With the future of deep-sea mining still under debate, here’s what we know so far about the proposed practice and its impacts — and what we don’t.
Source: World Resources Institute
April 30, 2025
Half a century of oil drilling has left the world’s largest rainforest scarred by deforestation and pollution. Now it is bracing for a new wave of fossil fuel extraction
Source: Climate Home News
April 4, 2025
Since the turn of the century, mining has increased by 52% due to surging demand for coal, iron, industrial minerals and other metals. In some cases, this extraction has come at the expense of forests, along with burdens to the communities who rely on them.
WRI analyzed tree cover loss data from the University of Maryland and a combination of studies on global mining extent and found that mining has increasingly pushed into forests around the world — especially tropical primary rainforests and protected areas. From 2001 to 2020, the world lost nearly 1.4 million hectares of trees from mining and related activities, an area of land roughly the size of Montenegro.
Felling these trees also released 36 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per year into the atmosphere, an amount similar to Finland’s fossil fuel emissions in 2022.
Source: World Resources Institute
October 24, 2024
Thick smoke, oppressive heat and eerily orange sunsets blanket both major cities and small villages. Hundreds of cities are exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution while thousands of hectares of forest burn. The jarring images send out a clear distress signal: Something is fundamentally amiss.
Everybody familiar with the scientific literature understands that climate change is accelerating, manifesting as heatwaves, severe droughts, more frequent floods and devastating fires, leading to urban calamities, biodiversity loss, economic impacts and health hazards. But this spate of fires is truly exceptional. Preliminary analyses by WRI’s Global Forest Watch initiative, which monitors tree cover loss in near-real time through satellite images, show that the current fires season in Brazil is the worst in at least a decade, with more than 47,000 high-confidence fire alerts from the beginning of the year through Sept. 16, 2024. MapBiomas data shows an 85% increase in area affected by fires, compared to the average since 2019.
Source: World Resources Institute
October 10, 2024
In its annual report, Global Witness affirms how dangerous it is to defend nature. More than 2,100 defenders have been murdered since 2012.
Source: Climate News
September 10, 2024
In the race to cut greenhouse gas emissions and rein in climate change, demand for critical minerals is surging. Materials such as lithium, cobalt and graphite are essential components of EV batteries, wind turbines, solar panels and other low-carbon technologies increasingly powering the world’s energy systems. Mining for these materials on land is already underway, but with demand surging, some are now looking to tap the seafloor for its millions of square kilometers of metal ores.
With the future of deep-sea mining still under debate, here’s what we know so far about the proposed practice and its impacts — and what we don’t.
Source: World Resources Institute
June 21, 2024
In a setback to efforts to conserve 30 percent of the ocean by 2030, a third of the world’s largest MPAs allow destructive practices like mining and commercial fishing, while others are “paper parks” with no formal conservation measures.
Source: Inside Climate News
June 18, 2024
Noise from shipping and other ocean industries are drowning out the natural sounds of the ocean, and climate change could soon turn up the volume. The global shipping fleet nearly quadrupled in size between 1996 and 2020, and fishing, oil and gas, wind farm construction and more have spiked in many ocean areas. This growth has been reflected in sound data as well; scientists estimate that shipping noise has doubled each decade since 1960. In fact, a 2022 study revealed that there are few “quiet” areas of the ocean left around the world.
Source: Inside Climate News
June11, 2024
According to new data analysis from WRI’s Global Forest Watch, the world lost 10 football (soccer) fields’ worth of primary forest per minute in 2023. The Tropics lost 3.7 million Hectares of Primary Forest. And while progress was made on fighting deforestation, it was not consistent around the world.
The good news: Brazil and Colombia — home to the large and vastly biodiverse Amazon rainforest — showed dramatic reductions in primary forest loss due to strong policies and political will. The bad news: Significant decreases in Brazil and Colombia were counteracted by increases in other tropical countries like Bolivia, Laos and Nicaragua. Canada also experienced significant loss after a record-breaking wildfire season.
Source: World Resources Institute
June 4, 2024
Guerillas once protected the forests that provided them with cover, but recently some factions see the trees, critical to the nation’s climate commitments, as leverage in new peace talks with the government.
Source: Inside Climate News
June 4, 2024
New research reveals that one-third of great apes on the African continent are threatened by mining concessions, while inadequate protective measures are in place.
Source: Inside Climate News
April 3, 2024
Almost 90% of the world’s forest loss is driven by the expansion of agriculture, thanks to growing consumer demand for commodities like coffee, cocoa, beef, soy, palm oil and timber. Because of this, governments, businesses and NGOs are increasingly targeting action to reduce deforestation in this sector. Several markets are developing policies that prohibit the sale or importation of products grown on deforested land, while hundreds of consumer goods companies have made zero-deforestation pledges.
