forests

By Hans Nicholas Jong An Indonesian forestry company with possible links to pulpwood and palm oil powerhouse Royal Golden Eagle has cleared forests the size of 500,000 basketball courts since 2016, some of them home to critically endangered orangutans, according to a new report. Nusantara Fiber controls 242,000 hectares (598,000 acres) of industrial tree plantations […]

By Natalie Muller Trees soak up carbon from the atmosphere, provide a home to wildlife and even improve our mental well-being. But did you know they can also “talk” to each other, and send out distress signals when under attack? 1. ​60,000 Different Species There are around 3 trillion trees on Earth, according to a […]

By Jared Kaufman Nearly one-third of the land on Earth is forested, but because of agriculture and infrastructure development, nearly 27 soccer fields’ worth of forest are destroyed every minute. Globally, forests are home to a significant majority of the world’s land biodiversity and absorb billions of tons of carbon dioxide every year. Over 1.5 […]

Over the past 40 years, about 50 percent of lowland rainforests in Southeast Asia have been converted for palm oil and other plantations, and remaining forests in the region are heavily logged, according to new research. Yet while the impacts of fragmentation on old-growth forests are well understood, how fragmentation impacts regenerating logged forests isn’t. […]

By Douglas Broom Redwoods are the world’s tallest trees. Now scientists have discovered they are even bigger than we thought. Using laser technology they map the 80-meter giants. Trees are a key plank in the fight against climate change. They are among the largest trees in the world, descendants of forests where dinosaurs roamed. Now […]

By Dana M Bergstrom, Euan Ritchie, Lesley Hughes and Michael Depledge In 1992, 1,700 scientists warned that human beings and the natural world were “on a collision course.” Seventeen years later, scientists described planetary boundaries within which humans and other life could have a “safe space to operate.” These are environmental thresholds, such as the […]

By Beverly Law and William Moomaw Protecting forests is an essential strategy in the fight against climate change that has not received the attention it deserves. Trees capture and store massive amounts of carbon. And unlike some strategies for cooling the climate, they don’t require costly and complicated technology. Yet although tree-planting initiatives are popular, […]

By Nancy Harris and David Gibbs Forests are an important asset in the fight against climate change. New research has found that they sequester around twice as much carbon dioxide as they emit, classifying them as a carbon sink. Forests emitted on average 8.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide and absorbed 16 billion between […]