Swift action must be taken to address human-caused land-system change and land degradation, which is now having wide ranging impacts on planetary health and human health, according to a first…
Imagine you purchased a swanky new chair. The paperwork claims the piece of furniture was made from legally sourced wood. But how can you be sure? After all, global supply…
There have been 29 United Nations Climate Change Conferences (UNFCCC COPs) so far. The first COP meeting was held in Germany in 1995, and the 29th meeting of the Conference…
Australia’s vibrant biodiversity is hanging by a thread, but citizen scientists have stepped up with passion and purpose. More than 100,000 volunteers are mapping species and gathering essential data, playing…
At the end of a long day, you might sit down with friends or family to eat a bowl of hot noodle soup. A savory scent fills the air as…
“Plastics pollution exacerbates the impacts of all [nine] planetary boundaries,” warns a report published this month in the journal One Earth in the run-up to what could be the final…
Cleared or degraded tropical forests around the world covering a combined area larger than Saudi Arabia could regrow on its own, according to new research published Oct. 30 in the…
CALI, Colombia — Over the past three decades at annual United Nations climate summits like COP29, which is just concluding in Azerbaijan, delegates have hyperfocused on the need for national…
As we've watched the biodiversity COP in Colombia and then the climate COP negotiations in recent weeks, the urgency of addressing the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss…
Agriculture and nature are closely intertwined, with millions of farmers around the world relying on nature-based activities as their source of livelihoods. Yet the adverse impacts of agriculture on the…
Bottlenose dolphins leapt and torpedoed through the shallow turquoise waters off Florida’s Sarasota Bay. Then, a research team moved in, quickly corralling the small pod in a large net. With…
The task at hand was nothing short of grueling. In the depths of the Amazon Rainforest earlier this year, it was a mad scramble as six teams deployed cutting-edge technology…
It’s been clear for some time: We’re in the midst of a rapidly escalating global plastics crisis. More than 11 billion metric tons of virgin plastics were produced worldwide from…
In the two years since biodiversity credits garnered a prominent mention in the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) aimed at halting the loss of wildlife, a flurry of projects and…
Among marine ecosystems, the capacity of mangroves, seagrass meadows and kelp forests to store carbon is well documented, but less is known about the sediments of the ocean floor. Two…
For many years, the North Atlantic Ocean warmed more slowly than other parts of the world. In 2023, that changed — dramatically. Over the last year and a half, North…
As 198 nations convene in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the 29th United Nations climate summit, one word will almost certainly dominate COP29 technical negotiations and private discussions: finance. After two years…
As the U.N. biodiversity conference recently concluded with both historic achievements and disappointments for Indigenous leaders, delegates are now quickly shifting their attention to the other big conference: today’s U.N.…
With the start of the 29th U.N. climate summit, COP29, less than a week away, former U.S. environmental leaders said they have no delusions as to what the election of…
The announcement came early on the morning of Oct. 31. Delegates to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity summit (COP16) in Cali, Colombia, had finally agreed on a protocol…
What a week. The global biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia (COP16) had just concluded. And then Trump got re-elected as President of the United States. Clearly the latter puts an…
Zoe Jewell was working in Zimbabwe in the 1990s when a harsh reality dawned on her. The female black rhinos (Diceros bicornis) she was helping monitor were suffering from a…
Despite gridlocked talks over finance and little advancement on key elements on the agenda, this year’s U.N. biodiversity conference, or COP16, was considered a success for some Indigenous peoples and…
A variety of geoengineering technologies are being closely studied to rapidly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But researchers are also now considering removing another powerful greenhouse gas: atmospheric methane,…
In late September 2014 a besuited and bearded Leonardo DiCaprio stood at the grey marble dais in the UN General Assembly in New York and declared somberly that world leaders…
JAKARTA — The world’s top certification body for ethical palm oil is set to vote on a major new standard aimed at balancing conservation goals with the practicalities of the…
The chances for a stronger international agreement on limits to plastic production may have increased dramatically as the world nears a U.N. deadline for achieving a plastics treaty. The game…
CALI, Colombia — The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP16, ended on Nov. 2. Several days before delegations from 177 nations completed their work, a top finance official…
CALI, Colombia — The hunger for new, reliable forms of finance to save biodiverse forests in developing tropical countries was palpable here at a jam-packed event during the COP16 United…
To help address the biodiversity crisis, momentum has been gaining around establishing and tracking protected areas (PAs) and Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs) to achieve 30-by-30, the conserving of…
In December 2022, nearly 200 countries adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, committing to protect 30% of Earth's lands and waters by 2030. Now, two years into this initiative, a…
It sounds like a simple solution: Spread some crushed silicate rock atop the world’s vast agricultural lands to absorb atmospheric carbon and thereby tackle climate change at a large scale.…