The last best place no more: Massive deforestation destroying prime chimp habitat in Uganda

By Benon Herbert Oluka9 July 2014 (mongabay.com) – Uganda’s Kafu River, which is about 180 kilometers (110 miles) long, is part of a vast chimpanzee habitat that includes Budongo and Bugoma Forest Reserves, as well as several unofficial protected areas. However, this region is losing a significant portion of valuable chimpanzee habitat, with Global Forest […]

Photo gallery: Aerial images of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest – ‘I live this torment, because I’m not sure if my work was good or strong enough to make an effective change in people’s lives’

By Chelsea Matiash8 July 2014 (Wall Street Journal) – Rodrigo Baleia first embarked on a Greenpeace trip to make photographs of the Amazon rainforest in 2000 – and after twelve years and about 218,000 miles of flight documentation, he is still not satisfied with his mission in chronicling the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon. “I […]

The palm oil diet: study finds displaced orangutans have little else to eat

By Ariel Mark 20 June 2014 (mongabay.com) – One of humans’ closest relatives, the charismatic orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), has been listed as Endangered by the IUCN since 1986 and its status continues to remain critical. The orangutan population decline on the island Borneo can be attributed to extensive habitat loss caused by agricultural development, in […]

Oil drilling has contaminated western Amazon rainforest, study confirms

By Becky Oskin, Senior Writer14 June 2014 SACRAMENTO, California (LiveScience.com) – Peru’s Amazon rainforest is extensively contaminated from decades of oil and gas drilling, researchers reported yesterday (June 12) here at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference. In the past decade, volatile demonstrations by indigenous groups and tangled lawsuits against oil companies have exposed the toxic […]

Tree-killing beetles attacking California's forests – ‘We have no known treatment. We have no capacity to fend it off.’

7 June 2014 (CBS News) – Southern California is already plagued by a crippling drought and wildfires. Now you can add a legion of seemingly unstoppable beetles to the list of threats facing the region’s forests. They’ve already invaded hundreds of tree species, and they are showing no signs of slowing down. “We have lost […]

Fewer polar bear cubs are being born in the Arctic islands, survey finds

Damian Carrington 28 May 2014 Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (theguardian.com) – The proportion of polar bear females around the Arctic islands of Svalbard who gave birth to cubs crashed to just 10% in 2014, according to a small scientific survey of the animals. It follows a series of warm years and poor sea ice. The Barents Sea […]

Half of world’s forest species at risk – FAO publishes first global study of forest genetic resources

4 June 2014 (PhysOrg) – Half of the world’s forest species are at risk from climate change and farming, the United Nations warned on Tuesday, as it called for “urgent action” to manage them better. In its first global study of forest genetic resources, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) said woodland was shrinking […]

Ecuador signs permits for oil drilling in Amazon’s Yasuní national park – Companies could start extracting oil underneath key biodiversity reserve by 2016

By Adam Vaughan    23 May 2014   (theguardian.com) – Drilling for oil in a part of the Amazon rainforest considered one of the most biodiverse hotspots on the planet is to go ahead less than a year after Ecuador’s president lifted a moratorium on oil drilling there. Last August, Rafeal Correa scrapped a pioneering scheme, […]

Report: Impossible to conserve nature as is, thanks to climate change

By Elizabeth Harball and ClimateWire15 May 2014 (Scientific American) – When President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon in 1903, he famously admonished the attending crowd to avoid meddling with the landscape. “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it,” he said. True to Roosevelt’s message, America’s conservationists have since focused on maintaining […]

Brazil laundering illegal timber on a massive and growing scale – ‘Logging in the Brazilian Amazon is absolutely out of control’

By Jonathan Watts and John Vidal    14 May 2014 (theguardian.com) – Illegally logged timber in Brazil is being laundered on a massive and growing scale and then sold on to unwitting buyers in the UK, US, Europe, and China, Greenpeace claimed on Thursday. After a two-year investigation, the environmental campaign group says it has uncovered […]

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial