The Tongass National Forest in the U.S. state of Alaska is a special place for conservation biologist Dominick DellaSala, even after decades of traveling the world to study temperate rainforests.…
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.
Trees and soils keep a lot of carbon trapped in the forest, pulling it from the atmosphere, where it can do more harm than good. In fact, roughly 30% of…
Two decades ago, the inhabitants of four communities in the northern Mexican state of Durango put together a proposal: to make sustainable forest management a means of living. Over the…
The Sierra Madre Occidental in northwestern Mexico boasts vast forests that are home to Indigenous communities such as the Wixárika people (or Huichols). Across the largest forest reserves in Jalisco,…
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…
WildEast hopes to rewild large, interconnected tracts in East Anglia and also introduce regenerative farming practices on farmland still in use, but some local farmers complain the project lacks consultation.
[Part II - What countries are leaders in reducing deforestation?] On November 2, 2021 at the 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference (#COP26), 127 countries signed the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on…
Mongabay joins a noted forest ecologist in Olympic National Park to experience its magnificence and significance as a bastion of biodiversity and a carbon storehouse; protection of these vanishing U.S. and Canadian ecosystems is vital, say scientists.
There’s a tree-planting frenzy everywhere you look. In August 2019, the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India announced that more than a million Indians had planted 220 million trees…
The US, China, UK, EU, Japan, South Korea, Canada and others upped their climate ambitions at Joe Biden’s Earth Day Leaders Summit on Climate, but activists pointed to duplicitous policies on forest biomass, coal, and more.
Last fall, the ruling New Democratic Party promised to defer cutting BC’s last old-growth, but the NDP has so far failed to act and may be embracing the province’s old policy: forestry first; nature and planet a distant second.
No one was sure exactly what near-term impact the global pandemic would have the world’s forests in 2020. Some expected lockdowns and economic shocks to dampen deforestation rates; others thought…
The Netherlands has voted to stop issuing new subsidies for the burning of forests to generate heat. Though a small win for critics who say biomass is not carbon neutral, the vote could influence a June EU biomass review.
Scientists implore US, EU, Japan, South Korea and UK to stop harvesting forests to turn into wood pellets to burn as fuel at converted coal-burning power plants; a policy the UN has erroneously condoned as “carbon neutral.”
Michael Regan, President Biden’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2019 saw no climate benefit to the production of wood pellets in North Carolina to make energy abroad; what will he do at EPA?
The survival of Europe’s most valuable – and threatened – wildlife and habitats depends on Natura 2000. Natura 2000 sites are meant to be environmental havens, shielded from the relentless…
This article is a one year follow up to the award-winning series, The Great Insect Dying published in June, 2019 on Mongabay. The original series documents insect losses in Europe, the U.S. and the tropics — here’s what we know today.
In the decade following the end of the U.S. Civil War, a group of people led by physician and horticulturist John Aston Warder established the American Forestry Association to create…
GÄSTRIKLAND, Sweden — It’s just past 7 p.m. here in the woods along the eastern coast of Sweden. A handful of people are waiting, some of them for the past…
The forest biomass industry is booming, with forests in the U.S., Canada, Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Eastern Europe cut to provide wood pellets for burning at former coal power plants in the UK, EU and Asia.
By 2070, rising soil temperatures could cause germination failure in 20% of tropical plants, and reduced rates in more than 50%, with the potential to disrupt and alter tropical ecosystems.
This week, Greenpeace International released a series of dramatic photos revealing megafires burning in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, Russia. The images, captured on July 16 by drone, show red…
The Canadian province says 23% of its forests are old growth, but a new study shows only 1% is left. And without immediate protection that could be sacrificed to supply the booming wood pellet biomass energy industry.
Responding to intense pressure from investors and environmental activists, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, signaled in January that it would reduce investments in coal for energy generation. Other fossil…
Tech giant Microsoft says it will go “carbon negative” by 2030; to get there, it will rely on Pachama, a startup using LIDAR and artificial intelligence to truthfully track forest carbon storage projects.
Appalachia is home to some of the most biodiverse temperate forests in the world, and it has a deep history of harvesting species like American ginseng for personal use and…
Forests don’t have it easy. Even when they escape being cleared for farmland, pastures, or cities, many of them are battered by a variety of other human pressures. Damage to…
In a recently published study, Canadian researchers monitored the fine-scale movements of GPS-tagged fishers (Pekania pennanti), a member of the weasel family, across a terrain of over 700 protected areas…
Two papers published this week in major journals claim to do the same thing: show where forests should be restored. But they used starkly different approaches that lead to sharply…