Some of these regulations are still in the early stages of development or implementation so their potential positive impact remains to be seen, but existing measures have so far failed to stem the tide of deforestation. One of the major reasons is the persistent lack of traceability and transparency in supply chains.
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Source: World Resources Institute
March 8, 2024
We can get a global glimpse of how migratory species are faring, in the first-ever stocktake produced by the United Nations Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species. The report shows falling populations in close to half (44%) the 1,189 species tracked by the convention. The problem is much worse underwater – 90% of migratory fish species are threatened with extinction.
Their decline is not inevitable. After all, the migratory humpback whale was headed for rapid extinction – until we stopped whaling.
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Source: The Conversation
February 19, 2024
A newly published study in the journal Nature combines satellite images, vessel GPS data and artificial intelligence to reveal human industrial activities across the ocean over a five-year period. Researchers at Global Fishing Watch, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing ocean governance through increased transparency of human activity at sea, led this study, in collaboration with Duke University, University of California, Santa Barbara and SkyTruth.
It found that a remarkable amount of activity occurs outside of public monitoring systems.
Source: The Conversation
January 08, 2024
Large-scale tree planting projects aimed at sequestering carbon are oversimplifying the many values of forests, researchers reported.
Source: Inside Climate News
October 03, 2023
Tropical primary forest loss worsened in 2022, despite international commitments to end deforestation. The tropics lost 10% more primary rainforest in 2022 than in 2021, according to new data from the University of Maryland and available on WRI’s Global Forest Watch platform.
Source: World Resources Institute
October 02, 2023
Rising ocean temperatures and marine heat waves are pushing whales closer to busy shipping lanes. Flexible speed reduction areas could help prevent ship collisions, scientists say. Last March, a California giant perished. The 49-foot humpback nicknamed Fran washed up on a beach in the coastal city of Half Moon Bay. Fran had visited these waters for the entirety of her 17-year life, easily recognized by Californians due to the distinctive markings and shape of her tail.
Source: Insight Climate News
October 10, 2023
Source : Inside Climate News
August 30, 2023
The trade of used clothing in Kenya has come to represent the export of plastic waste to countries in the Global South, and a lesser known source of vast quantities of plastic pollution. Our investigation sheds light on this broken system – the pressure realease value of the Global North’s overproduction and overconsumption of fast fashion, and the fashion industry’s overreliance on synthetic fibres
Source : Changing Markets Foundation
February 24, 2023
Researchers behind the Land Gap Report say we can’t plant our way out of global warming—and it’s disingenuous to pretend that we can.
Source : Inside Climate News
November 2, 2022
The Amazon has existed as a dense and humid rainforest teeming with life for at least 55 million years. But in a new paper, scientists claim that over 75% of the ecosystem has been losing resilience since the early 2000s due to climate change. This process appears to be most prominent in areas that are closer to human activity, as well as in those receiving less rainfall.
Source : The Conversation
November 2, 2022
The world is facing a climate and ecological crisis. The two planetary crises occasionally pull in the same direction: restoring faltering coastal ecosystems, such as mangroves and saltmarshes, sequester carbon, buffer against more frequent extreme weather events and provide for nature.
Source : Carbon Brief
February 5, 2022
A new report finds that up to 85 percent of threatened animal and plant species have had their habitat damaged by mining, agriculture or logging.
Source : Inside Climate News
September 6, 2021
The Forest Trends report shows a 50 percent increase in deforestation of tropical woodlands, most of it for agriculture and much of it illegal, since the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests.
Source : Inside Climate News
May 25, 2021
New data analysis from WRI shows that deforestation increased by 12% between 2019 and 2020, destroying a Netherlands-sized area of primary tropical forests. In addition to the troubling implications of this forest loss for biodiversity and communities that depend on forests for drinking water, food and livelihoods, new research also suggests that current rates of deforestation are causing global forests to transform from carbon sinks to carbon sources, which will make it more difficult for countries trying to achieve emissions-reductions.
Countries can learn much from indigenous communities about sustainable land and forest management. At least 36% of the world’s intact forests are on indigenous lands, and the deforestation rate on these lands is often lower than in other forest areas.
Source : World Resources Institute
April 14, 2021
New study finds the rate of capturing CO2 is increasing at a lower rate.
Source : The Guardian
March 29, 2021
Planting trees is unfortunately not the silver bullet solution you are looking for.
Source : The Economist
March 23, 2021
Our food system has been shaped over past decades by the ‘cheaper food’ paradigm.
Policies and economic structures have aimed to produce ever more food at ever
lower cost. Intensified agricultural production degrades soils and ecosystems,
driving down the productive capacity of land and necessitating even more intensive
food production to keep pace with demand. Growing global consumption
of cheaper calories and resource-intensive foods aggravates these pressures.
As a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, our food system is
also driving climate change, which further degrades habitats and causes species
to disperse to new locations. In turn, this brings new species into contact and
competition with each other, and creates new opportunities for the emergence
of infectious disease.
Source : Chatham House
