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By Tim Christophersen, originally posted at the UN-REDD Programme The lack of knowledge on peatlands must be addressed urgently. An often neglected ecosystem, and significant contributor to climate change, is peat. When it burns or dries up huge amounts of CO2 are released. The UK Met Office says carbon dioxide levels have seen a surge in recent months as […]

By Fred Pearce, Originally posted on the CGIAR’s Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems’ Thrive blog What do you do with a radioactive landscape? Leaving aside the devastation left in the Marshall Islands, eastern Kazakhstan and elsewhere by atmospheric bomb tests in the 1950s, the prime cases today are the exclusion zones created around Chernobyl in 1986 […]

Originally posted at the UN-REDD Programme Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo announced the other week a landmark moratorium banning all peat-damaging activities. At the Climate COP in Marrakech a new UN Environment-led global initiative, the Global Peatlands Initiative, was launched. Why that sudden focus on protecting peatlands, an ecosystem so far not on the radar of […]

March 22 is the United Nations’ (UN) World Water Day. Anyone who has walked outside on a sunny day knows that forests and trees matter for temperature, humidity and wind speed. Planting trees speaks to concerns about climate change, but the directly important aspects of the tree-climate relationships have so far been overlooked in climate […]

#ListenToTheYoungVoices was the theme of the day, going into the UN 2017 World Wildlife Day. We held a rousing Q&A session on twitter and learned from our social media community about the relationships between wildlife, habitat protection, agriculture, and development. Here are our top 6 takeaways from that discussion. 1. Habitat loss for increased food […]

March 21 is the United Nations’ (UN) International Day of Forests, and while we’re already attending Cool Insights for a Hot World Virtual Symposium and taking the ‘Think you know forests?’ quiz on Forests News to celebrate, we also have a round-up of some of our best content on this year’s theme: Forests and Energy. […]