Rolex, Cartier, Rolls-Royce . . . Customers always seem willing to pay more for premium brands. Why should wildlife conservation be any different? If companies and governments are going to spend money on carbon credits anyway, will they be willing to pay more to also protect habitats for key species such as tigers, elephants, […] Read More »
By Charles Fishman
In the rangeland of Australia, sheep get frightfully dirty. They roam the outback among all manner of plants, trees, and scrub; they loll in the dirt; they sleep on the ground; they roll in their own poop. They shower only if it happens to rain.
So when Australian sheep get sheared, […] Read More »
Companies that adopt green practices have more-productive workers, according to a new study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
Past research suggests that committing to environmental standards can improve a company’s financial performance. Magali Delmas, an environmental economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Sanja Pekovic, an economist at the Université Paris-Dauphine […] Read More »
By Fred Pearce
The road north of Buchanan port in Liberia is one of the worst in a country of dreadful roads. Past Compound 3, a town serving a giant, French-owned rubber plantation and so ramshackle they never got around to naming it, there is more pothole than road. We broke down twice. Even […] Read More »
By Fred Pearce
Mohammed is a modern Bedouin from the Badia, the arid “outback” of eastern Jordan. He exchanged his camels years ago for a truck and a big motorized water tanker. For much of the year, he lives a sedentary life in his village in the Tafila district in southern Jordan. He keeps […] Read More »
By Marc Gunther
The ceremony had all the pomp of the Oscars, minus the gowns. Musical fanfares greeted each presenter. Politicians delivered windy speeches. A global audience watched live (and a prime-time special followed on The Discovery Channel) as the winners of the Progressive Automotive X Prize were announced on September 16, 2010, in […] Read More »
Along with drugs and weapons, wildlife is one of the world’s biggest sources of illegal trade. Now researchers in Brazil have put some numbers to the problem, finding that tens of thousands of birds are sold illegally each year in just one metropolitan area’s street markets.
Illegal trade can affect biodiversity and drive some […] Read More »
Gaia Vince reviews The Land Grabbers by Fred Pearce
When Madagascan President Marc Ravalomanana was ousted in March 2009, a major factor in his new unpopularity was the deal he had made with South Korea’s Daewoo corporation, effectively handing over 1 million hectares of Madagascar’s best agricultural land. The firm planned to use a South […] Read More »
Home sellers take note: That blue jay in your backyard could add $32,000 to your asking price. An innovative study of home sales in Lubbock, Texas, suggests that planners can use relatively simple bird counts to analyze the ecological and economic values of urban landscapes. And it finds that even a single extra species […] Read More »
How is the global economic meltdown changing conservation? Which do you want first–the good news or the bad news?
It’s no coincidence that the words “economy” and “ecosystem” both originate from the same Greek word, oikos, for “home” or “household.” But rarely have the links between the complex financial and biological structures that sustain us been […] Read More »
Invasive, wood-boring insects are costing Americans more than $2.5 billion each year—and there is a one-in-three chance that a new wood-chomping invader could add to the toll over the next decade, according to a new analysis in PLoS ONE.
The research team, composed of scientists from U.S. and Canadian universities and from the U.S. […] Read More »
When researchers discovered a remnant population of endangered crocodiles near a Philippine national park in 1999, the future seemed bleak for the rare reptiles. Crocodiles were widely reviled and often killed, and efforts to reintroduce farmed crocodiles back into the wild were faltering in the face of local resistance. By challenging some fundamental assumptions about […] Read More »
It’s not time to throw the recycled bathwater out with the baby. Although wastewater recycling plants can produce more greenhouse gas emissions that traditional water treatment facilities, a new study finds they can still offer advantages in water-stressed regions.
Nitrous oxide, a potent warming gas, is by-product of common bacteria “that live in agricultural soils […] Read More »
It’s a pattern seen throughout the developing world: Poor communities clustered around the edges of national parks. To some scholars, it’s a sign that parks are “poverty traps” that help keep people poor. A new long-term study from Uganda, however, disputes that idea.
“There is a lot of research looking at poverty in parks, but […] Read More »
Cities are creeping into some of the world’s most biologically diverse ecosystems, concludes a new analysis that takes a first crack at estimating how fast the world’s urban areas have grown over the last few decades – and how much they might grow in the future.
“The conversion of Earth’s land surface to urban uses […] Read More »
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