In 2016, Global Forest Watch (GFW) and the University of Maryland released the world’s most detailed satellite-based deforestation alerts. Since the launch, the GLAD alert system has expanded from just three countries to the entire tropical region and is accessed by hundreds of thousands of users through GFW.   Peru’s Early Warning Alerts After using the GLAD deforestation alerts, […]

In 2016, Global Forest Watch (GFW) and the University of Maryland released the world’s most detailed satellite-based deforestation alerts. Since the launch, the GLAD alert system has expanded from just three countries to the entire tropical region and is accessed by hundreds of thousands of users through GFW.   Peru’s Early Warning Alerts After using the GLAD deforestation alerts, […]

By  Peter Veit and Ryan Sarsfield Cows in the Paraguayan Chaco. Flickr/Arcadius. In the last 15 years, Paraguay lost a greater share of its forest than almost any other country on Earth. While soy farming once drove deforestation in the east, the focus of Paraguay’s forest loss has since moved west to the low-lying, thorn-forested Chaco, where cattle ranching has […]

For products like cacao (above) and palm oil, sustainability is increasingly critical to the corporate bottom line. Bobby Neptune/USAID. By Sarah Alix Mann and Octavia Aris Payne Some companies are learning the hard way that sustainability is increasingly critical to the corporate bottom line—and that advanced technologies make unsustainable and illegal practices easier to detect. The Roundtable on […]

By Jessica Webb How can open government accelerate implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the post-2015 development agenda? That’s the big question on the table at this year’s Global Summit of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an initiative dedicated to increasing government transparency and citizen empowerment. One overlooked answer to that question is “forests.” Forests […]

By Benjamin Kessler, Thomas Maschler and Sarah Alix Mann Mbitom, an area in Cameroon’s East region, is experiencing unexplained tree cover loss. In order to identify the drivers of this loss, the GFW Cameroon team set out into the Mbitom forests to investigate. Click on the StoryMap to enter the interactive version.

By Jonathan Mason Recognizing community forest rights is important not just for legally securing those lands for the community, but also for mitigating the threat of climate change. That’s what WRI and the Rights and Resources Initiative have detailed in a new collaborative report entitled Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change. The two organizations partnered to study […]

By Danielle King A new report by WRI and the Rights and Resources Initiative, to be released on July 24th, shows governments can meet their climate change mitigation targets by protecting community forest rights. We caught up with the report’s lead author, Caleb Stevens, to find out why community forests are so important—both for human rights and for curbing climate […]

By Nigel Sizer, Tania Puspita Firdausy, Susan Minnemeyer, Fred Stolle, Aaron Minnick, James Anderson and Hidayah Hamzah Read this post in Bahasa Indonesia. Residents of Indonesia and Singapore have been bracing themselves in recent weeks as WRI and others have warned that this year’s dry season would likely herald a severe spike in fires on the island of Sumatra and accompanying toxic haze across the region. As […]