globalforests
By Spoorthy Raman With more than 70% of the country blanketed by tropical rainforests, Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a megadiverse country home to more than 5% of the world’s biodiversity, including charismatic tree kangaroos, egg-laying echidnas and flightless cassowaries. However, since 1972, nearly a third of the country’s rainforest has been lost or degraded due to logging, road construction, agricultural expansion and mining. In a significant push to conservation, the country’s parliament passed the Protected Areas Act 2023 on Feb. 20. The new legislation aims to establish a national system o...
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By Justin Catanoso The bankruptcy filing in March by Maryland-based Enviva — the world’s largest maker of wood pellets from forest biomass — is rattling a European Union that relies heavily on biomass as a significant though contested renewable energy source. The bankruptcy is also invigorating U.S. forest advocates determined to keep the Biden Administration from using new renewable energy credits to bail out the flailing company. On March 21, officials from five federal agencies visited North and South Carolina to see an Enviva pellet-making plant firsthand and hear environmental justice com...
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By John Cannon The state government of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo has reaffirmed its plans to proceed with an opaque nature conservation agreement despite concerns raised by the United Nations. Representatives of Sabah’s government and a representative of a Singaporean company called Hoch Standard Pte. Ltd. signed the agreement, which included the rights to carbon and other marketable ecosystem services from more than half of the state of Sabah’s forests, in secret on Oct. 28, 2021. As news of the deal broke in early November 2021, questions arose as to whether the state’s Indigenous peoples, w...
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By Petro Kotzé Toilet paper is so common in some countries it’s only noticed when it’s not there, as exemplified by the panic buying that prompted shortages when the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Thought to be in use in China since the sixth century, inventor Joseph C. Gayetty patented the first U.S. commercial “medicated paper” in the 1850s. Since then, demand has soared in many places, bolstered by rising population, urbanization, shifts in demographics, changing hygiene practices, and lifestyle choices influenced by advertising. Still, only 25-30% of the world uses TP today; the rest rin...
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By Abhishyant Kidangoor For years, detecting illegal roads in remote areas has remained a challenging and labor-intensive task. More often than not, it requires poring over satellite images to identify thin lines cut through the dense green of forests and fragile ecosystems. Enter artificial intelligence. A new study published in the journal Remote Sensing describes how scientists have automated the process of mapping illegal roads that are wreaking havoc on the environment. The model was trained to detect roads from satellite images captured from rural and semiforested areas in Papua New Guin...
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By Nelfi Fernández Reyes Regardless of what satellite images show, inhabitants who have illegally planted crops within the protected area told committee officials that they “take care of Curichi”, because each union member’s rice plots do not exceed three hectares. Behind their crops, a row of trees is visible in the background. So, on approaching the area, the officials were understandably surprised to discover that more crops lay behind the trees. The Global Forest Watch (GFW) satellite monitoring platform confirms this loss of forest cover. Images show that some 5,005 deforestation alerts w...
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By Justin Catanoso Two hundred leading U.S. forest ecologists and climate scientists are calling on the Biden Administration to do much more, and much sooner, to protect old-growth and mature forests on federal lands to combat climate change. Their urging comes after Biden’s announcement in December of the first nationwide amendment in more than a hundred years to change all 128 U.S. Forest Service management plans in order to protect stands of old-growth trees as carbon reservoirs. The signed letter received at the White House Feb. 24, and also received by the secretaries of agriculture and i...
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By Maxwell Radwin A new lawsuit in New York claims that one of the world’s largest beef producers has been misleading the public about its efforts to curb deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against JBS USA Food Company and JBS USA Food Company Holdings for misrepresenting plans to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. In reality, the company lacks concrete sustainability calculations and even plans to expand operations, the lawsuit claims. “JBS Group and JBS USA have used greenwashing and misleading statements to cap...
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By Spoorthy Raman For 12 years, primatologist Nadine Ruppert and her colleagues have had one recurring task on their calendar: tagging along with a group of southern pig-tailed macaques in Segari, Peninsular Malaysia, as these primates hop between native rainforests and the neighboring oil palm plantations. Over the years, the researchers successfully habituated the group: they named every individual, discerned their life histories, and watched their behavior to understand how these monkeys adapt to human-modified landscapes such as agricultural plantations. Southern pig-tailed macaques (Macac...
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By Aimee Gabay A new fund, announced Oct. 30, plans to support the territorial land management visions of four Indigenous organizations in Bolivia’s Madidi Landscape. It has so far attracted $650,000 in initial support from the Bezos Earth Fund, and more funding from several other sources is now being explored. “We want these funds to help us move forward,” said Gonzalo Oliver Terrazas, president of the regional organization of Indigenous People of La Paz (CPILAP) and member of the Tacana community. “It will help us reaffirm our strong commitment as Indigenous peoples to advance and to carry o...
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