Forest Trends in the News

Vietnam may be a big winner of Donald Trump’s trade war but its success is not cost-free. As the country takes more business from China-based exporters, so Hanoi’s currency practices draw more scrutiny, while its growing trade dependency leaves it more exposed to a global downturn.

Vietnam’s wood and wooden product exports to the United States may be subject to higher import duties due to a surge in export revenues and China’s foreign direct investment in the local industry, experts said at a recent seminar in Hanoi.

Australian researchers recently warned that without “immediate drastic action,” climate change will degrade our forests, farms, and ecosystems to such a degree that civilization as we know it could collapse as soon as 2050. Such dire climate projections are increasingly common, as is unwarranted cynicism about climate solutions.

A new scientific report finds human behaviors are driving the extinction of non-human species at a rate so severe that the subsequent disappearance of life will soon be a threat to human health and prosperity. Habitat destruction on land, over-fishing in the seas and overconsumption across much of the globe, among other things, now threaten […]

In the Colombian Amazon, we find an indigenous organization that manages the protection of around two million hectares of rainforest. As we covered in a previous article, this organization, called Azicatch, worked in association with WWF-Colombia and Fundación Puerto Rastrojo in 2016 to identify its territory’s ecosystem services and the risks of losing them using […]

GAMAMADU, Guinea-Bissau, May 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Before the ban, Chinese loggers drove straight through Gamamadu village to harvest its most important resource: the rosewood forest. “So many Chinese came here. We were praying for a means to stop it,” said Braima Djassi, a small, white-haired farmer in the village in central Guinea-Bissau, a tiny […]

The value of logs and sawn wood exported from Cambodia to Vietnam last year increased by about $31.5 million compared to 2016, customs data has shown. The Vietnamese data, obtained by Khmer Times yesterday, said about 163,071 cubic metres of Cambodian logs were imported to the country last year, worth about $39.5 million.

When Colombia’s government signed a peace deal with leftist guerrillas in 2016, it ended one of the world’s longest-running conflicts and inspired hope for the country’s future. It also had an unexpected downside. The return of normalcy led to a spike in rainforest-clearing, as landowners mowed down former guerrilla hide-outs to establish cattle ranches and […]

The European Union wants to ensure its Ikea cabinets and Conforama desks are made from legal timber, and it’s turning to the source, or at least one of them: Vietnam. A pending deal with the EU requires Vietnam to tighten laws and enforcement against illegal logging, mostly from over the border with Cambodia but previously […]

There is huge potential value in transforming agriculture production, but more companies need to start developing climate-resilience now.