Tropical forests are well known for being the “lungs” of our planet. Through photosynthesis, the trees in these forests produce oxygen and remove enormous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to mitigate global warming. The world’s most famous tropical forests found on lowlands, like those of the Amazon or Borneo, are celebrated for…
Tree planting to restore forests, capture carbon and improve the land has gained strong momentum in recent years. The Bonn Challenge and its offshoots such as AFR100, initiatives focused on forest restoration, have persuaded developing countries to commit millions of hectares of land to these projects. Funding for AFR100 has been secured from international donors…
“Plant more trees!” has become a rallying cry for global leaders and climate activists around the world who see tree planting as a solution for everything from climate change to food security. The growing interest in this area means it is more important now than ever before to consider effective tree planting that benefits communities…
A Cameroonian government decree allowing logging in a forest that is home to the rare Ebo gorilla and other endangered species, like chimpanzees, forest elephants and grey parrots, has been cancelled. The decree, which was signed mid-July, had sparked outrage among local communities and conservation groups. In total 68,385 hectares of virgin forest would be…
Rainforest Rescue released a petition protesting the Cameroonian government’s move to open 150,000 hectares of Ebo Forest – an area the size of Greater London – to logging. The logging concessions would impact one of Africa’s great biodiversity hotspots. Ebo Forest is the habitat of a possible new subspecies of gorilla, as well as a…
South African scientists say African governments have been misled into massive tree planting schemes by the Global North misreading Africa’s grasslands. Megafires and drought beckon. Trees are good. Trees are green. Trees suck up carbon dioxide. Ergo: plant as many trees as possible and you solve the world’s environmental and climate change challenges almost overnight….
Pangolins, a group of unique African and Asian scaly mammals, are considered to be one of the most heavily trafficked wild mammals in the world. They are hunted and traded for their meat, scales, and other body parts, and used as traditional medicines in parts of Africa and Asia. Of the eight pangolin species, four are found…
Forest elephant extinction would exacerbate climate change. That’s according to a new study in Nature Geoscience which links feeding by elephants with an increase in the amount of carbon that forests are able to store. The bad news is that African forest elephants – smaller and more vulnerable relatives of the better known African bush…
Logging roads are expanding dramatically in the Congo Basin, leading to catastrophic collapses in animal populations living in the world’s second-largest rainforest, according to research co-led by a scientist at James Cook University in Australia. Just as worrying is that the rate of forest destruction caused by new roads in the Congo Basin has risen…
A new review paper finds that the loss of Africa’s forest elephants has broad impacts on their ecosystems, including hitting several tall tree species, which play a key role in sequestering carbon dioxide. Forest elephants disperse large seeds, keep the forest canopy open, and spread rare nutrients across the forest, benefiting numerous species across the…