#timber-plantations

#timber-plantations

"I think it surprised me how easily people are swayed by headlines," says Suderman, noting that wartime information flows are often strategic and conflicting. "You have to learn in a wartime to take everything with a grain of salt in the context of what you observe."

When the Paiter Surui community expelled the last invaders of their land in 1981, they faced a divisive decision. Should they keep the coffee plantations left by the colonisers? Some destroyed them because of the death and violence contact with the non-Indigenous world had caused. Others felt sorry for the trees and couldn't kill them.

Peat bogs provide huge value to humans and the environment. When healthy, they store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests, reducing global emissions.

The case is one of the most notorious examples of British involvement in illegal enslavement in Brazil, said historian Joseph Mulhern and a stark symbol of how, even after the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British citizens and companies profited from slavery in Latin America's biggest country for another half century.

Multinational firms are under rising pressure-from investors, regulators, and employees-to demonstrate positive societal impact in the places where they do business. With ESG-focused institutional investments projected to reach nearly $34 trillion this year and roughly 90% of large U.S. companies now disclosing ESG reports, these pressures are now a central part of corporate strategy.

Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia's history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City.

Dozens of Chinese men were getting off a bus and heading into a pair of squat two-story buildings at the end of the road. Oliveira assumed the outsiders had some type of meeting and would soon be on their way. She'd been inside the structures, painted dark green, and knew they weren't nearly big enough to house them all. But one day turned to the next, and soon Oliveira realized her new neighbors - 56 itinerant Chinese laborers, none of whom spoke any Portuguese - were here to stay.

The idea that hiking trails are a tool for conservation is based on a simple premise: people protect what they know. That requires making conservation areas accessible. There's no point telling people you only protect what you know, if you don't give them the tools to know. The trail is this tool. People who hike, people who camp, these people often become defenders of the environment.

Last year the JIC produced a hard-hitting report which found the collapse of globally important ecosystems around the world including the potential shift of the Amazon from rainforest to savannah, the demise of coral reefs, and the loss of glaciers would threaten the UK's national security, through food shortages at home and the potential for conflict overseas.

The European Commission will "proceed with [the] provisional application" of the Mercosur trade deal with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, the commission's chief Ursula von der Leyen announced on Friday. The deal was signed in January after over 25 years of negotiations, despite opposition from some European farmers.

Laterite deposits are created by intense humidity and tropical weathering of rock and so they form in the tropics, often in hotspots for biodiversity and rich, intact rainforests. These deposits account for about 70% of the world's reserves of nickel, a mineral now in high demand for manufacturing batteries, especially for electric cars and clean energy infrastructure.

Thermal modification is not a new invention, but its relevance has increased as expectations around performance, sustainability, and predictability have tightened. Developers, architects, and contractors are no longer just asking whether timber looks good or performs well initially. They want to know how it behaves after ten, twenty, or thirty years, and how much risk it introduces into a project once the scaffolding is gone.

The river won, the forest won, the memory of our ancestors won, said the campaigners in Santarem when it was clear their actions had forced the Brazilian government into a U-turn on plans to privatise one of the world's most beautiful waterways and expand its role as a soy canal.

Confirmation that the Whitewebbs Oak was alive at the time of its felling felt inevitable. I visited the tree in the aftermath and there was absolutely no doubt in my mind the tree was very much alive. There were still green shoots and healthy buds and, in fact, just before the felling, tree VETcert-qualified consultants found the tree was in good health with a full crown.

A moratorium that has protected vital rainforest since 2009 is on shaky ground as several players from Brazil's soy industry say they are pulling out. Specifically, the Brazilian industry association ABIOVE, whose members include global companies such as Cofco International, Bunge, Amaggi and JBS, have said they will no longer refrain from growing soy on deforested land. Environmentalists fear this could fuel a new wave of Amazon logging.

BP's sponsorship of the museum has long drawn ire, in part because the oil company pursues an "all out for oil and gas" strategy, including plans to exploit deep drilling at the recently discovered Burmerangue site off the coast of Brazil. The project has been criticised by campaigners and oil and gas unions due to its threat to ocean ecosystems, elevated carbon dioxide levels, and lack of revenue flowing back into the Brazilian economy.

Raw sewage and solid waste flow into the bay from surrounding cities, home to more than 8 million people. Cargo ships and oil platforms chug in and out of commercial ports, while dozens of abandoned vessels lie rotting in the water. But at the head of the bay, between the cities of Itaborai and Mage, the environment feels different. The air is purer, the waters are empty but for small fishing canoes, and flocks of birds soar overhead.

Police and prosecutors from Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana and Suriname have arrested nearly 200 people in their first joint cross-border operation targeting illegal gold mining in the Amazon region, authorities said. The operation was backed by Interpol, the EU and Dutch police specialising in environmental crime. It involved more than 24,500 checks on vehicles and people across remote border areas and led to the seizure of cash, unprocessed gold, mercury, firearms, drugs and mining equipment, Interpol said.

The world spends 30 times more money destroying nature than protecting it. That's according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that exposes a massive gulf between so-called "harmful investments" and financing that promotes nature preservation. The global environment agency's latest "State of Finance for Nature" (SNF) report is calling to phase out the US$7.3 trillion (6.2 trillion) in global investments that damage nature including into high-emissions energy infrastructure and manufacturing, for example.