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How trees may be a first defense in the battle against disaster By Douglas Sheil, originally posted on Forests News The 12-year absence of major hurricane landfalls in the continental USA ended earlier this year: Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma… perhaps the list and the destruction will continue. But what does this have to do with forests? As […]

Review of almost 17,000 documents finds holes in the literature on both successes and failures By Bill Hinchberger, originally posted on Forests News In recent decades, growing numbers of policymakers have begun to embrace more holistic strategies to address the intertwined challenges of environmental sustainability and human development. Known as ‘landscape approaches’, these strategies have […]

In the Autumn of 2015, a thick yellow toxic haze — the likes of which had never been seen before — fell over Kalimantan. Peatland fires from slash-and-burn agriculture and their accompanying toxic smoke are by no means unprecedented in the region, but the exceedingly hot and dry El Niño event that year exacerbated the already-precarious […]

Ethiopia is suffering from severe drought. But there is water in Gergera. Twenty years of restoring its hills and valley has brought life back to this area in the state of Tigray. The work has been painstaking, complex and multidimensional, and continues to this day. But its hard-won results offer up two key lessons:  first, landscape […]

By Joe Kiesecker, lead scientist for land conservation, The Nature Conservancy Following the Paris Agreement, 140 nations have volunteered plans to reduce their carbon emissions—most of which include a greater reliance on renewable energy sources. Subsequently, global investment in and power generation from renewables set new records in 2016 while the cost of generation from […]

Solution Search, a global contest designed to identify, reward and spotlight innovative approaches to conservation, has released the list of its 10 finalists for the 2017 “Farming for Biodiversity” contest. This year’s theme showcases innovative ideas that make farming more sustainable and promote behaviors that increase biodiversity across the agricultural sector. A panel of experts […]