IIASA researchers announce a new citizen science campaign on human impact on forests for improving forest management maps and value estimations on biodiversity and carbon storage, within the Nature Map project.

• North America’s temperate rainforest extends some 2,500 miles from California to the Gulf of Alaska, providing important habitat for many species and playing a big role in global carbon sequestration. However, despite its uniqueness, there is no officially recognized name for the whole of the forest.

Nature-based solutions such as ecosystem restoration will play an indispensable role in addressing climate change, but a strong economic case will need to be made to convince policymakers, investors and business leaders to place them higher on the agenda.

Despite efforts to protect them, tropical forests are dwindling at a near-record rate at a time when humanity needs them more than ever in the fight against climate change. In this interview with Eco-Business, World Resources Institute’s global forests director Rod Taylor argues that we need to rethink the balance between development and conservation.

An experiment conducted in Brazil in an area of Atlantic Rainforest suggests that intensive silviculture, including the use of herbicide and substantial amounts of fertilizer, is a more effective approach to promoting the regeneration of tropical forest and biomass gain than the traditional method based on manual weeding and less fertilizer.

Forest Advisory Committee decided this while suggesting that instead states with deficient green land should divert their non-forest land for afforestation to companesate for use of forest land in development projects

States with more than 75 per cent forest cover won’t be required to provide non-forest land for forest diversion projects, decided the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) in a meeting on April 23, 2019.

• A new modeling study finds that largely unrestricted “business-as-usual” Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado deforestation could result in the loss of an estimated 606,000 square kilometers of forest by 2050, leading to local temperature increases of up to 1.45 degrees Celsius, in addition to global rises in temperature.
• Under a Brazil Forest Code enforcement model, researchers predict deforestation would be limited to 79,000 square kilometers, with reforestation occurring over 110,000 square kilometers, leading to an average local increase of just 0.02 degrees Celsius.

“Climate change is hitting hardest those who have done least to cause it, especially the world’s indigenous peoples from the Arctic to the tropics,” said renowned actor and activist Alec Baldwin speaking at the 18th Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York on 23 April 2019.

Studies reveal that community-forest management can reduce deforestation and poverty

Washington: Researchers observed that giving local communities the opportunity to manage their forests reduced deforestation and poverty. According to the study published in the journal of Nature Sustainability, community-forest management led to a 37 per cent relative reduction in deforestation and a 4.3 per cent relative reduction in poverty.

West Africa's native rosewood was listed as endangered last year following a huge increase in trade driven by Chinese demand

GAMAMADU, Guinea-Bissau - Before the ban, Chinese loggers drove straight through Gamamadu village to harvest its most important resource: the rosewood forest.

"So many Chinese came here. We were praying for a means to stop it," said Braima Djassi, a small, white-haired farmer in the village in central Guinea-Bissau, a tiny country in West Africa.

“When invaders come from the outside, they bring hunger and death,” said Jair Seixas Reis, chief of the Maraguá people in Brazil’s state of Mato Grosso. “We don’t know what to do other than resist. It’s very dangerous. I’m asking for help. The world needs to speak out. Amazonia is the lungs of our earth and if the lungs don’t work, the world will die.”

The project may prove to be biggest effort so far to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

NEW YORK - A Dublin-based company plans to erect "mechanical trees" in the United States that will suck carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, it said on Monday, in what may prove to be biggest effort to remove the gas blamed for climate change from the atmosphere.