In the wake of the IPCC land use report earlier this month, with its urgent focus on food supplies, soil conservation, and natural methods of storing carbon, follow-up news stories in the United States and Canada are tracing the steps farmers are already taking to shift their practices.

An influential UK newspaper is calling on the European Union to step up and help prevent a global deforestation disaster, after Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research reported that Amazon rainforest destruction had “exploded” to an estimated 2,254 square kilometres in July.

Afforestation—cultivating timber plantations on previously depleted land—comes in at #15 on Drawdown’s list of climate solutions. By sequestering carbon in timber, soil, and biomass, newly-planted forests can reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide by 18.06 gigatons, Drawdown calculates. And from an initial implementation cost of US$29.44 billion, a net operational savings of $392.33 billion is projected to ...

Humanity could recapture about two-thirds of the carbon pollution it has poured into the atmosphere by restoring 2.2 billion acres/890 million hectares of forest cover around the world, according to a widely-disputed study of current and potential forestation published last Thursday in the journal Science.

After suffering through the wettest year on record, and with rain continuing to bucket out of June skies, American corn farmers are desperately behind on planting, with little relief in sight and their distress compounded by Donald Trump’s trade war with China and Congressional Republicans’ reluctance to provide flood relief.

The federal government has tossed an emergency lifeline to Ontario’s 50 Million Tree Program, committing C$15 million over four years after the Ford government suddenly cut the non-profit initiative in its 2019 budget.

Brazil recorded its worst rate of rainforest destruction in a decade over the crucial month of May, with the government’s own satellite imagery showing illegal loggers stepping up their activity under the deregulatory regime of President Jair Bolsonaro.

Invasive earthworms are catching scientists’ attention as the latest threat to the ability of soils in the Canadian boreal forest to sequester carbon.

Restoration of natural habitats through “rewilding” is a key component of a rapid ecological transition, as both a “vital defence” against climate breakdown and a way to restore badly damaged biodiversity, the Rapid Transition Alliance argues in a post for Resilience.org.

The urgent need to restore the health of the world’s agricultural soils—for the sake of the food supply, and as a critical tool in climate mitigation—is one of the major themes of the global biodiversity report due for release today by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

The prospect of growing algae to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce nearly-carbon neutral diesel, petrochemicals, or bioplastics is moving gradually toward commercialization, with investors directing hundreds of millions of dollars into dozens of start-ups. One of those ventures, backed by genomics pioneer Craig Venter and colossal fossil ExxonMobil, says it’s on ...

It’s time for the “sharp lawmakers and staff” on the U.S. House and Senate agriculture committees to bring their expertise on farm and rural policy to a discussion on climate change, DTN Agriculture Policy Editor Chris Clayton writes in a recent opinion piece for Progressive Farmer.

After years of severely underestimating the number of trees on Earth, scientists are now calculating that a massive, global reforestation effort could offset at least 10 years of greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity.

A solution to the raging food wars between vegans, paleos, and everyone in between is to recognize that good, bad, or terrible farming practices are far more important than the end product that lands on dinner plates, according to a recent post on Resilience.org.

A group of 2,400 small-hold coffee producers in Peru will be the first beneficiaries of a new United Nations initiative aimed at combatting land degradation that could displace 135 million people around the world by 2030.