Tag Archives: global warming

Mongabay: Study offers first map of Amazon’s climate-resilient upslope corridors

Tropical ecologists Willian Farfan Rios and Miles Silman with the Andes Biological and Ecosystem Research Group gather data on tree species migration in a field plot at 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) on the elevational transect in the Kosñipata Valley in the Peruvian Amazon. Image by Justin Catanoso.

In this story, I return to the theme and focus of my very first environmental reporting in summer 2013 in the southern Peruvian Amazon — how climate change-driven warming in the tropics is driving upslope species migration. It was a concept that largely baffled me when I first encountered it. But the years since, I’ve come to understand and appreciate it in depth and historical context.

Thus, when his new, exhaustive and pioneering research was brought to my attention, I immediately pitched a story idea to my editor, Glenn Scherer, who just as quickly grasped the importance of the researchers’ findings.

Here’s the essence: In the tropics, vast lowlands can require species to move large distances north or south to escape warming. The most rapid path to climate-resilience is upslope migration, with plants and animals relocating shorter distances uphill to cooler places. A new study has mapped major elevational gradients in the Amazon that offer the best possibility for connectivity and upslope relocation in the biome — overlaying elevational gradients, amount of forest cover, fragmentation and protected areas.

With the except of the primate photo, I took all the photos that accompany the story during my repeated visits to the Peruvian Amazon since my first reporting trip there in 2013.

Densely forested slopes of the Peruvian Amazon in Manu National Park offer what scientists believe are pathways to climate resilience and species survival as warming temperatures across the South American tropics force many plant and animal species to migrate to cooler temperatures to remain in their ecological equilibrium. Image by Justin Catanoso.

Mongabay: Novel research finds unexpected climate resilience in up to 36% of Amazon forest

Palm trees, which make up 20% of the trees in the Amazon, grow mixed among various tree and grass species in the southern Peruvian Amazon lowlands of Manu National Park. Image by Justin Catanoso.

It is usual for research coming from the Amazon to be even remotely upbeat. But this story of mine may qualify. Published long-term research based on field monitoring, not computer modeling, shows that forests dominated by palm species in low water table regions of the rainforest are more drought resilient, and thus functioning and healthier, than previously understood. Such forests make up more than a third of the Amazon.

This research is unique and perhaps groundbreaking. It bears close attention and scrutiny. That’s because most Amazonian research points to a rainforest devastated by drought, deforestation and wildfires, and close to tipping from a carbon sink to a carbon source. All those things are true, but…

Lead researcher and ecologist Flavia Costa of Brazil told me: “Our research goes against the belief that the Amazon is collapsing. And this is big because someone needs to say that things are more patchy [than generally believed] and there are possibilities of a positive outcome. Because then, if there are such possibilities, you can go and protect these specific areas.”

Thanks to my editor Glenn Scherer for pushing for a bit more reporting context on this story, and to my longtime colleague Enrique Ortiz, a leading Peruvian forest ecologist, for bringing this study to my attention.

A research scientist marks a tree in a shallow water table forest in Brazil to gauge its response to drought conditions. More than a third of the Amazon is composed of such wetland forests, suggesting that huge swaths of the world’s largest rainforest may be far more resistant to severe droughts than recognized by previous research. Image courtesy of Flávia Costa.

Mongabay: Forest advocates accuse EU energy firm of Dutch biomass certification fraud

Research shows that “biomass burning power plants emit 150% the CO2 of coal, and 300-400% the CO2 of natural gas, per unit energy produced.” Image by GIZ Bush Control and Biomass Utilisation Project via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

My first story for Mongabay in 2026 is among the more important stories I’ve written in recent years on the forest biomass beat. Forest advocates across the EU have had little success in pushing back against the expanding use of forest biomass — wood pellets — for industrial-scale energy generation and the billions in state subsidies paid to support the industry.

In what appears to be an unprecedented development, law enforcement in the Netherlands is weighing whether to launch a criminal investigation against RWE, one of the largest energy providers in the Netherlands, and a significant importer of wood pellets from Asia, the U.S. and Eastern Europe. Forest advocates Comite Schone Lucht and Biofuelwatch alleged that RWE has misrepresented what its imported wood pellets from Malaysia are made out of in order to receive lucrative Dutch subsidies. RWE says it supports and abides by Dutch and EU certification schemes.

Such certification has been designed to ensure that imported wood pellets are not contributing to deforestation where they are produced. Forest advocates argue that the certification process is imprecise and unreliable. Now, Dutch law enforcement agencies will determine whether to investigate to see if corporate fraud is involved.

Mongabay: From waffle gardens to terraces, Indigenous groups revive farming heritage in America’s deserts

A traditional waffle garden, like this one in New Mexico, has grid-like sunken beds with earthen walls that capture rain, retain moisture and prevent runoff. Image by Geoffrey Kie.

Permaculture is a word I’ve gotten familiar with from a Greensboro neighbor and good friend Charlie Headington. He has turned his 60×150 foot property into a flourishing urban farm of fruit trees, garden beds, beehives and water features. In a space usually reserved for lawns, Charlie has adapted his land to be productive year round, regardless of weather conditions.

