deforestation

Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador ordered state-owned oil company, Pemex, to build an $8 billion oil refinery. So, the company has followed orders and razed protected mangrove trees to clear way for the controversial project, according to Quartz. Satellite images posted on Quartz show the cleared land to accommodate the construction. Mangrove forests, which […]

A month and a half ago, BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, made waves for choosing to divest from some coal investments, setting up funds that avoided fossil fuels, and saying it would only support corporate board members who factored the climate crisis into its decisions. While the initial announcement was met with some criticism […]

Brazil’s divisive President Jair Bolsonaro has taken another step in his bold plans to develop the Amazon rainforest. A bill he is sponsoring, now before Congress, would allow transportation infrastructure to be built on indigenous territory. Such lands cover 386,000 square miles of the Brazilian Amazon — one-fifth of the jungle. Here, Native people are […]

The UK government is looking to take charge of a major crackdown on the illegal and largely unregulated plundering of forests in developing nations. The UK plans to form a coalition of developing countries to combat the practice as part of its duties as host of the UN’s COP26 climate summit in November, as The […]

An extensive study that looked at a decade of carbon emissions found that nearly 20 percent of one of the world’s largest carbon sinks is actually releasing carbon instead of capturing it, according tso the BBC. The decade-long study led by professor Luciana Gatti, a researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), measured […]

By Frederick Cohan, Kathleen Sagarin and Kelly Mei As the novel coronavirus death toll mounts, it is natural to worry. How far will this virus travel through humanity, and could another such virus arise seemingly from nowhere? As microbial ecologists who study the origins of new microbial species, we would like to give some perspective. […]

By Gurvinder Singh Jamini Mohan Mahanty is out for a morning walk every day. At 91, he is hale and hearty. A resident of Jharbagda village in Purulia district, West Bengal, Mahanty thanks the “green mountain” in his village for having added some extra years to his life. “I could have died long ago but […]

There’s a theory going around that Native Americans actively managed the land the lived on, using controlled burns to clear forests. It turns out that theory is wrong. New research shows that Native Americans barely altered the landscape at all. It was the Europeans who did that, as ZME Science reported. The new research, published […]