logging

Mountain-Dwelling Species Losing Habitats Rapidly, Study Finds

Mountain-Dwelling Species Losing Habitats Rapidly, Study Finds

Mountain forests are important habitats for many species, but a new study has found that habitat loss in these areas has been rapidly accelerating since 2000. In that time, more than 78.1 million hectares (approximately 193 million acres) of mountain forests have been lost, equaling an area greater than the size of Texas. A team […]

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    To Stop Amazon Deforestation, Brazilian Groups Take Bolsonaro to Court

    To Stop Amazon Deforestation, Brazilian Groups Take Bolsonaro to Court

    By Ajit Niranjan Civil society groups and public prosecutors in Brazil are taking President Jair Bolsonaro’s government to court for failing to protect the Amazon rainforest, adding pressure to an administration already under fire for mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic. Lawsuits filed last week challenge the government on two fronts: reducing inspections of exported timber — […]

    Indonesia Revokes Ending Legality License for Wood Exports

    Indonesia Revokes Ending Legality License for Wood Exports

    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 […]

    Worried About Biodiversity? End Industrial Activity in the Rainforest

    Worried About Biodiversity? End Industrial Activity in the Rainforest

    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 […]

    Logging Native Forests Worsened Australia’s Wildfires, Scientists Say

    Logging Native Forests Worsened Australia’s Wildfires, Scientists Say

    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 […]

    Indigenous People May Be the Amazon’s Last Hope

    Indigenous People May Be the Amazon’s Last Hope

    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 Pope Makes Plea to Save the Amazon — Will the World Listen?

    The Pope Makes Plea to Save the Amazon — Will the World Listen?

    by Justin Catanoso Pope Francis, in an effort to reignite his influence as a global environmental leader, released an impassioned document Feb. 12 entitled Dear Amazon — a response to the historic Vatican meeting last autumn regarding the fate of the Amazon biome and its indigenous people. In a 94-page “exhortation,” Francis argued for the […]