When Latoya Abulu, Mongabay’s Indigenous editor, offered me the opportunity to report and write this story on Native American dry farming techniques in New Mexico and Arizona, I thought about Charlie — and how much I had to learn about permaculture. Fortunately, I had several excellent sources in the U.S. Southwest who patiently answered my questions, offered examples and demonstrated how age-old dry farming holds lessons for regions around the world as climate change makes weather more erratic and regular rains harder to come by.

Roxanne Swentzell, who shared her inspiring story with me, is shown here harvesting drought-resistant corn on her garden plot in the Santa Clara Pueblo of New Mexico. Image courtesy of Roxanne Swentzell.

Mongabay: There’s far less land available for reforestation than we think, study finds

A participant plants local green plants in a park as part of Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative, which aims to plant 7.5 billion trees by the end of the year, at Jifara Ber site, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in July 2025. (AP Photo/Amanuel Birhane)

In this story, I had an opportunity to evaluate an increasingly common national strategy of combatting climate change: planting trees. Lots and lots and lots of trees.

I first became familiar with massive tree-planting pledges as a way of fighting climate change at COP20 in Lima, Peru in 2014. The Bonn Challenge promised to reforest 350 million hectares of deforested or degraded land by 2030. The person declaring the great promise of this pledge was Bianca Jagger, the former wife of the Mick Jagger; her environmental nonprofit was an official sponsor of the challenge. It sounded great at the time. It sounded far less great as time went on.

Over the years, the national promises have mounted — to the extent where they became unrealistic if not plain misleading. Rather than do the hard work of reducing emissions and protecting biodiverse forests, countries simply promised to plant more and more trees — often in ecosystems such as savannas and grasslands that would be damaged by such efforts.

The new study in Science that I report on makes clear that there is far less available land for reforestation than imagined. Perhaps more importantly, as forestry expert Bill Moomaw shared with me, there is no shortcut to slowing down the ever-accelerating climate crisis.

Monoculture tree farms do very little to sequester carbon compared to mature, biodiverse forests. They do even less to harbor biodiversity. Here, you see an oil palm plantation (left) and native tropical rainforest on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Image by Rhett Ayers Butler/Mongabay.

Mongabay: Brazil leads push for novel forest finance mechanism ahead of COP30 summit

Tropical forests like this one in the Peruvian Amazon could qualify for annual payments from the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) to help keep them standing and delivering planetary ecosystem services — especially carbon sequestration that slows the rate of climate change. Image by Justin Catanoso

In this story, I revisit a promising initiative I first wrote about at the UN biodiversity meeting in Cali, Colombia, in October, 2024. At Climate Week 2025, Brazilian President Lula stepped forward to pledge the first $1 billion to a tropical forest protection fund unlike any other, as my sources have told me.

Highlights from my story, as summarized from my story by my editor, Glenn Scherer.

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) — a proposed $125 billion fund to conserve tropical forests worldwide — was developed by Brazil in 2023, and pushed forward in 2024 at the UN biodiversity summit in Colombia. Since then, momentum has built in support of this market-driven approach to conserving tropical forests.
Once fully established, the $125 billion fund would spin off as much a $4 billion in interest annually (above what is paid to investors), potentially going to more than 70 TFFF-eligible developing nations, which collectively hold more than one billion hectares of tropical forests. The fund could be operational before 2030.
At Climate Week in New York City on Sept 23, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced that his country will invest the first $1 billion in the fund. Other nations, including China, Norway, the UK, Germany, Japan and Canada seem poised to contribute. Even oil producing nations like Saudi Arabia have shown interest.
But hurdles lie ahead: TIFFF needs $25 billion from sovereign nations and $100 billion from private investors before a full launch, with Indigenous and local communities (IPLCs) to be major benefactors. The make-or-break moment for TIFFF is expected to occur at the UN climate summit (COP30) in Belém, Brazil Nov. 10-21, 2025.

Marina Silva, Brazil’s minister of the environment and climate change, has been instrumental in TFFF development and was in New York City during Climate Week to discuss it with other environmental ministers. She is shown here in an Oct. 2024 meeting with journalists at the UN biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Mongabay: Study in Nature lays out new pathway to assess climate liability of fossil fuel majors

The new framework only addresses temperature increase and extreme heat disasters. Other climate change-intensified extreme weather events, like 2024’s Hurricane Helene that inundated Appalachian Mountain communities would require far more complex scientific assessments. A North Carolina plaintiff, for example, who wanted to sue fossil fuel firms for their role in the disaster would need to prove in court how extreme heat warmed the Gulf of Mexico to record levels, causing Helene to pick up excessive moisture, intensifying the storm and creating 1000-year floods. Drawing such connections may become possible in the future. Image courtesy of NCDOTcommunications.

