Forest Trends in the News

Early in his career, Michael Jenkins ’88 M.F. came to realize that traditional conservation methods would have limited effectiveness until they put a proper value on the natural world. Over the past two decades Jenkins, the CEO and founder of Forest Trends, has helped change the equation.

Facebook seemed so frivolous when it first emerged 15 years ago, but look at it now: this glorified chatroom has completely upended the very sector it seemed destined to complement, becoming in the process the epitome of a “disruptive technology”. Lyft and Uber have since done the same to the sector formerly known as “taxis”, […]

Keeping global temperatures under a 2-degree rise will require enormous carbon savings from forests, food, and lands – nearly as much as from renewable energy – say leading environmental groups represented this week at the Global Climate Action Summit.

Tropical forests could be critical to avoiding extremely dangerous impacts of climate change. New strategies and commitments have inspired hope and driven important progress and innovations to slow tropical deforestation and speed its recovery following clearing, fire or logging. But forests—broadly defined—are still falling fast.

A new report that looks at the collaborative efforts of private sector and government actors to halt deforestation in two key tropical forest nations could have lessons for countries around the world.

On the surface, the Republic of Congo appears to be making strides toward both conservation and economic development. But the process of becoming an emerging economy is not without its growing pains, especially when it comes to conservation and the country’s forests.

PHNOM PENH — The killing of three conservationists patrolling Cambodia’s biggest carbon credit project exposes the nearly insurmountable conflicts of interest plaguing schemes in which huge corporations such as Disney and Virgin Atlantic have invested millions of dollars, observers say.

Despite a ban on timber exports and the government’s repeated declaration that “large-scale” logging has been stopped, Vietnamese customs data compiled by watchdog Forest Trends show a significant increase in the import of Cambodian logs and sawn wood in 2017.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam – This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but reporting on the environment in Vietnam is not an easy task. The one-party state was recently ranked 175 out of 180 in Reporters Without Borders’ 2017 World Press Freedom Index, between Sudan and China.

Science has been around since the beginning of human civilization. It was the engine behind Aristotle’s ambitious effort to fly and even earlier than that, it helped the Babylonians fashion an understanding of time and their universe.