RIPÁ, Brazil — One muggy morning last December, eight women and their chief drove out of the Indigenous Xavante village of Ripá across a forested savanna in the Brazilian state…
“When I was a kid, it was easy to find and catch fish and to see hatchlings of turtles walking around the beach on my way to school,” says Matla’ah,…
Land degradation – the deterioration or loss of the productive capacity of land – is progressing at an alarming rate. Globally, over a fifth of the total land area has…
Birds, bats, elephants, apes, rodents and many other animal species spread plant seeds throughout the world. But as those animal populations diminish, so do the plants that rely on wildlife to shift their range, especially as climate change worsens.
In 1993, the democratically elected president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated in a coup. At the time, the country’s democratic institutions were still only three months old. The incident…
The Atlantic Rainforest of the Northeast Project plans to reforest 70 hectares (173 acres) in the states of Pernambuco and Alagoas by 2023. Monitoring in Pernambuco’s Serra do Urubu region has shown an increase in bird diversity, from 105 species recorded in 2005, to 287 in 2021. Despite the progress being made, the situation remains fragile, with seven bird species having gone extinct in the Atlantic Forest in recent decades, and a strong tradition of keeping birds in cages still persisting.
In the past decade, the European bison (Bison bonasus) has made a comeback in Central and Eastern Europe. Hunters had killed the last known bison in the region nearly a…
“It still rains here,” says Emeterio Hernández Cano, the San Francisco communal land commissioner, at the start of a tour of La Fabriquita, a pine and oak forest of just…
Traditional and Indigenous peoples in the Arctic are joining with scientists to successfully rewild mining-degraded peatlands and other sites.
Each morning as the sun rises into the sky, ranger Donovan Wright stands on the outskirts of Blean Woods in the United Kingdom. The ancient woodland in southern England covers…
SHOUF BIOSPHERE RESERVE, Lebanon — Late afternoon light falls across Talal Riman’s weathered face as he stands under the ancient cedars he’s tended for almost three decades in Lebanon’s Shouf…
Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca National Park has become a laboratory for the reintroduction of locally extinct species. A study shows that, of the 33 species of large and medium-sized mammals that used to occur in the park area, only 11 remain today.
In 2017, Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm, struck Puerto Rico. The hurricane dried up four basin mangrove forests in the island’s northeast, leaving behind an urgent need for restoration,…
Organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah have filed a complaint with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples about a once-secretive deal aimed at locking up…
On this episode we look at mangrove restoration and the effectiveness of nature based solutions to climate change. Listen here: The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a…
High above sea level on the central Greek mountain of Oiti, the mythological place of Hercules’ funeral, snow melts in the springtime. As the soil becomes wet, grasses start growing…
Restoration initiatives are slowly making a mark on the Atlantic Forest, a Brazilian biome that has been reduced to about a quarter of its original area. Brazil has made global commitments to restore tens of millions of hectares of forest by 2030, but the much smaller programs underway in the Atlantic Forest show country is still unable to monitor restoration efforts effectively.
The reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 triggered a cascade of knock-on effects. The wolves kept herbivores like elk in check and on the move, reducing…
In 2007, scientists at the Conservation Land Trust, now known as the Rewilding Foundation, released a giant anteater couple into the wild as part of a new reintroduction program. While…
The “Black Summer” bushfires burned an area the size of the U.K. in Australia in 2019-20, forcing foresters to reconsider the meaning of forest resilience and how best to restore forests as climate change and drought intensify.
An agreement for the rights to the natural capital covering 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) in Malaysian Borneo for the next 100 years “in its present form is legally…
Cecilia Rivas remembers Tukupu as a place to live freely. The dwellings of the Indigenous Kariña community, spread out under the shade of the trees in the Imataca Forest Reserve,…
JAKARTA — Indonesia has recorded mixed progress in its dual programs of restoring tropical peatlands and mangroves, acknowledging that achieving the latter goal will be far more challenging than for…
Felipe “Pipe” Henao is a young environmentalist from the small town of Calamar in southeastern Colombia. At the meeting point of the Amazon and Orinoco basins, it’s an area of…
For several weeks in 2015, the sound of chainsaws cutting down trees was incessant in the Angangueo municipality in the Mexican state of Michoacán. When a group of people tried…
TANAKEKE ISLANDS, Indonesia — Wading through a mangrove swamp in the coastal waters of Indonesia’s Tanakeke Islands, Hayati wiped the sweat from her brow and tried her best to keep…
All across the arid and semi-arid landscapes of Africa, grasslands meet the eye. These ecosystems provide a wealth of environmental services, sequestering immense amounts of carbon (grazing lands store up…
2021 was a year where tropical forests featured more prominently in global headlines than normal thanks to rising recognition of the role they play in addressing climate change and biodiversity…
The tooth-billed bowerbird gave itself away with a not-quite-right call. Suspicious, I’d panned my binoculars toward the sound and there he was, the mimic, high in the canopy of a…
The world has long monitored global deforestation, but tracking ecosystem restoration is a more subtle, challenging process, needing metrics for long-term success, carbon storage, biodiversity and local economy benefits.
