International Conservation & Development

The U.S. is one of the largest consumers of wood and paper products. Recent investigations into illegal logging in Russia, the Amazon, South East Asia and Africa indicate it’s a widespread and highly lucrative enterprise. It’s also highly destructive – causing the loss of ancient forests and habitats critical to wildlife. And chances are American consumers are unwittingly contributing to the problem. Some environmentalists believe one solution is to track every step of the supply chain to ensure products that make it to the American market come from legal wood.

As the Arctic warms faster than any other place on the planet and sea ice declines, there is only one sure way to save polar bears from extinction, the government announced Monday: decisive action on climate change.

In the early 1960s, a young ornithologist successfully persuaded Vietnam’s top leaders, including its founding president, Ho Chi Minh, to designate a tract of land near the capital as the country’s first national park.

Fellow Daniel Orenstein writes that scientists, educators and researchers have to become leaders, both advancing the state of knowledge about global climate and the impacts of human activities, and strengthening the ecological literacy of youth. Education will be key in pushing back the damage that the Trump presidency is already causing, he says.

Karen Merritt, public health educator, street photographer and SEA Semester alumna (W-98), has been selected to receive this year’s Armin E. Elsaesser Fellowship award. Karen plans to use the award to investigate and document the “invisible history” of 16th and 17th century mercury and silver mining in Spain and Mexico, which she describes as one of the “longest continuous maritime transport endeavors in history.” ...

In several interviews with prominent media outlets, Climate Interactive’s Andrew Jones and MIT’s Prof. John Sterman elaborated the potential effect of president-elect Trump pulling out of the Paris climate agreement.

A new world of global climate action is coming into view here in Morocco – a world without US leadership on the issue. The test now is whether global cooperation can proceed and grow at a time when America – in recent years a leader in the push to reduce carbon emissions – has a president-elect who opposes the very concept of climate response.

Australia has some 8,300 islands, many of them home to threatened species. But humans have introduced rodents and predators such as feral cats and foxes to many of these islands, devastating native wildlife and changing entire island ecosystems. Removing invasive mammals has proven to be a very effective tool for protecting island species, Fellows Chris Wilcox and Erin McCreless discovered.

Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere put shallow, warm-water coral reef ecosystems, and the people who depend upon them at risk from two key global environmental stresses: 1) elevated sea surface temperature that can cause coral bleaching and related mortality, and 2) ocean acidification. These rising CO2 levels may affect most of the world’s coral reefs and the populations which depend on them by 2050, according to this study in the journal PLOS ONE.