This story was written by Joseph Lee for Grist. You can subscribe to Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Photo by Martin San Diego for The Washington Post via Getty Images The world’s healthiest, most biodiverse, and most resilient forests are located on protected Indigenous lands. That’s according to a new study that suggests...
Already wracked by extensive deforestation and forest degradation, the future looks grim for Borneo’s tropical rainforests, reports a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences. Combining historical records with field observations and global climate models Tomo’omi Kumagai and Amilcare Porporato of Duke University find that an sharp increase in drought...
A spate of studies highlighted both how little we know about tropical rainforests and the threats to forest biodiversity. In May a report from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said that wildlife populations in the tropics have declined 61 percent over the past...
Research published in 2012 provided a better understanding of tropical deforestation’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Two studies — one published in Science and the other published in Nature Climate Change, concluded that while deforestation now accounts for a lower share of global emissions relative to the late 1990s, it still represents roughly 10...
The Eyes on the Forest report [PDF] finds that APRIL and its suppliers cleared at least 140,000 hectares (346,000 acres) of natural forest between 2008 and 2011 in Riau, accounting for 27 percent of all forest loss in the province during the period. Some of the area cleared by APRIL and its...
Penan leaders issue stern warning to loggers. “We will do everything necessary to protect our forests”: Penan leaders from Sarawak’s Middle Baram region (Photo : www.bmf.ch) It could well have been a plot from Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness. Except that, instead of the African Congo, the clashes between...
