By Daniel Ross The wildfires that tore across Australia were as devastating as they were overwhelming, scorching some 15 million hectares of land, killing 34 people and more than 1 billion animals. In terms of its apocalyptic imagery — sweeping infernos torching great swaths with unerring speed — Australia’s wildfires were hauntingly reminiscent of the […]
More than a third of the world’s old growth forests died between 1900 and 2015, a new study has found. In the study, published in Science Friday, nearly two dozen scientists used satellite data combined with more than 160 previous studies to show that deforestation and the climate crisis are killing off older, taller trees […]
By Hans Nicholas Jong The Indonesian government has backed down from a decision to scrap its timber legality verification process for wood export, amid criticism from activists and the prospect of being shut out of the lucrative European market. On May 11, the Ministry of Trade issued a regulation revoking its decision from February to […]
By Lamfu Fabrice Yengong and Sylvie Djacbou Deugoue Biodiversity loss is a global crisis. In May last year, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warned that over 1,000,000 species are threatened with extinction worldwide. On May 22, the International Day of Biodiversity, it is important to recall the silent victims of […]
by Rhett A. Butler Despite the global economic slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon appears to be continuing largely unabated with forest clearing over the past 12 months reaching the highest level since monthly data started being released publicly in 2007, according to official data released Friday by the country’s […]
As it races to stop “murder hornets” from making themselves at home, Washington state has another invasive insect to worry about. Gov. Jay Inslee issued an emergency proclamation Tuesday against the “imminent danger” of a gypsy moth infestation in parts of the state’s Snohomish county, as CNN reported Friday. “[T]his imminent danger of infestation seriously […]
Australia’s unprecedented wildfires that raged for months and destroyed millions of acres were likely made worse by industrial logging of native forests, according to a new commentary from five scientists published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The group of five senior Australian scientists from the Australian National University, Macquarie University and the University of Queensland […]
By Richard Orange The harvesting machine takes just one second to fell the towering spruce, and another to strip the branches and scan its trunk for defects. “This one is very straight,” operator Antonio Petersson Kvennefelt says of the trunk gripped by the arm of his machine, as a screen in front of him flashes […]
The landscape of Minnesota is changing as the climate crisis intensifies. Animals and plants that once were only found in the southern part of the state have moved north, suggesting that as the climate changes, Minnesota, by 2100, will start to resemble an environment similar to the one found in Kansas, a few states to […]