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In a UN first, a ferocious and talkative dinosaur bursts into the iconic General Assembly Hall at UN Headquarters in New York, with a special warning for any diplomats who still think climate action is for the birds. “At least we had an asteroid,” the carnivorous critter warns, referring to the popular theory explaining dinosaurs’ extinction 70 million years ago. “What’s your…

October 26, 2021 By John Brandt, Jessica Ertel and Will Anderson “We can’t see the forest for the trees.” The popular saying calls on us to remember the big picture problems as we identify individual solutions. It turns out that it’s accurate for real forests and trees, too. For years, researchers have produced accurate techniques to track where people are damaging, protecting…

WRI’s Land & Carbon Lab harnesses the data revolution to monitor the pulse of the planet’s land and its nature-based carbon 27-10-2021 Humanity is putting unprecedented pressure on the world’s land, and barreling toward climate, biodiversity, and humanitarian crises. This pressure is driving increasing competition over finite land resources – a global land squeeze. …

New research finds that 25% of Europe’s peatlands are degraded, increasing to 50% -120,000km2- when looking at the European Union alone. In more than half of Europe’s natural peatland (mire) regions, the Convention on Biological Diversity 2020 target for at least 17% of areas to be protected has not yet been met for peatlands. Scientists from the Greifswald Mire Centre, the UN…

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) are to announce at COP26 a new United Nations Coalition Fund to significantly improve the collection of essential weather and climate data and boost the international response to climate change. The Systematic Observations Finance Facility (the SOFF) will plug the…

The Changing Wealth of Nations 2021 provides an updated database and rich analysis of the world’s wealth accounts spanning 146 countries, annually from 1995 to 2018. It contains the widest set of assets covered so far, including human capital broken down by gender, as well as many different forms of natural capital, spanning minerals, fossil fuels, forests, mangroves, marine fisheries and more…