Mrn-forests News

A recent report discusses how regreening may offer a possible solution to the chronic economic and political instability in some regions of Africa.

Yunguillo Indigenous Reserve stretches out into the Colombian forest. Photo courtesy of the Amazon Conservation Team. A landmark achievement was celebrated in southwest Colombia in May when the Colombian Institute…

Aerial view of flowering canopy trees in the Amazon. New research has found significant chemical differences between tree species that occupy just slightly different habitats. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.…

Mangroves provide many ecosystem services like controling erosion and mitigating the effects of tsunamis. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. The first-ever set of comprehensive guidelines for designing, implementing and managing…

A wild Bengal tiger in India. Photo by Morgan Erickson-Davis. A hundred years ago, there were thirteen times as many tigers in the world as there are today, ranging from…

The Te Apiti wind farm in New Zealand was granted tradeable carbon offset credits when it was built in 2003/2004. Wind energy projects were popular in voluntary carbon markets in…

A rainforest in Borneo. Photo credit: Rhett Butler. Negotiators at U.N. climate talks in Bonn, Germany, have produced a draft agreement on the technical provisions of a plan to reduce…

This article is the second in a two-part series on mangrove conservation. Read the first part here. Red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle) in Panama. Photo by Rhett Butler. In December 2014,…

This article is the first in a two-part series on mangrove conservation. Read the second part here. Mangrove forest in Cuero-Salado, Honduras. Photo by Rhett Butler. In a press conference…

Young swift parrots (Lathamus discolour). Photo courtesy of Dejan Stojanovic. In the forests of Tasmania lives the swift parrot (Lathamus discolour), a highly threatened bird that breeds nowhere else in…

  Rainforest in Kinabatangan, Malaysia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.   Scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts have developed vegetation height maps for the entire tropics at…

Forest in Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia. Photo by Dtfman. A proposed border checkpoint at Kbal Damrei, on Cambodia’s border with Vietnam, together with a new road leading up to it, may…

On the border of Colombia and Venezuela lies a mountain range called Serranía de Perijá in which a small brown songbird is going about its day entirely unaware of what…

Fragments of cerrado forest in Brazil's Mato Grosso state. The proposed railroad route goes through some of the last standing intact forest in the state. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.…

Blooming Amazon rainforest in southeastern Peru. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Human activity has destroyed huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest's biomass as trees are cleared to make way for…

Two palm oil plantations have recently been established in Peru, supplanting primary forest. Satellite imagery analysis shows extent of the massive development, which is led by a group of companies…

Peatland cleared for palm oil outside Palangkaraya in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province. Photo: Rhett Butler The charity that Indonesia's Golden Agri-Resources has enlisted to devise and implement its zero-deforestation and…

A stump is all that remains of an illegally felled tree in the rainforest of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Recent findings indicate amendments made to the Lacey Act in 2008 may…

Cleared Cerrado in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Photo by Rhett A. Butler China has been investing heavily in Latin America’s natural resources and crude oil. Recently, the country even pledged to…

With more than 3,000 hectares cleared so far and more to come, Greenpeace and other organizations call for detailed land-use strategy in Cameroon In its push to become a middle-income…

'Copy-paste' not good enough for civil society groups calling for the policy to be strengthened A Greenpeace activist dons a mask of Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo in a smoldering…

A logging road transects Peruvian rainforest (this is not an image of one of the newly detected roads). Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Roads spread out like multi-fingered tendrils, eating…

Inside Central American rainforest. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Thanks to the world’s voracious appetite for crops like coffee, palm oil, rice, rubber, soy and tea, large-scale agriculture is one…

A Sumatran elephant of the sort that lives in the Leuser Ecosystem. Photo: Rhett A. Butler A new report provides evidence that a supplier of palm oil giants Wilmar and…

A Madagascar nightjar (Caprimulgus madagascariensis), which shares a genus with the endangered Itombwe nightjar (Caprimulgus prigoginei). Photo by Francesco Veronesi Many of the world's endangered animals live in only one…

Reaching 1,450 meters (4,750 feet) above the surrounding sea, Cleopatra's Needle is one of Palawan's tallest mountain peaks. Photo by Jonah van Beijnen. Palawan, an island-province of the Philippines near…

A sustainable-business forum in Indonesia's Riau province urged the government to support companies' zero-deforestation commitments, which remain hampered by policies that prevent firms from preserving forests in their concessions. Under…

Clearing of Brazilian Amazon rainforest for soy. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. A study on the impact of forest loss on biodiversity, recently published in the journal Conservation Biology, shows…

An oil palm estate in North Sumatra. Photo: Rhett A. Butler Executives from palm oil giants Wilmar, Cargill and Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) appeared at a green investment summit in Jakarta…

The blue-bearded helmetcrest (Oxypogon cyanolaemus) is a spectacular hummingbird. It is aptly named for the blue streak of feathers on its chin and a pointed crest on its head resembling…