How do the products we buy affect the world’s rainforests? In the lead up to the Asia-Pacific Rainforest Summit held in Sydney this week, The Conversation is running a series on rainforest commodities…
Where the rainforest meets the plantation: there are probably a lot more insects.
Ryan Woo for Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Palm oil plantations have an overall negative impact on biodiversity, according to research released this week. The study, published in Nature Communications, found palm oil plantations are home to fewer…
Peril from the forests.
EU Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection
The growing Ebola virus outbreak not only highlights the tragedy enveloping the areas most affected but also offers a commentary on they way in which the political ecology in West Africa has allowed this…
At the recent UN Climate Summit governments, business and NGOs vowed to stop deforestation by 2030.
Rainforest Action Network/Flickr
At the recent UN Climate Summit in New York there was little in the way of new climate policy announcements, but 27 countries did sign a new forest agreement — the New York Declaration on Forests. Some…
Despite all the treaties, pledges, export bans and labelling schemes, the world’s forests are still disappearing at an alarming rate. In poorer countries a forest may simply be worth less as a living…
Indonesia enacts a moratorium on new permits to clear forests but gives exemptions to mining and palm oil companies.
EPA/STR
This week’s United Nations Climate Summit produced the New York Declaration on Forests. It promises to halt deforestation, one of the biggest contributors to global carbon emissions, by 2030. Indonesia…
Australian resources are fueling Asia’s development, but the next challenge is to make that sustainable.
EPA/Bagus Indahono
If measured by political will and rhetoric, Australia’s relationship with Southeast Asia would undeniably be in fine shape. Prime ministers as diverse as Paul Keating, Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard have…
“The best thing you could do for the Amazon is to blow up all the roads.” These might sound like the words of an eco-terrorist, but it’s actually a direct quote from Professor Eneas Salati, a forest climatologist…
There is more freedom and more reasons to smile in Burma than in the past – but will this girl and others in her generation share the spoils of the nation’s resources boom?
Dietmar Temps
Our Tropical Future: A new report on the State of the Tropics has revealed rapid changes in human and environmental health in the Earth’s tropical regions. This is the final in a four-part series about…
Around 54 million tonnes of carbon is lost from the Amazon every year due to selective logging and wildfires, making up 40…
Changing corporate attitudes are giving orangutans and other endangered species in Indonesia’s rainforests more hope of survival.
Flickr/Austronesian Expeditions
Indonesia is the world’s biggest destroyer of forests and four multinational corporations — APP, APRIL, Wilmar and Golden Agri Resources — have been responsible for much of it. Until recently these mega-corporations…
Large, older trees have been found to grow faster and absorb carbon dioxide more rapidly than younger, smaller trees, despite the previous view that trees’ growth slowed as they developed. Research published…
As the trees go, so do the microbes.
Jorge Rodrigues
Beneath the lush forests of the Amazon is a whole different level of diversity that new research says may be one of the keys to understanding how to stem the global impacts of deforestation. The Amazon…
Otim Joseph (front centre) donates native tree seedlings for Ugandan students to grow.
Ugandan National Forest Authority
Otim Joseph first started planting trees to protect his mother and sisters from being raped. Growing up amid a civil war, he watched as the Ugandan army cut down swathes of forest to make it easier to…
Extensive deforestation has been found to be a major cause of rainfall decline in Western Australia during the 1980s. A study…
Using tree measurements by Papua New Guinean villagers such as Daniel and Jackson, scientists can estimate that this tree stores about one tonne of carbon in its trunk and branches.
Michelle Venter
While hugging a tree sounds relaxing, it’s harder than you might think - especially when the tree is 20 storeys high and 3 metres wide, it’s hot as hell, and you’re swatting away swarms of sweat bugs…
With current concerns focusing, quite rightly, on controlling carbon emissions, it is easy to lose sight of the need for continued conservation efforts. In fact our recent study published in the Proceedings…
Once majestic low-lying rainforests, Indonesia’s peatlands now emit around 1 billion tonnes of CO2 a year.
H Dragon/flickr
One of the world’s major terrestrial carbon pools is rapidly deteriorating as large parts of Indonesia’s peatlands are deforested and converted to oil palm and paper plantations. No longer a carbon sink…