As the price of gold and other minerals soars, expanded mining in Amazonian countries has damaging impacts on the forest and its people, including the 1.5 million Indigenous People who depend on the Amazon for their livelihoods and well-being.
When fires across Brazil captured the world's attention in August, a ban on setting fires was put in place. Fire alerts in the Amazon dropped 34% between August and September. Now the ban is ending.
Frances Seymour, a WRI Distinguished Senior Fellow, and Nancy Harris, Research Manager at Global Forest Watch, offer their expert perspective on tropical deforestation in the journal Science as the world's attention is riveted on fires in the Amazon and around the globe.
For the cash-strapped government of Rio de Janeiro, restoring forests around the city is a smart investment. New research shows that forests can provide Rio with better water quality at lower cost.
More than a quarter of global tree cover loss between 2001 and 2015 was associated with commodity-driven deforestation, not likely to be forested again, finds a new study published in Science.
WRI will host a public briefing featuring senior Chinese and U.S. participants on China-US climate and energy cooperation among national and non-federal actors on Tuesday, July 17 in San Francisco.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the world’s secret weapon to preserve forests and mitigate climate change, and LandMark — the first global platform to provide maps of collectively held indigenous and community lands — helps measure their impact.
As Brazilian President Michel Temer fought for his political life over the past three months, he sought support from powerful interests to keep from being impeached. His efforts paid off, but this victory for the president brought a threat to his nation’s indigenous peoples and to Brazil’s climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.
Indigenous Peoples and other communities hold and manage 50 to 60 percent of the world's land, yet governments recognize only 10 percent as legally belonging to these groups. That's bad economic policy, shows a new WRI report.
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has a big role to play. It’s expected to become the world’s main mechanism for securing and distributing finance to help developing nations tackle climate change.
The multi-billion dollar question is: Can it live up to this expectation?
Groups call for redoubled effort to protect last great forest wilderness sites
Editor’s Note: To view the Intact Forest Landscape mapping methods and findings please visit: www.intactforests.org.
Learn how securing water and shale gas could strengthen energy security while cutting emissions.
To help city leaders shift to a planning paradigm that creates more compact neighborhoods and sustainable cities, EMBARQ has released a Transit-oriented Development Guide for Urban Communities.
The guide combines best practices from existing communities and design guidelines for creating healthy, sustainable, people-oriented cities.
This piece explores how advances in technology can curb illegal logging, written in honor of the first International Day of Forests. It originally appeared on The Guardian's Sustainable Business Blog.
As the old adage suggests, it is important to see the forests for more than just the trees. While an estimated 500 million people depend directly on forests for their livelihoods, the entire world depends on them for food, water, clean air, and vital medicines. Forests also absorb carbon dioxide, making them critical to curbing climate change.
This analysis compiles a comprehensive set of geospatial indicators of human activities that lead to forest degradation and conversion. Illustrated by numerous maps, the results provide valuable insights for land-use planning and zoning.