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In this week’s international edition of TIME—which is thankfully not behind the paywall—I have a piece on Ecuador’s innovative plan to forswear drilling for oil in the Yasuni National Park in exchange for funding from the international community. Yasuni is in the western reaches of the Amazon rain forest, and it may be the most [...]
I’m in Quito, Ecuador tonight, where I’ve flown—by way of a long detour to Panama City, thanks very much Continental Airlines—to report a story about one of the more innovative conservation ideas out there. Ecuador—which you can find nestled in the northwestern corner of South America, between Colombia and Peru—has two major natural resources: oil [...]
Another day, another global report on the world’s land use. This time a wide-ranging survey from the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO)—an intergovernmental body that promotes the sustainable use of forest resources—has revealed that the area of the world’s tropical forests that are under some form of sustainable management has increased 50% since 2005, from [...]
We’ve just posted an interesting story to Time.com about a group of monks in northern Cambodia who are lobbying for over a dozen protected forests to go onto the global carbon market. This is exactly the kind of project that makes Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) so promising: protecting the forests in [...]
I’ve got one more tidbit from last weekend’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and it’s nothing less than a new scientific concept: telecoupling. This is not, as you might expect, a particular risqué form of conference call. Telecoupling refers to how connections between nature and human beings are growing [...]
The story of the world’s forests is usually a depressing one. Tropical rain forests are under pressure in South America, Asia and Africa, threatening habitat for countless species and adding billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. But while the headlines can be scary, the reality is that the world may [...]
After the disappointment of Copenhagen and a year when the viability of the UNFCC was repeatedly called into question, the world has its first new legal agreement on climate change in years. The deal is modest—there are no new binding pledges to cut carbon emissions, no hard figures in climate aid and some of the [...]
You don’t have to be in Washington to hear the howls of progressive Democrats enraged by what they see as President Obama’s capitulation to the Republicans on taxes—they’re audible all the way down here in Cancún. (Twitter helps.) As Timothy Noah of Slate puts it, Obama seems to be an easy mark, a terrible [...]
Someone speaking the truth—it’s an unusual occurrence at any government event (unless you have a link to Wikileaks) and it’s even rarer at the highly stage-managed U.N. climate talks. But that’s exactly what happened last night in Cancún at an event put on by Avoided Deforestation Partners, an NGO dedicated to promoting REDD, or Reduced [...]
Last year’s global climate change summit in Copenhagen ran into trouble for all kinds of reasons, but one of the first and worst was logistics. Too many people—more than 45,000—tried to jam into the Danish capital’s too-small Bella Center. The result was hours-long lines for security and accreditation, hot tempers and general frustration—not the sort [...]
