In the first major deal to come out of the COP26 climate talks, more than 100 countries have pledged to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. The countries agreeing to the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use include nations with important forest cover like Brazil, Russia, Canada, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of […]
Aptly called, “Earth’s lungs,” the planet’s two largest swaths of rainforest, in Amazonia and Africa, suck up 15 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions produced by humans. These ecosystems are essential for carbon sequestration and therefore curbing climate change, and while the Amazon rainforest has been the subject of mountains of research, scientists are just […]
By Giuliana Viglione Current estimates of land-use change may be capturing only one-quarter of its true extent across the world, new research shows. The paper, published in Nature Communications, revises previous estimates of how much humans change Earth’s land surface – such as via the destruction of tropical rainforests. It finds that, when accounting for […]
Much of the conversation surrounding the ecological benefits of tropical rainforests focuses on South America’s Amazon. However, the forests of Central Africa are just as important. While the Amazon is the largest contiguous rainforest in the world, Central Africa’s rainforests are the world’s second largest, Nature reported. They store more carbon per hectare than the […]
A new study published Wednesday found that the destruction of primary forest increased by 12% in 2020, impacting ecosystems that store vast amounts of carbon and shelter abundant biodiversity. Brazil saw the worst losses, three times higher than the next highest country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the report from Global Forest Watch […]
Spreading coffee pulp, a waste product from coffee production, over degraded lands helps them recover quickly, a recent study found. By dumping 30 truck-loads of coffee pulp on a plot of degraded land in Costa Rica, researchers watched a small forest grow at a remarkable speed in just two years, the British Ecological Society reported. […]
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 […]
By Jessica Corbett New data from a Norwegian nonprofit is generating fresh concerns about humanity’s destruction of the natural world, revealing Monday that people have ravaged about two-thirds of original tropical rainforest cover globally. The Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN) analysis found that human activities including logging and land-use changes—often for farming—have destroyed 34% of old-growth […]
In October 2020, two men living in Indonesia’s South Kalimantan province on Borneo managed to catch a bird that they had never seen before. They photographed and released it, then sent the pictures to birdwatching organizations in the area for identification. Ornithologist Panji Gusti Akbar was equally surprised when he saw Fauzan and Suranto’s picture […]