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Previous studies have shown that Africa’s tropical forests store more carbon per hectare than Amazonian forests. But how they do so is still a puzzle. It turns out that elephants play an outsized role in the upkeep of healthy forests. New research shows that without these giant gardeners, forests in West and Central Africa would

Last week, a timber company won a controversial lawsuit against Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority when a court ordered the agency to allow a shipment of illegal logs to be exported overseas. Liberian environmental groups say the ruling is emblematic of a breakdown of the laws regulating the country’s logging sector under the current president, George

Night is falling on Tokyo. The moon, shining in a berry-blue sky, has come to govern the darkness. But it has not come alone: a new study reveals that artificial light in coastal megacities is outshining the moon and exposing marine ecosystems to threats still poorly understood. A new model looking at how natural and

KATHMANDU — Climate change is likely to expand the habitat of leopards in the Nepal’s high mountain regions, potentially increasing conflict with humans and competition with snow leopards, a new study suggests. As the planet heats up, the mean winter temperature, the amount of total rainfall and the timing of the rains are likely to

Large trees in older forests that hold significant amounts of carbon located within U.S. national forests are vulnerable to logging, according to a new study published Jan. 6 in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Forest protection efforts often single out old-growth forests because of the carbon they keep out of the atmosphere,

Floods, heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires – a changing climate is bringing with it ever more frequent and destructive so-called “natural” disasters, often impacting the most vulnerable areas and communities of the world. Amidst these rising impacts, the role of nature is too often framed as “creating” such events. Yet, as both science and traditional knowledge

PUERTO NATALES/PUNTA ARENAS, Chile — Pristine waters, partially covered in sea ice, reflect the early morning light while a flock of flamingos basks in the warmth of the sun near the coast. A few meters away, on the mainland, stands a huge white shed with a red roof: a factory for processing salmon, completed just

COLOMBO — Each day, as the sun set over the horizon, Thettuwage Tennakoon and his wife would carefully climb up into their treehouse in the middle of their rice field. This elevated position was ideal for keeping watch over the crop — and for staying safe from the elephants they were guarding the crop against.

On Dec. 5, a flight over the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s northern Amazon showed the Greenpeace and Brazilian NGO Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA) members on board an illegal road, already 150 kilometers (93 miles) long, and four hydraulic excavators nearby. “The road is the road to chaos. It will turn the Yanomami Indigenous land into

“They bought new land and they are cutting wood where our ancestors were,” says a source in Meta, Colombia. “Us Mbya live from the forest, but here there’s barely anything left,” says an Indigenous local from Paraguay. “They cut thousands of hectares,” says a member of Kabi Habin, a beekeeping cooperative in Mexico. These testimonials

The indiscriminate use of gillnets by fishers in Bangladesh has become a major threat to the two freshwater dolphin species found there: the Ganga River dolphin (Platanista gangetica) and the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris). Both species, listed as threatened by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, are found in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest

The decline of big carnivore populations like lions, bears and lynx is most closely associated with rapid economic growth, according to a study published this week in Nature Communications. The study looked at 50 species of large carnivores worldwide over the past 50 years and found that social and economic factors, like people’s quality of life,

The U.S. government has denied two petitions to immediately protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales during the species’ calving season, raising concerns that this population of whales will continue to decline without intervention. There are currently about 340 of these whales left, making them one of the most threatened cetaceans in the world. The

Imagine showers of little green sand grains drifting through the ocean: collecting on coral reefs, rolling off the backs of whales, sprinkling schools of tuna — and helping to save all those creatures, and humanity, too. At least that’s the idea. These green showers are crushed olivine, an abundant volcanic mineral, delivered by a fleet

The tree kangaroos inhabiting a forested mountain range in Papua New Guinea have made an unlikely comeback in the past 40 years, but old dangers now jeopardize that rebound. Three species of the Dendrolagus genus — arboreal marsupials about twice the size of a house cat — haunt the leafy tropical canopy of the Torricelli Mountains,

At least 570 Indigenous Yanomami infants have died over the past four years from treatable diseases such as diarrhea and malaria, an average of three every week, highlighting the ongoing plight of one of Brazil’s most persecuted peoples. The figures were published by environmental news outlet Sumaúma, showing a 29% increase in deaths of children

During a dietary study on fishing cats living near Colombo, Sri Lanka, researchers made an unexpected finding: Some scat samples collected contained plastics. Varying in size from tiny microplastics to larger debris in the form of macroplastics, these findings are cause for concern for the vulnerable species, say conservationists. The results were “a bit of

Tropical forests play a key role in our efforts to stabilize the global climate. As a readymade means of ameliorating our continued greenhouse gas emissions, tree-clad tropical landscapes provide us with some much-needed hope. But as we relentlessly degrade and disturb them, how are we affecting their crucial capacity to lock away carbon dioxide from

Last July, as the Ukraine war raged, the EU barred all Russian woody biomass imports; even as South Korea took in Russia’s supply. Illicit woody biomass may also still be flowing to the EU from Turkey, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Imagine having to choose between having water or a mining project in your backyard. Or between having a job or polluting your community. What would you choose? This dichotomy is the choice that the people of La Higuera in northern Chile were proposed by Dominga’s project developers. However, this false framing – which is faced