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 […]
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 — […]
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 […]
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 […]
A federal judge in Alaska ruled late Wednesday against a Trump administration plan to open 1.8 million acres of America’s largest national forest to logging. The Forest Service plan targeted part of the Tongass National Forest on Prince of Wales Island. It would have been the largest sale of national forest timber in 30 years, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]