7.8 billion people produce a lot of waste, but governments, entrepreneurs and NGOs are developing a host of technologies that work with nature to transform a dirty problem into a suite of elegant sustainable solutions.
MAASAI MAU, Kenya — Two years ago, Kenyan authorities evicted 30,000 people from their homes in the Maasai Mau section of the Mau Forest. The evictees, many of whom had…
JAKARTA — Palm oil companies in Indonesia’s West Papua province are suing a local district head for revoking their permits, the second such case filed since authorities last year rescinded…
LUBUMBASHI, Democratic Republic of Congo — Armed assailants recently attacked the home of Congolese environment lawyer Timothée Mbuya. Mbuya, head of human rights NGO Justicia, is fighting a defamation lawsuit…
Initiatives to inject billions of aerosol particles into the stratosphere to deflect solar rays and cool Earth are too risky to go forward; governments must act fast to rein in potentially disastrous planetary-scale solar geoengineering, say critics.
Felipe “Pipe” Henao is a young environmentalist from the small town of Calamar in southeastern Colombia. At the meeting point of the Amazon and Orinoco basins, it’s an area of…
PALAWAN, Philippines — When park ranger Allan Daganta travels to work from his home in a village just outside Palawan's Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park (PPSRNP), he’s usually welcomed…
Three years after the collapse of a mining dam forced them from their homes in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state, a small community of Pataxó and Pataxó Hãhãhãe Indigenous peoples face…
Illegal mining in protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon saw as much as a fivefold increase since 2010, a gold rush driven largely by surging prices in international markets. Over…
The crew of the M/V Arctic Sunrise, an icebreaker vessel owned by Greenpeace, were sailing through Antarctica’s Weddell Sea this month when they saw something they didn’t expect. “One of…
Escalating ocean temperatures stemming from climate change are devastating the world’s tropical coral reefs. In response to the stress, corals, which are animals, sometimes unceremoniously jettison the algae that live…
2022 has already started out with a series of extreme climate events, reminiscent of last year’s record-breaking storms, heat, drought, and flood events, which displaced nearly 30 million people. In…
HARARE, Zimbabwe – Women, children and the elderly are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change in rural Zimbabwe, taking up a large share of the agricultural labor force…
After a disappointing track record over the past two decades, carbon credit markets are back in style. Also known as “offsets,” carbon credits are having a renewed moment, as corporations…
Many thousands of human-made chemicals and synthetic pollutants are circulating throughout our world, with new ones entering production all the time — so many, in fact, that scientists now say…
Animals that eat fruit and spread the seeds in their droppings offer an all-inclusive transportation service for half the world’s flora. But as more seed-dispersing birds and mammals die off…
Pesticides have been dropped from planes and even helicopters with the aim of evading IBAMA, the Brazilian environmental agency, for years as a method to clear remote and hard-to-reach areas…
For Africa, 2021 was the third-warmest year on record, tied with 2019. Even as the continent clocks record-breaking temperatures, adaptation efforts are failing to keep pace, marred by planning gaps…
Activists in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, say they fear logging will ramp up following the state government's decision to overturn a ban on exporting unprocessed timber. The ban was imposed by…
When we routinely flush a toilet, the waste is hurled away so quickly that most of us don’t give it a second thought. But that waste, despite our inclination to…
According to communications consultant Meindert Brouwer, author of Central African Forests Forever, there are still opportunities to save the Central African — or Congo Basin — rainforest. Brouwer's 216-page, 17-chapter…
Tiger conservationists in Thailand are reeling following the recent killing of two tigers in Thong Pha Phum National Park. Authorities confiscated the two carcasses and are investigating the incident and…
For several weeks in 2015, the sound of chainsaws cutting down trees was incessant in the Angangueo municipality in the Mexican state of Michoacán. When a group of people tried…
COLOMBO — At his home in Thimbirigasyaya, a highly residential area in the heart of Sri Lanka’s commercial capital Colombo, Eshan Witana keeps expensive Japanese koi fish, a species of…
KATHMANDU — Stuffed garbage bags float gently down the Bisnumati River in the western part of Kathmandu. The river, sacred to Nepal’s Hindu and Buddhist populations, is one of the…
Biologist Sofía Zalazar wasn’t born yet the last time a bare-faced curassow was seen in the Iberá forests in Argentina. The bird began disappearing from the wild in the 1970s,…
When scientists described the Popa langur (Trachypithecus popa) as a species new to science in 2020, it was already staring extinction in the face. Fewer than 260 of the fluffy…
The ocean is now warmer than it’s ever been in recent history, according to a new study. And this isn’t the first time such a record has been set. For…
For the uninitiated, the first mouthful of the Hawaiian red algae known as limu kohu (Asparagopsis taxiformis) may be an unpleasant one: intensely iodine-rich and bitter, with all the marine…
Chamela-Cuixmala sits in the western corner of Mexico, where one of the best-studied dry tropical forests continues to serve as a refuge for at-risk species like the jaguar. The story…
