This Month in Climate Science summarizes significant new research and gives a clearer picture of the threats posed by climate change. Studies published in February 2019 reveal the first mammal extinction caused by climate change, shifting bird migrations, disintegrating clouds and more.
biodiversity
Ramping Up Governance of the Global Environmental Commons: What Do Theory and History Tell Us?
This paper discusses how governance of the global environmental commons requires collective action to generate public goods. Public goods theorists vary in their views about what it takes and how likely it is to achieve such collective action to produce these goods. The history of efforts to...
Resource Watch
Resource Watch is an open data visualization platform with over 200 available data sets on topics ranging from climate change to human migration, deforestation to air quality, agriculture to energy and much more. Users can dive into curated topic pages of data, explore near real-time visualizations and create their own unique data visualizations by overlaying individual data sets.
Charcoal production is destroying mountain gorillas' habitat in Virunga National Park. Pastureland is pushing into protected forests in Brazil. Satellites are watching these and other threatened forests.
DNA evidence often implicates violent criminals. Now it can do the same for poachers harvesting wood from protected forests.
The ocean contributes $1.5 trillion to the global economy every year. But there's another reason to protect marine ecosystems—they’re crucial for curbing climate change.
Intact forest landscapes (IFLs), or vast stretches of unbroken forest wilderness, are some of the most important ecosystems in the world. The fact that the world lost an area of IFLs twice the size of California over the past decade spells trouble for nature, the climate and human well-being.
Indonesia will continue to ban new licenses to clear key forest areas. The policy brings benefits for the country's forests, climate and the economy.
Forest loss threatens the survival of endangered and endemic species like Madame Berthe's mouse lemur, the sky blue poison dart frog and the whooping crane.
A new WRI paper finds bioenergy can play a modest role using wastes and other niche fuelstocks, but recommends against dedicating land to produce bioenergy.
The lesson: do not grow food or grass crops for ethanol or diesel or cut down trees for electricity.