global forests

If 2021 was the year when global supply chains began to creak and groan under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, palm oil proved to be no exception. Partially due to lockdown-induced labor shortages in Malaysia, the world’s second-largest exporter of palm oil, an imbalance between demand for the commodity and its availability on the […]

For the Congo Basin, 2021 proved to be an up-and-down year. Funding commitments totaling in the billions of dollars were announced that would help forested countries preserve some of the highest-quality tropical rainforest left on the planet. And research into the world’s largest tropical peatland, which is found in the Congo Basin, continues to expand […]

The tooth-billed bowerbird gave itself away with a not-quite-right call. Suspicious, I’d panned my binoculars toward the sound and there he was, the mimic, high in the canopy of a rainforest tree. It was a satisfying sight. Like many of Australia’s wet tropics-endemic species, tooth-billed bowerbird populations have declined rapidly in recent years, their climate […]

Local stories in Michoacán tell how, when the Spanish invaded what would later be known as Mexico in the 1500s, they found Indigenous communities tapping pine trees and using the resin in sizzling-bright torches and lamps that lit the Aztec Empire capital of Tenochtitlan, today’s Mexico City. The Spanish appropriated the resin to use as […]

Northern Guatemala is covered in more than 3,000 square miles of rainforest. Some parts of it have been burned down by cattle ranchers and drug traffickers. Other parts remain pristine, with unexcavated Mayan pyramids hidden deep under the foliage. For the park rangers who work there, patrolling such a huge area can be dangerous and […]

There once was a stretch of Trans-Canada highway so perilous it was known as “The Meat Maker.” The then-infamous section of road that transects Banff National Park, a breathtaking expanse of mountainous terrain and glacial lakes in the Canadian Rockies, averaged about 100 elk-vehicle collisions each year. In the early 1980s, a simple highway expansion […]

This is the wrap-up article for our four-part series “The Congo Basin peatlands.” Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. In the first half of December, Mongabay published a four-part series on the peatlands of the Congo Basin. Only in 2017 did a team of Congolese and British scientists discover that a […]

France is taking new steps to ensure that products imported from Brazil aren’t contributing to deforestation in vulnerable forests and savannahs. The French government published a new risk analysis platform earlier this month that shows how much activity by soy traders is causing tree cover loss. The tool is intended to implement more rigorous oversight […]

This is the fourth article in our four-part series “The Congo Basin peatlands.” Read Part One, Part Two and Part Three. The muddy cores that Ian Lawson and his colleagues pull from the swampy peatlands of the Congo Basin might not look like much at first glance. Layers of clay and silt are interspersed here […]

Thousands of companies around the world have made pledges to reduce carbon emissions in the coming decades in response to the climate crisis, including initiatives to reduce reliance on carbon-heavy industries, reducing deforestation-related emissions, recycling and even linking executive pay to carbon emissions reductions. Some firms — such as Adidas and Volkswagen — have pledged […]