Forests

The world’s governments have committed to end deforestation by 2020 and many global companies are following suit by making their supply chains deforestation free.  But what happens in areas where global businesses are absent?  And what role can small and medium enterprises play in solving deforestation? © James Morgan / WWF-US Nepal is a clear […]

Sometimes it takes a coincidence of the calendar to help us see the obvious connections in nature. 21 March is International Day of Forests and 22 March is World Water Day, which prompted WWF’s leading freshie (Lifeng Li, director of our global freshwater programme) and head tree hugger (Rod Taylor, director of our global forest […]

Why should a bank in Europe care about the haze in Singapore or forest fires in Indonesia? First: credit risk. If a bank finances a plantation involved in open burning, the borrowing company can face fines and other penalties under Singapore’s Transboundary Haze Act. Similarly, banks can see a deterioration in their client’s credit profile […]

The theme of this year’s Asia-Pacific Forestry Week is “Growing our Future,” and it focuses on the need to integrate forestry into the wider context of sustainable development. This is an issue that is especially relevant to Vietnam. Wood is one of our country’s most valuable resources. The livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people […]

The theme this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos is the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which promises hyper-connectivity and technological breakthroughs. But will a faster, busier, more urban world simply sidestep the world’s wild places and natural systems? The answer: it must not. Nature, including forests, is more important to this revolution than the most […]

The upcoming Global Forest Resources Assessment – FRA2015 – slated for release on Monday will no doubt reconfirm what many of us have seen with our own eyes: devastating deforestation in the tropics over the past 25 years. Looking forward, the picture isn’t any rosier. In his new book,  On the Edge: The State and […]

On August 6th the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) launched a two month public consultation on its proposal for a voluntary add-on standard, RSPO Next, which aims to draw on the strengths and breadth of the RSPO to help companies deliver on their ‘no-deforestation’ commitments. If successfully adopted by the RSPO, WWF believes RSPO […]

Bella Roscher, Forest Project Coordinator for the WWF and IKEA partnership, reports on the importance of smallholders, certification and partnership in creating a more sustainable timber market. Around the world, millions of “smallholders” – people who manage or use forests that are considered small in relation to others in their region, and who mainly apply […]

Long meetings and animated discussions are usually fuelled by coffee. But at the New Generation Plantations (NGP) annual meeting in Santiago, Chile, most of us were drinking maqui juice. Maqui berries grow wild in the forests of southern Chile. They’re so rich in antioxidants that they make other superfoods look positively ordinary. And, mixed with […]

What could be better than a blog about Nick Cave and palm oil? Nothing, I hear you say. I was humming along to the song ‘Red Right Hand’ the other night. I don’t know all of the lyrics and hence I hum a lot. One line that I do know the words to and that […]