Latest Deforestation Stories

RIO DE JANEIRO, March 26, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Approximately half of the deforestation that was avoided in the Brazilian Amazon during 2005-2009 was the result of government conservation policies, according to analysis by Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) Rio. CPI's analysis isolated the effects of agricultural prices and other potential drivers of forest clearings to estimate the contribution of policies to the slowdown of deforestation in the Legal Amazon. Results...

Many of the world’s rarest and richest forests – its high-altitude cloud forests – could be all-but obliterated by 2080 due to the combined impact of man-made climate change and habitat destruction. Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change an international scientific team has warned of the near-total loss of one of the world’s most delicate ecosystems, the Mexican cloud forest, along with 70 per cent of its plant and animal species, as a result of human pressures. “Cloud...

With its 1.7 billion square kilometres, an area equivalent to 5 times the size of Germany, the Congo Basin forest is the world's second largest tropical forest. The 'State of the Congo Basin Forests 2010' report launched in Douala, Cameroon, at the Annual meeting of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), provides a comprehensive and detailed assessment of the status of this crucial pool for climate regulation and natural resources. It looks at deforestation patterns, points to trends in...

BRUSSELS, Feb. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Analysis of the most attractive forest resources and timberland investment opportunities in all major timber producing countries across the world, was published today in the new edition of Global Tree Farm Economics Review. Produced by RISI, the leading information provider for the global forest products industry, the report benchmarks investment costs and returns for a wide cross-section of potential plantation forest projects. It also...

By combining airborne laser technology, satellite mapping, and ground-based plot surveys, a team of researchers has produced the first large-scale, high-resolution estimates of carbon stocks in remote and fragile Madagascar. The group has shown that it is possible to map carbon stocks in rugged geographic regions and that this type of carbon monitoring can be successfully employed to support conservation and climate-change mitigation under the United Nations initiative on Reduced Emissions...

The composition of land surface – such as vegetation type and land use – regulates the interaction of radiation, sensible heat and humidity between the land surface and the atmosphere and, thus, influences ground level climate directly. For the first time, the Innsbruck climate scientists quantitatively examined whether land-cover changes (LCC) may potentially affect glacier loss. "We used Kilimanjaro in East Africa as a test case, where a significant decrease of forests at elevations...

New wall-to-wall carbon storage map can help developing nations track deforestation and report on emissions A study published in Nature Climate Change today finds that tropical vegetation contains 21 percent more carbon than previous studies had suggested. Using a combination of remote sensing and field data, scientists from Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC), Boston University, and the University of Maryland were able to produce the first "wall-to-wall" map (with a spatial resolution of...

In yet another triumph of modern technology, scientists say they’ve been able to use an advanced system of lasers to study the biodiversity and structure of Amazonian rainforests in unprecedented detail. Over three miles above the Peruvian rainforest, a team of scientists crammed themselves into a small research aircraft along with a laser-emitting device known as a Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging). The Lidar was used to bounce laser beams off the lush green canopy below at a rate of...

Highlights signs of transition to a disturbance-dominated regime A new paper published today in Nature reveals that human land use activity has begun to change the regional water and energy cycles - the interplay of air coming in from the Atlantic Ocean, water transpiration by the forest, and solar radiation - of parts of the Amazon basin. In addition, it shows that ongoing interactions between deforestation, fire, and climate change have the potential to alter carbon storage, rainfall...

<font size="2" face="Arial"> </font> STEIN, <font size="2" face="Arial">Germany</font>, Dec. 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The forestry project was one of the first to be registered by the UN "Clean Development Mechanism" programme (CDM) for environmentally compatible developments. From 2012, Faber-Castell is expected to become the world's first private corporation authorized to deal in CO2 certificates from managed forests. In the north of Colombia, in the El...