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.
Rodrigue Katembo remporté le Goldman Environmental Award pour sa défense du Parc National des Virunga.
Ranger Rodrigue Katembo risked his life to protect wildlife from oil developers in Virunga National Park—even wearing a hidden camera and pretending to accept bribes. He recently shared his incredible story with WRI.
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This Infrastructure Week, it's time to look beyond building new pipes and pumps. Growing, restoring and preserving America's "natural infrastructure" like forests can help secure clean water supplies.
A new free trade agreement lacks common-sense protections for forests that help power Asian economies.
Scientific advances in wood identification are improving chances of catching illegal loggers endangering the world’s most threatened rainforests.
Agriculture and forestry offer great opportunities to help create the lower-carbon economy envisioned in the Paris Agreement, but these two sectors were largely overlooked in a new decarbonization roadmap published in the journal Science. That needs to change to reap the benefits of forest and landscape restoration.
A critical way to protect forests is to determine how well companies are complying with concessions agreements that allow them to work on forested government land. Finding this out can be a challenge. A new WRI study shows Freedom of Information laws can help.
This working paper gives an overview of the availability of information for land concessions in 14 forested countries, with a special focus on open spatial information. More specifically, this paper examines the legal framework for granting concessions, laws governing the disclosure of spatial concessions data, and the completeness and quality of concessions data in each country.