To Reduce Mortality From High Heat in Cities, a New Study Recommends Trees

Nearly 40 percent of the thousands of deaths that can be attributed to high heat levels in cities could have been avoided through increased tree coverage, a recent study from Barcelona’s Institute of Global Health found.  Past studies have linked urban heat with increased mortality rate and hospital admissions for adults and children. This link […]

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Study Shows Protected Forests Are Cooler

Measured at a global scale, protected forests with legal limits on human activity are significantly cooler than neighboring forests that lack protections, scientists reported in a new Science Advances study today.  The researchers compared land surface temperatures and warming rates in protected areas to those in unprotected zones across five major biomes—boreal, temperate and tropical […]

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Countries Want to Plant Trees to Offset Their Carbon Emissions, but There Isn’t Enough Land on Earth to Grow Them

Countries’ climate pledges rely on “unrealistic” and “extensive” amounts of land for carbon removal projects like tree planting schemes, a new report from the University of Melbourne said.  A landmass larger than the entire United States, about 1.2 billion hectares, would be needed for countries to deliver on those plans, which largely ignore who lives […]

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Luxury wood market driving extinction of rare ipê trees, report warns

Whether walking along a beach boardwalk, installing new hardwood floors or sitting out on a friend’s deck, there’s a good chance you’ve already come across the wood of the rare ipê trees. These are among the most popular species supplying a global luxury wood market, an increasing driver of deforestation in the Amazon Basin. Demand […]

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Mexican firm profits from reforestation, empowers Indigenous people

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 […]

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New restoration “Playbook” calls for political, economic, and social change

Toco toucan (Ramphastos toco). Photo credit: Rhett A. ButlerInternational forest and climate experts have released a “playbook” for ecosystem restoration with a set of 10 principles that they say, if followed, could be a game-changer. The Political Ecology Playbook, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, recognizes that issues such as climate change and forest loss are not just biophysical and environmental problems, […]

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