Europe’s forests are growing, but tropical areas are losing tree cover at a massive scale due to EU demand for imported products. Here’s how to redress the imbalance.
A stand of red mangroves in the calm, calcium-rich, fresh waters of the San Pedro Mártir River, Tabasco, Mexico.
Ben Meissner
Mangroves grow in saltwater along tropical coastlines, but scientists have found them along a river in Mexico’s Yucatan, more than 100 miles from the sea. Climate change explains their shift.
We are logging more than can be sustained by tropical forests.
Plinio Sist
Observations collected since the 1980s in the Amazon, Central Africa and Southeast Asia show we are not giving tropical forests enough time to recover after logging.
Mountain forests are significant carbon stores.
Heibe/Pixabay
Palm oil is responsible for widespread deforestation and labor abuses, but it’s also cheap and incredibly useful. That’s why many advocates call for reforming the industry, not replacing it.
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.
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.
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?
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