Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of In Re: News Item titled "Are missing palm trees causing more lighting deaths in Bihar appearing in ‘The Times of India’ dated 29.05.2025". The original application was registered suo-motu based on the news item titled "Are missing palm trees causing …
The FAO is the lead United Nations agency on the sustainable use of forests, and the voluntary guidelines refer to so-called forest concessions; laws and policies that allow local communities and private individuals or businesses to use forested land in return for payment or services. The aim is to make …
Precise descriptions of forest productivity, biomass, and structure are essential for understanding ecosystem responses to climatic and anthropogenic changes. However, relations between these components are complex, in particular for tropical forests. We developed an approach to simulate carbon dynamics in the Amazon rainforest including around 410 billion individual trees within …
Understanding how anthropogenic CO2 emissions will influence future precipitation is critical for sustainably managing ecosystems, particularly for drought-sensitive tropical forests. Although tropical precipitation change remains uncertain, nearly all models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 predict a strengthening zonal precipitation asymmetry by 2100, with relative increases over Asian …
The present study documents the wood-boring trace fossil Asthenopodichnium from the Palaeocene sediments of the Barmer Hill Formation (BHF) in the Barmer Basin, Western Rajasthan, India. The Asthenopodichnium trace fossils are loosely to tightly packed, pouch-like burrows or almond-shaped structures identified as Asthenopodichnium lignorum, whereas lozenge and J-shaped structures are …
Deforestation of the Amazon is about to reach a threshold beyond which the region's tropical rainforest may undergo irreversible changes that transform the landscape into degraded savanna with sparse shrubby plant cover and low biodiversity. This warning derives from an editorial published in the journal Science Advances. The article was …
Most of the world’s remaining tropical forests lie in areas that are customarily managed and/or legally owned by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. In the context of climate change and global efforts to protect and enhance the capacity of forests to capture and store greenhouse gas emissions, the question of …
Tropical forests all over the world are at risk from climate change and deforestation for arable land. Scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Thünen-Institute compared losses due to deforestation with those that would result in extreme climate change scenarios in Ecuador. Although global warming is likely …
Recently published research in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that setting a price of $20 per metric ton (about $18/short ton) of carbon dioxide could diminish deforestation by nearly 16 percent and the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by nearly 25 percent. The pair of economists calculated …
Non-native plants invade some tropical forests but there are few long-term studies of these invasions, and the consequences for plant richness and diversity are unclear. Repeated measurements of permanent plots in tropical montane rain forests in the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park in Jamaica over 24 to 40 …
Limited data exists on emissions from agriculture-driven deforestation, and available data are typically uncertain. In this paper, we provide comparable estimates of emissions from both all deforestation and agriculture-driven deforestation, with uncertainties for 91 countries across the tropics between 1990 and 2015. Uncertainties associated with input datasets (activity data and …
The latest “Forest 500” rankings are out from the Global Canopy Programme (GCP), and the main takeaway is that the global companies with the most influence over forests still aren’t doing enough to cut tropical deforestation out of their supply chains. Just five companies improved their policies enough over the …
The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has a pronounced influence on year-to-year variations in climate1. The response of fires to this forcing2 is complex and has not been evaluated systematically across different continents. Here we use satellite data to create a climatology of burned-area and fire-emissions responses, drawing on six El …
The palm oil industry is still a leading cause of deforestation in Indonesia. Three years after the world’s biggest palm oil traders adopted ‘no deforestation’ policies, Greenpeace International examined 11 traders to see how much progress they had made. Not only were they unable to prove their suppliers were not …
A new study finds the world’s tropical forests may no longer be carbon sinks, with a net loss of 425 million tons of carbon from 2003 to 2014. Also, 1.1 billion metric tons of carbon is emitted globally from forested areas and land use annually — 4.4 billion metric tons …
This report evaluates options for how countries that are parties to the Paris Agreement can cooperate to accelerate the implementation of REDD+. The five presented options, summarized below, are not mutually exclusive and can be combined to deliver a blended flow of finance in support of the implementation of REDD+ …
While carbon dioxide emissions from energy use must be the primary target of climate change mitigation efforts, land use and land cover change (LULCC) also represent an important source of climate forcing. In this study we compute time series of global surface temperature change separately for LULCC and non-LULCC sources …
We evaluate the Community Atmosphere Model Version 5 (CAM5) with a higher-order turbulence closure scheme, named Cloud Layers Unified By Binomials (CLUBB), and a Multiscale Modeling Framework, referred as the “super-parameterization” (SP) with two different microphysics configurations to investigate their influences on rainfall simulations over Southern Amazonia. The two different …
The study quantified mammal numbers in forests and landscapes with varying degrees of human impact in Malaysian Borneo. Across 57 mammal species recorded with live and camera traps, the average number of all animals combined was 28 percent higher in logged forests -- where hunting wasn’t an issue -- compared …
The world’s forests play a pivotal role in the mitigation of global climate change. By photosynthesis they remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store carbon in their biomass. While old trees are generally acknowledged for a long carbon residence time, there is no consensus on their contribution to carbon accumulation …
A new report that looks at the collaborative efforts of private sector and government actors to halt deforestation in two key tropical forest nations could have lessons for countries around the world. The report, released by the NGOs Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Forest Trends (FT) last week, consists of …