I’ll let my editor, Glenn Scherer, in his summarizing bullet points, describe this story of mine:

In recent decades a growing number of lawsuits have been launched by states, cities and other government entities to hold fossil fuel companies financially liable for the climate harm caused by the greenhouse gas emissions their products produce.
But those efforts often come up against challenging legal arguments made by the companies saying that their actions and emissions cannot be scientifically linked to specific climate change-driven extreme weather events.
Now, fast-advancing attribution science is offering answers to those legal arguments. A new study — published in Nature — has created a framework that connects the emissions over time of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies — BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom — to rising temperatures and specific heat-related climate disasters.
Researchers say that, in time, this framework for assigning attribution and financial damages could be extended to specific fossil fuel companies and a range of climate change-intensified extreme events such as hurricanes, flooding, sea-level rise and wildfires. The framework has yet to be tested in court.

Mongabay: Netherlands’ largest forest biomass plant canceled, forest advocates elated

In 2020, two years after the Vattenfall wood pellet energy plant was proposed, forest advocates organized a youth protest outside Vattenfall headquarters as part of the National Children’s Climate March. Image courtesy of the Clean Air Committee in the Netherlands.

As this stories describes, forest advocates were able to take significant credit in The Netherlands when one of its largest energy providers canceled plans in February 2025 to build the largest wood-pellet-only power plant just outside Amsterdam. It took six years and a circuitous route through the Dutch court system, but on a rare occasion, the environmental argument that burning forest biomass is not the climate-friendly solution it is touted to be until won out.

While the Dutch, like the South Koreans, appear to be inching away from industrial-scale forest biomass energy, neither is close to giving up entirely on wood burning, or subsidizing the burning, as they both try to meet 2030 legal deadlines to phase out all coal burning.

In fact, the elusive promises of BECCS — Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage — is now being touted as the reason to continue burning wood pellets because, it is theorized, that emissions can be easily trapped and permanently buried underground.

There is a significant flaw in that plan in that the scientific consensus illustrates that BECCS technology is years, if not decades, away from effective implementation.

“The irony is that my country (The Netherlands) and the EU have called burning biomass carbon neutral, right?” Dutch forest advocate Fenna Swart told me. “Now the claim with BECCS is that the air will be even cleaner. But in our view, it’s just another flawed policy to allow business as usual.”

A close-up image of one of the posters held aloft by demonstrators to protest plans by Vattenfall to build the Netherlands’ largest woodburning energy plant. Image courtesy of the Clean Air Committee in the Netherlands.

Mongabay: Forest biomass growth to soar through 2030, impacting tropical forests

Tree felling on an energy plantation concession in Indonesia where wood has been used to supply wood pellets to South Korea. Image courtesy of FWI.

This story here, my latest on the issue of global forest biomass for energy, sends a bit of a mixed message. Projected supply and demand for wood pellets appears to be rising dramatically through 2030, with more wood coming from tropical forests than every before.

On the other hand, there appear to be a few cracks forming in the long-term viability of an industry that has been on a steady, upward trajectory for 15 years or more — save for Enviva’s self-inflicted business wounds that led to its 2024 bankruptcy. Subsidies are being inched back on South Korea and Japan. Drax is still getting a ton of British subsidies for five more years, but far less than the previous 10. Germany’s second-largest city, Hamburg, nixed a conversion of a coal-burning plant to wood, admitting that it was not a climate friendly move. And a highly regarded investment think tank is raising a bright red flag to investors to think twice before investing in wood-pellet manufacturing stocks.

A source and forest advocate in South Korea went as far as to tell me he believes we are beginning to see that beginning of a paradigm shift regarding forest biomass for energy. The scientific arguments and journalistic reporting, including my own, that challenge industry line that it a climate-friendly alternative to coal, grow stronger every year. Is the tide really turning?

Meanwhile, in the near-term, the industry continues to grow, and native forests across the US Southeast, British Columbia, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, will continue to be diminished and degraded, many replaced by tree farms, to feed immediate demand.

Estimate of global wood pellet production and use in metric tons by nation by 2030. Data sourced from the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Scenario study. Image courtesy of the Environmental Paper Network.

Mongabay: COP16.2 biodiversity summit in Rome OKs finance pathway; big obstacles loom

COP16 President Susana Muhamad. Top environmental groups and NGOs were largely complimentary of the outcomes achieved in Rome under the leadership of Muhamad. Image by IISD/ENB | Mike Muzurakis.

I spent eight days in Cali, Colombia in October 2024 covering my first UN Convention on Biological Diversity summit. I left before the final day, but as this story illustrates, it ended up not being the final day.

Delegates left the hardest work for last — specific strategies by which nations and non-government actors could reach $200 billion annually in finance to protect nature and stave off deforestation and species extinctions. They ran out of time. Delegates fled to catch flights at the Cali airport. And the COP16 president, Susana Muhamad, was forced to close the biennial meeting prematurely.

Delegates did agree to meet for three days in February in Rome (Feb. 25-27) to complete their work. And they did. As best they can. My story overviews what they accomplished and the difficulty they will have in reaching their ambitious and critically important goal. Alas, I reported from home in North Carolina, not from Rome, my favorite city in the world.