Frances Seymour talks about her contributions to setting up a $1 million prize to stir innovation in technology for locating peat, a project WRI Indonesia is overseeing. Indonesia's peatlands are one of the world's premier stocks of carbon, but mapping them remains a stubborn hurdle to their protection.
The climate mitigation potential of forests is immense. To help prepare for next year's Global Stocktake of NDCs, new publications by the Climate and Land Use Alliance clarify the way forests are counted under UNFCCC rules.
Frances Seymour, author of Why Forests, Why Now, talks about the fuel faith can give us to confront the injustice of climate change.
Returning to WRI as a Distinguished Senior Fellow on forest and governance issues, Frances Seymour reflects on the impact of technology and international efforts to turn the tide on deforestation.
When Jakarta isn't submerged by floods, its residents experience incredible water stress. These twin problems—too much water and too little—are linked by a common solution: restoring the watershed's forests.
Computers are invaluable aides to tracking deforestation. But some issues require local expertise to crack—in this case, allowing WRI to map drylands forests that add up to an area equivalent to the Amazon rainforest.
This paper discusses findings from a spatial land use change modeling study on future forest loss in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s forests. Key findings include a historical analysis of forest loss, identification of the influence of drivers on forest loss, the amount and location of future forest loss and associated carbon emissions, and implications for future land-use and climate policy decisions.
One of the poorest countries in Africa, Malawi once faced water shortages and power outages as its forests disappeared. Now, it has launched bold new strategies to restore trees to the landscape.
To help clarify heated debate over what drives deforestation in Indonesia, new analysis of Global Forest Watch data shows that most forest loss -- 55 percent -- occurs in legal concession areas, where some tree removal is allowed, but 45 percent happens outside these areas.
In Indonesia, a land grab by a palm oil company violates local villagers’ land rights. The path to justice is far from easy―but a new mapping initiative could help remove obstacles.
The 2015 data on tree cover loss has been added to Global Forest Watch. Here's what we learned.
Improving transparency of concessions data—the who, what, when and where of commercial activities that drive over 60% of global deforestation—is critical to preventing forest loss.
The struggle for land rights has left many Indonesians on the outside looking in.
Lawrence MacDonald sits down with Gita Syahrani and Adi Pradana to learn about their work on the OneMap.
Companies from Kenya to the United States are making money by restoring degraded forests and landscapes.
The Paris Agreement is the best instrument for addressing threats to development posed by climate change, such as forest fires, extreme weather and more. The U.S. withdrawal from the agreement is reckless.
Six years after Indonesia passed a forest moratorium aimed at slowing unsustainable agricultural expansion into primary forests and peatlands, tree cover loss remains high, according to the latest satellite data from the University of Maryland and Google, available now on Global Forest Watch.
The annual economic benefits of restoring degraded and deforested land globally are an estimated $84 billion.
Thanks to high-resolution satellite images, researchers discovered the equivalent of another Amazon rainforest in the world's deserts and drylands.