JAKARTA — Years of deforestation and mining have devastated a wetland of international importance in Papua New Guinea, which, if left unchecked, could lead to the collapse of the ecosystem,…
Researchers have described 12 new gecko species from India’s Western Ghats mountains, 10 of which are found nowhere else on Earth. One particularly stealth gecko, described as “nearly impossible to…
It’s not unusual to see some rivers running black in Venezuela, or for fishermen to return home scraping dark sludge off their boots. Crumbling infrastructure and a lack of government…
This year, decision-makers and leaders will gather to talk about the interconnected crises of biodiversity loss and climate change at a few key global conferences including the U.N. Biodiversity Conference (COP15)…
JAKARTA — A new study strengthens the case for redirecting a planned mining road around the largest surviving tract of lowland tropical rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, but the…
The spread of fires in a Brazilian state that’s still mostly swathed in Amazon rainforest is raising alarms about risks to public health, compounding what’s already one of the worst…
Is harnessing the storage power of soils the global carbon solution we have been searching for? Understanding soil-formation and function is a first step to finding out.
One of the world’s smallest and rarest chameleon species has been rediscovered in Malawi, living on the edge of extinction in just a few, scant patches of rainforest. “They are…
Slowing the pace of mass extinctions and the climate crisis requires that nature be protected. But when it comes to protected areas, some have argued that safeguarding one area can…
The Amazon has long done its part to balance the global carbon budget, but new evidence suggests the climate scales are tipping in the world’s largest rainforest. Now, according to…
JAKARTA — The rapid development of electric vehicles looks set to overtake the biofuel infrastructure that Indonesia is investing heavily in, and could render the country’s alternative-fuel model redundant, new…
JAKARTA — The world’s leading palm oil sustainability certification scheme may have helped reduce deforestation and pollution in areas where it’s applied, but has had a limited impact on rural…
High up in the Rocky Mountains, forests are burning more frequently than any time in the past 2,000 years. The overarching reason: climate change. Warmer and drier climate conditions mean…
JAKARTA — Orangutans in Borneo have been found to physically waste away when fruit is scarce — a finding with dire implications as human-driven climate change and the destruction of…
Planting trees is all the rage right now — billionaires from Elon Musk to Marc Benioff are touting the benefits of massive reforestation — but it's hard to identify legitimate…
As Earth continues to lose forests and biodiversity, many have called for an expansion of protected areas. But protected status is not a silver bullet. Designating land as a protected…
Something is wrong in the lungs of the world. Decades of burning, logging, mining and development have tipped the scales, and now the Amazon Basin may be emitting more greenhouse…
JAKARTA — The framework for resolving land disputes involving palm oil companies in Indonesian Borneo has largely failed, allowing conflicts to fester for a decade or more, with very few…
"If a tree lives 500 years, it carries the carbon assimilated and stocked for the last 500 years,” says Giuliano Locosselli, a researcher at the University of São Paulo (USP)…
Humans aren’t the only ones feeling anxiety about environmental destruction. As forests shrink, small mammals are also feeling stressed, and we can tell by their fur. A team of scientists…
The past 50 years have seen a catastrophic decline in the planet’s ecosystems and natural environments. Every day at least 32,300 hectares (80,000 acres) of forest vanishes, and the size…
In some of the wettest parts of the Amazon rainforest, dry air may increase plant photosynthesis rates — a response that contradicts the assumptions of many climate models, according to…
In the skies above far-flung corners of the Brazilian Amazon, a small plane aims laser beams down at the treetops to create a real-time topography down to the ground. Its…
On an expedition in the tepuis, or “sprouting rock,” landscape of the Guiana Highlands in South America, Mateusz Wrazidlo snapped a photo of an orchid he had never seen…
Held aloft by a canopy crane nearly 10 stories above the forest floor, Susan Kirmse observed and collected beetles in the rainforest canopy for an entire year. What did she…
Tropical trees have shorter life spans than trees in other parts of the world, living, for example, just over half as long as temperate trees. A new analysis suggests that,…
Smallholders and family farms, Indigenous people, rural women, youth, and landless rural communities are being squeezed into increasingly smaller parcels of land or forced out entirely as global land inequality…
When Celso Silva Junior, a Ph.D. candidate at the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE), stepped back from his recently completed map of Brazil’s secondary forests, he was surprised by…
Nearly 2 billion people live within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of a forest, and many rely on forests directly as a source of livelihood. But forests also play a critical…
As more trees die in the Amazon Basin, the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide weakens. But to understand why trees are dying at a faster rate, researchers first need…
