Economy News

Girl in village in Madagascar. One of the world's poorest countries, it has been estimated that about 70 percent of Malagasy people suffer from malnutrition. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.…

Rainforest in Borneo. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Thank you Professor Anthony Hall. After many years, we finally have a REDD textbook that can be used in the undergraduate and…

Popular for a time, General Motor's Hummer brand was criticized for its lack of efficiency. The brand has now been dropped. Last month, the American Council for an Energy Efficient…

Aerial view of Kaieteur Falls, Guyana. Photo © Conservation International/John Martin. The nation of Guyana sports some of South America's most intact and least-imperiled rainforests, and a new $8.5 million…

This has become Watt's most popular and widely viewed photo to date. It was taken on a foggy February day in a haunting clearcut near the Avatar Grove. It has…

Logging in Gabon, Central Africa. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Industrial logging in primary tropical forests that is both sustainable and profitable is impossible, argues a new study in Bioscience,…

Map shows the level of drought and dryness across the US in July 2011. Map courtesy US Department of Agriculture. Click to enlarge. Climate change is here and its increasing…

Deforestation of tropical forests for oil palm plantations in Sabah, Malaysia. Palm oil is one of over 15,000 commodities in a recent study that have been linked to biodiversity loss…

Vegetables in a Congo market. Photo by: Nancy Butler. Compiling over 1,000 foreign land deals from 2000-2010, a new report finds that 702,000 square kilometers (271,043 square miles) of agricultural…

This month, momentous events will occur on the global scene that will set the tone for whether 2012 will be a hopeful year or one in which dislocations and disconnects…

African elephants at Chobe River in Botswana. Photo by: Tiffany Roufs. Last month ten African nations, led by Botswana, pledged to incorporate "natural capital" into their economies. Natural capital, which…

Aerial view of the infamous Río Huaypetue gold mine in the Peruvian Amazon. This remote but massive gold mine is known for the destruction of primary rainforest, widespread mercury pollution,…

Coal truck in western China. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Governments, NGOs, and others fighting climate change should consider buying coal and oil deposits—not to exploit them, but to keep…

Man in a rice field in China. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Economic growth alone may not raise happiness, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National…

An interview with the Nature Conservancy's China Program. TNC staff and volunteers repairing signage at Meili Snow Mountain National Park in northwest Yunnan. Community benefits and ecotourism are at the…

Suburban sprawl in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The average American's ecological footprint is the fifth highest in the world. Photo by: Jeremy Hance. Human society is consuming natural resources as if…

Sawmill in Indonesia. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Last year researchers took the first ever publicly-released video of an African golden cat (Profelis aurata) in a Gabon rainforest. This beautiful,…

Observations of planet Earth from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on July 11, 2005. Photo by: NASA. Seventeen top scientists and four acclaimed conservation organizations have called for radical…

Kelompok Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) Indonesia telah menjadi sasaran banyak LSM selama bertahun-tahun karena dugaan dampak negatif terhadap hutan tropis. Hal ini memuncak dalam kampanye spektakuler yang diluncurkan oleh…

An interview with Arbio Left bank: Arbio's concession area. Photo by: Arbio. Arbio was begun by Michel Saini and Tatiana Espinosa Q. in the Peruvian Amazon region of Madre de…

Map, Bahuaja Sonene National Park, Grasshopper Mimicking a Wasp. Photo by: David Johnston. Research and exploration in the Neotropics are extraordinary, life-changing experiences. In the past two decades, a new…

Moth larvae munching on a host plant. Photo by: Tom Corcoran. For anyone who works in conservation in Madagascar, confronting the complex difficulties of widespread poverty is a part of…

Male lion in the Okavango Delta. © National Geographic Entertainment. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Now that California's carbon market has arrived, an Australian-based company that specializes in forest carbon…

The world's top five oil companies—BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—made a record $137 billion in 2011 beating out the previous record in 2008, reports Climate…

Illegally logged tree in Indonesia. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Australia should join the widening effort to stamp out illegal logging, according to testimony given this week by tropical ecologist…

"History does not crawl, it jumps."- Nassim Nicholas Taleb "This is an opportunity for greatness which has never been offered to any civilization… in human history before - to act…

Largescale clearing of Amazon rainforest for soy fields in Brazil. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. More companies are reporting on the impact of their operations on global forests, finds a…

Climate scientists have struck back at the Wall Street Journal after it published an op-ed authored by 16 mostly non-climatologists arguing that global warming was not an urgent concern. The…

The world's second largest mining company, Vale, has been given the dubious honor of being voted the world's most awful corporation in terms of human rights abuses and environmental destruction…

The U.S. state that takes climate change most seriously—California—has unanimously approved new rules dubbed the Advanced Clean Cars program to lower carbon emissions, reduce oil dependence, mitigate health impacts from…