGOCBOC, Philippines – Morning hasn’t broken, but the town’s resident fighting cocks are already awake, their crows rising and falling to different decibel levels, the locations moving like lightning bugs…
Companies are still getting their soybeans from the clearance of little-known forests and savannas in Brazil and Bolivia, according to a new report, despite calls to shift their focus to degraded…
British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto was for 45 years the majority-owner of the Panguna copper mine in Bougainville, an autonomous region in Papua New Guinea (PNG). But now it has…
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s extensive forests seem like a bright spot in an otherwise-troubled country. With forests covering an area larger than Colombia, DRC has managed to sidestep the…
On the surface, the Republic of Congo appears to be making strides toward both conservation and economic development. But the process of becoming an emerging economy is not without its…
A new study examines the amount of carbon emissions created by land-use change and management practices in China, the second-largest economy and the largest carbon emitter in the world. Driven…
ith the disbanding of Colombia’s largest military guerrilla group, FARC, Colombia’s forests could come under pressure from developmental goals. Home to almost 10 percent of the planet’s biodiversity, Colombia is…
The International Criminal Court (ICC), housed at The Hague in the Netherlands, has mostly focused on human rights abuses and war crimes committed during armed conflicts throughout its 14-year history.…
t is rare to spot an Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) in the wild, according to Yang Jun, director of the Hunchun Forestry Bureau’s wildlife protection department. However, on July…