Climate Change & Conservation eNews
Community
Home > Climate News >
All Articles
Agriculture
Communications
Community
Economy
Natural Areas
Renewables
Take Action
Wildlife
Sequestering carbon while making breakfast sweeter
Vermont’s private forests play a key role in mitigating climate change — they store four times as much carbon as the state’s vehicles release each year. Selling forest carbon credits to companies and individuals working to reduce their carbon footprints provides a new source of income for individual landowners like Jessica Boone and Everett McGinley in Vermont’s Cold Hollows region, which helps them protect their forests. Unfortunately, carbon markets can be too costly for most owners of small forest parcels to join.
That’s why the Vermont Land Trust formed Vermont Forest Carbon LLC and teamed up with The Nature Conservancy, the Caron Dynamics Lab at the University of Vermont, and Cold Hollow to Canada, a local land stewardship and conservation organization, helping landowners overcome the cost barrier by working together as a single carbon project.
This is the first large-scale aggregated forest carbon project in the country, with fifteen neighbors teaming up to sell carbon credits from their land…
Climate Change Pilot Project
South Kingstown Land Trust was invited by the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resource Center (CRC) to participate in a pilot project to investigate how climate change could impact land trusts — whether impacts to our land holdings themselves or to our priorities for preservation.
For Rhode Island, the likely effects of climate change will include sea-level rise and increases in air and water temperature, precipitation, and storminess. The study was funded by the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council…
Numb to the World
On August 1 1955, a telling photograph was featured in Life magazine. The photograph depicted cans, frozen foods containers, disposable diapers, garbage bags, and a paper tablecloth falling from the sky like rain onto a smiling couple who were raising their arms towards the tumbling sea of trash. The caption underneath the photo read, “Throwaway living: disposable items cut down household chores.” The photograph reflected a paradigm shift away from the pre-World War II ‘waste not want not’ philosophy of living and toward a more wasteful zeitgeist.
An integrated approach to land management
MNL developed the Conservation Grazing Program in order to provide the most ecologically comprehensive land management services in the region. Through the planned impact of livestock grazing, we provide an additional tool for land managers on large and small tracts of land, both public and privately owned, to achieve ecological goals.
Psychologists are learning how to bolster the health of humans and the environment as the planet warms
“We are concerned about the findings,” said Clayton, a psychology professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio. “Negative emotions and pessimistic beliefs can be a source of stress that leads to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.” Nearly half of the participants reported that their feelings about climate change negatively affected aspects of their daily lives, such as sleeping, socializing, school, and work…
Smart Solar Siting for New England: free webinar series
Join American Farmland Trust, Acadia Center, Conservation Law Foundation, Vote Solar, and Vermont Law School for a four-part webinar series, as we share outcomes from our joint two-year project seeking to reduce conflicts over the siting of solar facilities…
Want to get involved with solar grazing?
he American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA) was founded to promote grazing sheep on solar installations.
ASGA members are developing best practices that support shepherds and solar developers to both effectively manage solar installations and create new agribusiness profits…
What businesses [including land trusts] should know about the evolution of rural solar
Solar projects certainly are growing rapidly throughout the United States, with total installed capacity just shy of 70 gigawatts and a contracted pipeline of 27.9 GW, according to SEIA. A recent Wall Street Journal analysis of EIA data reported that solar projects occupied 258,000 acres in 2018, while NREL estimates that solar will occupy 3 million acres by 2030.
That may be a small fraction of the nearly 900 million acres of farmland in the United States (PDF), but it’s enough to make agricultural communities apprehensive about the advance of solar onto previously pastoral land. While landowning farmers are grateful for the steady income that comes from leasing to solar projects, others in rural areas—including many state agricultural departments—are still grappling with what the growth of solar will mean for their concept of rural land and role as agricultural boosters…
And with wind and solar cropping up in more rural communities, the bar is being set higher. “The future for renewable energy has to include a sustainable land use component,” Hoosier Energy’s Cisney said. In leveraging new partnerships and co-location opportunities among developers, farmers and local communities, rural America has the potential to assume a more active leadership role in cooperatively advancing the clean energy transition…
Young California ranchers are finding new ways to raise livestock and improve the land
These first-generation ranchers are young, often female and ethnically diverse. Rather than raising beef cattle destined for feedlots, many are managing small grazing animals like sheep and goats. And they are experimenting with grazing practices that can reduce fire risk on hard-to-reach landscapes, restore biodiversity and make it possible to make a living from the land in one of the most expensive states in the country.
Our research focuses on food systems, rangelands and livestock production. In our recent work, we found new ranchers in California using innovative strategies that they believe can mitigate fire risk to communities and improve soil through grazing.
Urban forestry takes on the world. But first, Rhode Island
Among dozens of new trees transforming a muddy Catholic elementary schoolyard, the pastor opened his Bible only a handful of pages, going full Old Testament in his impassioned spiritual plea for more trees.
Beside him stood Rhode Island’s Governor Gina Raimondo, who had just given an equally impassioned speech about the many scientific and public health benefits of trees. And when the children were unleashed with shovels to plant the final tree, it reminded everyone what perspective matters most: creating a stable future together…
- « Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
- Next »