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Imagine walking into the small wooden building that serves as the home and office of a tribal community leader in a remote village in Vietnam. One of the last things you might expect to see would be that leader talking to a team of young villagers, with e-tablets in hand, ready to walk their ancestral […]

Carbon markets are based on the premise that sources (greenhouse gas-emitting power plants, vehicles, farm animal waste) and sinks (greenhouse gas-absorbing forests, biogas digesters, healthy soil) can be “traded” between states, regions and countries to help each other offset and reduce overall carbon emissions. While carbon markets are not a perfect solution to atmospheric carbon […]

The Sustainable Orinoco Pact sponsored a one-day Initiatives Fair just outside of the region’s major city Villavicencio yesterday.  The event brought together several organizations and individuals to discuss ongoing projects around sustainable development in the region. The larger Pact initiative seeks to reconcile development and conservation interests in what many consider to the last [...]

Followers of environmental issues in the Amazon scarcely go a week without seeing news about threats to the biome. The region has been devastated with countless and constant hazards. For example, each year it experiences natural hazards like wetland degradation, salinization, destructive flooding, and severe fires, all compounded by climate change. Man-made hazards like deforestation, […]

Decades of scientific research have been suggesting that humans accrue many positive benefits from nature, whether that nature be in an isolated preserve, in urban green space within the confines of a city, or simply with a look at a painting of a forest. As more than 70% of the world’s population will live in […]

The Mekong River is one of the world’s great river systems, flowing 4,909 km through six countries: China, Myanmar, Thailand, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The Mekong is divided into both the Upper Mekong Basin, and the Lower Mekong Basin. The latter makes up 76 percent of the overall river basin; the Lower Mekong starts […]

$180 billion USD. 8400 buildings. 1,381,000 acres. Nearly 8% of the State of California’s GDP. The numbers produced by wildfires are staggering. In 2015, the world experienced the strongest El Niño year on record, and forest fires tore through homes, businesses and lives in many parts of the world – one of which was California.  […]

In an increasingly populated, financially-strained, and ecologically-stressed world, scientists are facing mounting pressure to find quick answers to social and environmental challenges. But, In the field of ecology, solutions almost never come quickly.  They take miles of hiking through uninviting terrain, months of laboratory sample testing, and weeks of data analyses to devise some of […]

Picture above shows the thick haze filling the air outside Palangka Raya, Central Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia in September 2015, during the peak of the wildfire/haze season. Photo credit: Sherry Panggabean (c). This week we are blogging about wildfires in Indonesia, and the research and practice SIG is doing to lessen the fire impacts there.  Later, […]

Our August-September Newsletter is now available on-line. Learn more about our recent work with the Comanche Nation and the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, along with information on recent publications and presentations by our team. Follow this link to the newsletter.