One problem with the onslaught of negative environmental news — extinctions, oil spills, and so on — is that people become numb to it, as Barney Long, senior director of conservation strategies at the nonprofit Re:wild, told Vox last fall.

“I’m a strong believer in flipping this on its head and really starting to talk about the positive stories,” said Long, who’s involved in IUCN’s new tools to measure recovery (but not the Restor map). We want to avoid extinction, he said, “but what do we want to achieve?”

Efforts to restore ecosystems don’t always work, of course, and it’s important to highlight failures and course corrections, Crowther said. His previous research into forest restoration helped inspire enormous tree-planting campaigns, for example, but these efforts often fail to restore forests and can even destroy native ecosystems. Restoration is also not going to stop climate change on its own, experts say…

Using a web of PVC pipes and rubber hoses, they inundate sections of woodland half the size of a football field to study how the trees might respond to climate change and its effects — namely rising seas and torrential downpours.

It’s a local experiment, but the researchers said they hope to build a global model that will help scientists understand what events lead to the earliest stages of tree stress and when forests near coasts start converting to wetlands…

Research conducted in Minnesota over the past two years points to many beneficial aspects of grazing sheep at ground-mounted solar projects. What is assumed to be the largest solar sheep flock in the United States operates from the MNL grazing facility and has been grazing Enel’s 150-MW Aurora project since 2017. Soil samples from six of the projects were first taken in 2020 and again in 2021 with the preliminary results recently presented…

Researchers found that conserving existing wetlands, restoring 35 percent of marshes that have been impounded or drained, and allowing coastal wetlands to naturally migrate toward land as sea levels rise could create a substantial sink for CO2 and human-caused methane by 2050…

“A capped landfill on the south side of Belchertown Road will become Amherst’s newest conservation land.

In what town officials say will be a unique conservation restriction held by Kestrel Land Trust, the 53-acre site on which residents once disposed of their household garbage will be permanently protected.”

Human activity and climate change-fueled disasters have turned 10 of the planet’s internationally recognized forests, also known as World Heritage sites, from carbon absorbers into carbon emitters, researchers have found. The report from UNESCO found these sites can absorb approximately 190 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year — roughly half the amount of the United Kingdom’s annual fossil fuel emissions.

Since the 1970s, saplings have generally been planted in translucent plastic tubes to protect them from being eaten by browsing animals. However, the research — which analyzed the lifecycle of the plastic and trees — found it was better to lose a certain percentage of saplings than use plastic guards to protect them…