Sustainable Development News

Subsidizing burning wood for energy as having zero emissions puts us at risk of overshooting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target.

This is the sixth article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five. KOTA BELUD, Malaysia — Road building is…

KENDARI, Indonesia — Next year will mark the completion of a nearly mile-long bridge being built over this booming industrial city’s iconic bay, say government officials here. But researchers studying…

AMORON’I MANIA REGION, Madagascar — People in the highlands of central Madagascar have long buried their loved ones in shrouds of thick wild silk. After several years, they exhume the dead…

Papua New Guinea hopes to nearly double the length of its road network by 2022, posing grave threats to more than 50 parks and biodiversity-rich areas, according to a new…

ARU ISLANDS, Indonesia — In one of this country’s most isolated places, Ipus Apalem believes he has finally found a way for his village of 400 to improve its lot.…

Small-scale oil palm projects show that sustainable supply chains, coupled with tough environmental regulation could benefit both farmers and forests.

The UK and EU say they plan to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, even as both pursue plans to burn massive amounts of carbon-producing wood pellets.

Scientists call it flood-retreat agriculture. As a swollen river blankets a dry plain and then recedes, it replenishes the thin soil with enough nutrients to sprout grass for cattle and…

The way humans have changed the forests of Central and South America may be making it impossible for subsistence hunters to continue their way of life, according to two conservation…

Life on this planet, in all its wide diversity, is disappearing more quickly now than it has at any time in human history, and some 1 million species of plants…

Traffic is a decades-old problem in Penang, a common complaint shared across class, race and political lines in this Malaysian state. When it’s brought up, Siti Fadhilah, a 31-year-old selling…

For many energy and environment problems that developing rural communities face, there exists a plausible technological solution. In communities that are economically or geographically isolated, tools that can save time,…

The elephant poaching epidemic continues to tear across the African continent. It’s even reached remote refuges in recent years, like the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, where poaching deaths began surging…

Deforestation can reduce communities’ access to clean drinking water, according to a recent study conducted in Malawi. A lot of prior research on how deforestation impacts water dynamics has shown…

PENGOTAN, Indonesia — Hundreds of top-heavy bamboo stalks stretch up from the ground and lean under their own weight over a road in Pengotan, a village on the island of…

JAKARTA — With every tree felled and every piece of coal burned for energy, Indonesia is inching closer to its ecological tipping point. And once it passes that point, the…

The chief minister of the Malaysian state of Sabah has called on construction crews working on the multi-billion-dollar Pan Borneo Highway project to avoid breaking up the region’s forests and…

Giraffes have to search a wider area for food and water when people live nearby, according to a recent study. “Giraffes are huge browsing animals that live in African savanna…

Ecologists know that when we humans start tugging at the threads of a food web, the unraveling that results is often catastrophic to the connected species, paving the way for…