Landscapes

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 […]

#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 […]

By Kate Evans, originally posted on Forests News Nepal – Nepal is a world leader in returning forest tenure rights to local people. But restrictive regulations continue to undermine communities’ attempts to establish sustainable businesses from forest products, experts say. Following sweeping reforms in the 1990s aimed at addressing widespread deforestation, over 20,000 community forest […]

By Pablo Pacheco, originally posted on Forests News Brazil – The successful Brazilian experience in slowing down deforestation in the Amazon has captured a lot of attention in the global arena, but serious concerns linger about its possible resurgence. While it is important to strengthen public and private arrangements to reach zero deforestation, or at […]

A virtual Symposium 21-22 March 2017 Planting trees seems like sensible choice when it comes to mitigating climate change, but crucial aspects of the relationships between trees and climate have so far been overlooked in climate research, the new review Trees, forests and water: cool insights for a hot world concludes. The authors suggest that the global conversation […]