A Brazil nut tree in Jaú National Park, Amazonas, Brazil.
Victor Caetano-Andrade
Trees in tropical forests are more than carbon sponges – they’re cultural artefacts.
Village Forests can reduce poverty and also deforestation if done properly.
Fehmiu Roffytavare/Shutterstock
Village Forests under the Social forestry Scheme can not only reduce poverty but also deforestation, study finds.
Tropical peat swamps like this are being cleared at record rates.
Jamikorn Sooktaramorn/ Shutterstock
Researchers found that palm oil plantations up to five years old were more harmful to the climate than already established ones.
Bam, a province Burkina Faso, was once a migration source due to land degradation. This is changing thanks to soil and water conservation projects.
flickr/ Ollivier Girard/ CIFOR
Soil and water conservation projects can create fertile farmlands and change migration patterns linked to land degradation in Burkina Faso.
Majete Wildlife Reserve, Malawi.
Jason I. Ransom
Building connections and grassroots efforts will sustain conservation over the long term.
Black-and-white ruffed lemurs are important indicators of rainforest health.
Franck Rabenahy
New research shows that slowing deforestation is the most essential step for saving Madagascar’s lemurs, and can help protect them against the longer-term threat of climate change.
Aerial view of deforested area of the Amazon rainforest.
PARALAXIS/Shutterstock.com
About 24,000 square miles of Amazon rainforest have been deforested over the last decade.
A collapsed building in Mayfield, Ky., after a tornado hit the town on Dec. 11, 2021.
Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
Government agencies have detailed plans for responding to disasters, like the Dec. 10-11, 2021 tornados. But one issue doesn’t get enough attention: cleaning up the mess left behind.
Breathe in the fresh forest air.
Luis Del Rio Camacho/Unsplash
Without care, reforestation projects can damage ecosystems and be useless as carbon stores. Here’s how to go about it the right way.
A knobbed hornbill in tropical forest, Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Ondrej Prosicky/Shutterstock
Instead of boycotting palm oil, source it from pastureland and not recently logged forests.
Left, farmer Ian Turnbull being who was convicted of murdering compliance officer Glen Turner. Right, Mr Turner’s partner Alison McKenzie outside court. Tensions over land clearing can have tragic consequences.
AAP/DAN HIMBRECHTS
Politicians and the media often stoke tensions between the city and the country. Nowhere is this more common than on the issue of land clearing – and the consequences can be tragic.
More than 300,000 hectares of subtropical forest in Paraguay have burned since July due to illegal land clearing for agriculture, according to the National Security Ministry, Oct. 1, 2019.
AP Photo/Jorge Saenz
Yerba mate is a wildly popular South American tea with a growing global market. Can this ‘superfood’ save Paraguay’s tropical forests, too?
Indigenous Marind in West Papua consider the forest and its plants and animals as kin. These culturally valued multispecies relations, however, are being disrupted by oil palm development projects.
Sophie Chao
Indigenous Marind in West Papua consider the forest and its plants and animals as kin. These culturally valued multispecies relations, however, are being disrupted by oil palm development projects.
A toucan eating a fruit in the tropical wetlands of the Pantanal, Brazil.
Uwe Bergwitz/Shutterstock
In the absence of animals to help larger trees reproduce, forests are suffering.
The Paraguayan Chaco, South America’s second largest forest, is rapidly disappearing as agriculture extends deeper into what was once forest. Here, isolated stands of trees remain amid the farms.
Joel E. Correia
The cleared land of Paraguay’s Chaco forest produces everyday products like charcoal and leather that are sold abroad to consumers who may never know the unsavory origins of their purchases.
The El Segundo Chevron oil refinery, left, and the Bom Futuro National Forest, right.
Pedro Szekely/WikimediaCommons, Reuters/Nacho Doce
California’s new plan to fight global climate change is innovative. But it raises tricky ethical questions with no easy answers.
Prescribed fires are often done to eliminate weeds and renew the grasses in pastures for ranching across the Amazon.
Paulo Massoca
Reversing the damage from fires in Brazil’s rainforest is not as simple as allowing trees to grow back. Decades of research shows how fires degrade their long-term health and utility.
A Nepalese woman collects mushroom in a forest.
Jagannath Adhikari
Himalayan villages are growing food in the forests, a traditional model that can fight both land clearing and world hunger.
Palm oil development is not just about the economy but also needs to consider social and environmental costs.
www.shutterstock.com
There are studies showing that farmers can have economic benefits from palm oil. However, they can also be impoverished by the commodity.
An Araucaria juts out of Brazil’s misty Atlantic Forest.
Douglas Scortegagna/Wikimedia Commons
Humans have never known a world without the Araucaria. But rising temperatures and changing rainfall mean that the extinction of these majestic trees may be just a generation or two away.