Next month BirdLife International, a global partnership of 115 organizations working to protect birds and their habitats, will mark its 100th anniversary by holding the BirdLife World Congress in London.…
Finalizing the new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is taking longer than expected and yet another round of negotiations – this time in Nairobi, Kenya – ended without much progress, say…
Traditional and Indigenous peoples in the Arctic are joining with scientists to successfully rewild mining-degraded peatlands and other sites.
For at least the past 20 years, there has been regular talk about the need to break down silos in conservation. The argument is straightforward: to be successful, the field…
I was texting my Scandinavian friend who works for a donor agency, informing him about my plan to write about the role of donors in the global sustainability agenda when…
Last month, nine organizations collectively announced a $5 billion pledge toward biodiversity conservation efforts worldwide. Most of the participants are philanthropic foundations, but one signatory is Rainforest Trust, a conservation…
How can we maximize the effectiveness of grant-making in the international conservation field? This article is based on my experience in international environmental conservation, both as head of implementing nonprofits…
Efforts to protect wildlife and landscapes have generally been shifting away from "fortress conservation" — where local people are excluded from the lands they've traditionally managed — toward more inclusive…
The loss of the Mukambi River Pride lioness last June was sobering proof that the shock wave of COVID-19 had reached the heart and wildlife of Zambia’s Kafue National Park.…
Few people likely associate the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven mostly oil-rich emirates on the Western shores of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, with biodiversity…
The past 18 months have been a time of upheaval around the world, prompting a wide range of companies, institutions, and organizations to re-evaluate how they operate. The conservation sector…
2021 continues to be a year like no other. From record heat and wildfires in western North America to the flooding in China, the impacts of climate change and environmental…
Last month, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced the receipt of a $24 million donation to catalyze the field of conservation bioacoustics, which uses sound data to to understand and…
In 2019, Norway committed to pay $150 million to Gabon to protect its forests under the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI). After independent verification of the country's deforestation rates in…
The climate in the Amazon has been changing over the last few decades. The average temperature in the basin rose about 1º Celsius (1.8° Fahrenheit) between 1979 and 2018, with…
Determining the success of a conservation project is rarely as simple as measuring how well forest cover has been maintained or the headcount of an endangered species. The multifaceted nature…
PETÉN, Guatemala — Once or twice a year, a jaguar visits Uaxactun at night. It slinks under the great stone pyramids built by the ancient Mayans and past the moonlit…
In the wake of George Floyd's killing last year, long-running concerns about discrimination, colonial legacy, privilege, and power dynamics in conservation have gained prominence, forcing many organizations in the sector…
Community-led conservation approaches are working, says Peter Kallang, a Kenyah leader in Sarawak who led a successful campaign to block a mega-dam project.
Efforts to maintain protected areas and safeguard wildlife can at times feel futile given the persistent onslaught of encroachment, poaching and extractive activities. At the extremes, top-down conservation approaches may…
Like many sectors, conservation has increasingly been reckoning with issues around inclusivity, representation, justice, and equity. Many of these stem from the sector’s origins in the West, where conservation has…
Conservation is complex. If it were easy, problems like the extinction crisis, human-wildlife conflict, overexploitation of forests and oceans, and habitat degradation and loss would be resolved already. Conservation’s complexity…
One of the dominant trends in conservation over the past 20 years has been growing recognition of the contributions Indigenous peoples have made toward conservationists' goals of protecting biodiversity, wild…
As the world works to emerge from the devastation and hardship brought by the pandemic, there has been much talk about the recovery being an opportunity to drive transformative change…
For at least the past 20 years, conservation has been wrestling with some of the darker aspects of its historical relationship with local communities: legacies of colonialism, institutional racism, lack…
In the past decade we've seen an incredible rise in the availability of information, from open-access journals to freely accessible high-resolution satellite imagery to high-quality investigative journalism. But we've also…
“Disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse…
Over the past twenty years the concept of "tipping points" has become more familiar to the public. Tipping points are critical thresholds at which small changes can lead to dramatic…
Between the pandemic, rising food insecurity and poverty, and catastrophic disasters like wildfires, storms and droughts, 2020 was a year of challenges that prompted widespread calls for systemic change in…
2020 is a year that many people would like to forget. Here's a look at 10 of the biggest environmental storylines to remember. The COVID-19 pandemic The impact of the…
