Likely the world’s most popular garment, jeans use huge amounts of water to grow irrigated cotton, a major factor in destroying the Aral Sea. Today, the industry, though making sustainability pledges, still does much harm.
Funders of a $1.7 billion pledge announced at the 2021 U.N. climate conference say they disbursed around 19% of the money to bolster the land rights of Indigenous and local…
As Arctic sea ice begins melting out fully in summer, the frequency of strong El Niños could increase by 35% by century's end, causing extreme weather events to increase, says recent modeling study.
In April 2009, ocean explorer Enric Sala and a team of marine biologists dove into the waters around the southern Line Islands, an uninhabited archipelago in the central Pacific that…
Jean Wiener should be elated. The organization he leads, FoProBim, has just won a series of grants to help protect mangroves in Haiti. In the coming months, he and his…
Discussions about the Greenland ice sheet often focus on what it’s losing. But from around the edges of the rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet, a global commodity is being created.…
Sea ice extent didn’t reach record lows this summer, but air temps over Greenland and ocean temps in some Arctic seas were extraordinarily high. Polar warming also likely continues influencing global extreme weather events, scientists say.
While forest advocates had high hopes, the EU parliament voted this week not to declassify woody biomass as a renewable energy source, paving the way for more EU, U.S., and Canadian forests to be turned into wood pellets and burned.
Heat waves are reshaping life in the Mediterranean, with few of the sea’s coves, bays and shorelines untouched, according to a recent study looking at the impact of marine heat…
A new study conveys a dire warning for the future: multiple tipping points could be triggered if global warming exceeds the critical threshold of 1.5°C. Published this week in Science,…
A new analysis of satellite data finds the Western Indian Ocean region lost around 4% its mangrove forests over the past quarter-century. In a report that discusses the state of…
The death knell of coal has been proclaimed, but policy loopholes in Asia allow for cofired power plants, where coal and wood are combined as fuel. Both fuels produce lots of carbon emissions, but those from wood aren’t counted.
Climate scientists say there’s a 0.1% chance of keeping warming below 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) by 2100, as called for in the Paris Agreement. Even the less ambitious target of…
OLENGURUONE, Kenya — Mau Forest covers some 2,700 square kilometers (1,042 square miles) in western Kenya, making it the largest native montane forest in East Africa. The forest is also…
BODO, Nigeria — Christian Kpandei is a man of many memories. Still, the vital incidents of his life, like the death of his childhood hero, environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, grow…
DHAKA — Wasim Ali, 45, lived in one of the 55,000 houses destroyed by the deadly Super Cyclone Amphan in May of 2020. The tropical storm whipped up a tidal…
Just weeks after visiting a patch of Malaysian rainforest, Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler learned it had been logged for wood chips to supply a paper plant. A teenager at…
A new model that links climate change-reduced oceanic oxygen levels to smaller ectotherms predicts marine microorganisms could shrink as the world gets warmer, with impacts up the food chain, impacting fisheries.
Spanning more than 1,600 square kilometers (620 square miles), the Ulu Muda rainforest is one of the last large, continuous tracts of forest in the Malay Peninsula, and provides vital…
The world’s largest bank of the partially decomposed plant matter known as peat in the tropics is even more extensive than initially thought, according to a new study. The peatlands…
PREK TABAEK, Cambodia — The roots of the forests surrounding Cambodia’s Tonle Sap lake spend half the year submerged in water. But in the past five years, they’ve been catching…
The UK and EU were the primary users of woody biomass for energy. But Japan and South Korea have drastically stepped up their burning of wood pellets — potentially threatening forests, biodiversity, and the climate.
Today we’re talking about agroecology, which applies ecological principles to agricultural systems and is considered to be a key strategy for both mitigating and adapting to global climate change, as…
For the first time, a portion of the EU government has challenged the sustainability of burning forest biomass to make energy, a controversial policy pushed by the forestry industry but condemned by environmentalists.
Last month, the Democratic Republic of Congo approved the auctioning off of 16 oil blocks, at least nine of which are in the fragile peatland ecosystem of the Cuvette Centrale.…
Japan and South Korea are increasingly burning biomass, such as wood pellets, to make energy, with potentially adverse impacts on the global climate, deforestation and biodiversity.
The Mediterranean is a cradle — of civilization, of agriculture, of history. But the region, stretching across southern and southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, is also a…
Slice through a tree trunk, and you’ll find a series of rings that tell a story of how that tree grew over the course of its life. These rings are…
In the past, ocean carbon data was sparse, mostly gathered by ships. But the future of monitoring belongs to robot floats that deliver real-time data across vast oceans — even in the remote Antarctic Southern Ocean.
The world still has a fighting chance to keep temperatures below 2° Celsius over pre-industrial levels, if all countries meet their commitments to curb global warming, scientists say. In a…
