Post types

Originally published by the Food and Agriculture Organization. What do cucumbers, mustard, almonds and alfalfa have in common? On the surface very little. But there is one thing they share: they all owe their existence to the service of bees. For centuries, this tiny striped helper has labored the world’s fields without winning much recognition […]

By Ann Jeannette Glauber. Originally published at The World Bank. This past autumn, I saw a shocking headline: Forest fires in Indonesia were creating as many greenhouse gas emissions as the entire United States economy. Between June and October 2015, an estimated 2.6 million hectares—or 4.5 times the size of Bali— burned to clear land […]

By Rachael Knight with Namati. Originally published at The World Bank’s “People, Spaces, Deliberation” blog. Rural communities across Africa face a variety of threats to their customary and indigenous land and natural resource claims. The drivers of these threats are diverse: increasing foreign investment, national elite speculation, rising population densities, climate change, and national infrastructure mega-projects, […]

Nature has solutions that can sustainably balance environmental health and human priorities. In other words, sometimes nature can outperform our best technological innovations. Watch The Nature Conservancy discuss the “forgotten” climate solutions.

Originally published at PROFOR. An estimated 1.3 billion people—nearly 20 percent of humanity—rely on forests and forest products for their livelihoods, with the majority living on less than $1.25 a day. In some areas, forest activities even rival agriculture in terms of benefits and earnings, and they may provide an especially important source of income for […]

By Rachael Petersen, Liz Goldman, Mikaela Weisse and Dmitry Aksenov. Originally published at Global Forest Watch. Which of the world’s forests are natural, and which have been planted by humans? It seems like a simple question, but researchers have been struggling to answer it for years. Satellites can’t easily distinguish between primary and secondary forests, which […]