The UN claims to be almost entirely climate neutral, yet that claim is based on buying millions of carbon offset credits that experts say do little to reduce greenhouse gas…
LABASA, Fiji — Jerry Lotawa knows his forest. He was raised in the tiny settlement of Drawa, a village of 11 brightly painted houses tucked high in the mountains of…
LABASA, Fiji — No one finds their way to the village of Drawa by accident. To get there, you must first board a tiny plane to Labasa, the biggest town…
South America has suffered through an intense and often record-breaking heatwave this year. Chile saw temperatures surpass 35°C (95°F) in August despite it being winter. In Bolivia it was 45°C…
A study has found that the vast majority of the carbon credits from a set of forest conservation projects on three continents aren’t “offsetting” the emissions of the companies and…
Amazonian lakes sequester carbon dioxide at a rate 39% higher than the rainforest itself. This is according to a 2022 study by researchers from Brazil, Australia, the U.S., France, Portugal,…
“There is no Planet B,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared to an audience of officials and Indigenous landowners at a conservation event in Papua New Guinea on July 28. Macron's…
Liberia is set to hand over control of nearly 10% of its total land mass to a United Arab Emirates-based firm in a massive million-hectare carbon credit deal that’s drawing…
POHUWATO, Indonesia — The world's largest collective of seafaring nomads has sailed the waters off Sulawesi Island and farther afield for centuries, forging a cultural legacy that inspired even James…
The Rainforest Foundation UK claims that all the leading carbon credit verification schemes have allowed millions of credits to enter the voluntary carbon market which do not accurately represent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Top tropical ecologists have spent two decades studying the impact of climate change on a single transect in the Peruvian Andes, an area unparalleled in its biodiversity. They find that every species studied there is struggling against warming temperatures.
According to a 2020 study, private philanthropy, at that time, dedicated to Amazon forest conservation amounted to about $100 million a year. That is about one ten thousandth of estimated…
DISANGA, Tanzania — Michele Menegon creeps stealthily through short grass before pouncing. Gently, the scientist holds up his prize: an unnamed species of forest agama. He shows the reptile to…
More than 10% of carbon emissions will likely result from cutting trees, including natural forests, to make wood products over coming decades if action isn’t taken. Plantation forests if made more efficient could provide for a lot of timber needs, scientists find.
More carbon is stored in the soil than in all plants, animals and the atmosphere combined, making it among the most critical conservation frontiers as we face the climate crisis.…
Sustainable liquid biofuels are needed to reduce the carbon footprint of fossil fuel-powered planes, ships, trucks and cars. Grass feedstock has shown promise in biofuel labs, but commercial scaling up may be an insurmountable hurdle.
Plants and fungi struck a deal way back when. More than 400 million years ago, plants began trading sugar made from sunlight (a.k.a. carbon) for some of the soil nutrients…
When Hurricane Dorian blazed its trail of destruction through the Bahamas in 2019, it ravaged the country’s mangroves. Almost overnight, coastal communities were deprived of a natural barrier that protected…
Urban green spaces — parks, gardens and other green areas where people can go to enjoy some fresh air — are more than just pretty places to relax. New research…
Researchers analyzed never-before-used satellite data to calculate how much carbon is stored in protected areas worldwide.
The founding CEO of the world’s most prominent standards organization for carbon credits sold on voluntary markets will step down. David Antonioli will leave the U.S.-based nonprofit standard-setting organization Verra…
It's easy to miss the mosses, the ubiquitous green, silver and brown carpets that drape across nature's surfaces, from forest to fen. It’s also easy to underestimate just how big…
Algae biofuels were initially hailed as a holy grail to sustainably power the transportation sector. Now after more than a decade of boom and bust, the industry says it’s on the verge of globally scalable, climate-friendly jet, ship and truck fuels.
A group of Indigenous-led organizations released a letter May 9 supporting forest protection efforts known collectively as REDD+ projects. They argue that REDD+, short for “reducing emissions from deforestation and…
It was down to the wire for the GEDI mission, but it now seems like the force may have prevailed. In a last-minute decision, NASA has decided to extend the…
At the start of the 2000s, the search for a “miracle” biofuel led to a stubby Latin American tree. But jatropha’s boom went bust when high yields and big eco benefits failed to materialize. Now some say it’s set for a return.
KATHMANDU — In 2012, when wildlife biologist Kanchan Thapa visited Chitwan National Park, a stronghold of the Bengal tiger in Nepal, a colleague asked him a question: “How much carbon…
An independent governance body has released a set of rules aimed at boosting the “integrity” of the global carbon market for the exchange of credits meant to address the climate…
The dry season of 2015 was a devastating one for Indonesia, with around 100,000 fires engulfing thousands of hectares of tropical rainforests and carbon-rich peatlands on the islands of Sumatra,…
A pioneering global study published March 15 in the journal Nature showed that humid tropical forests recovering from degradation and deforestation have the potential to absorb a vast amount of…