Top Ten Happy Enviornmental Stories of 2016

Top 10 HAPPY environmental stories of 2016

 

Are you posting all of these uplifting conservation stories to make up for the incredibly depressing one you started with, @Loxodonta Cobra?

 

My favorite part of this article is about the Indonesian man who is buying degraded land and restoring it back into natural habitat. My hope is that, in addition to protecting the still-existing habitat, we can add to it as well. And it shows that citizens can make a positive impact on the environment.

 

Yup Had to cheer myself up somehow

 

My favorites are the fact that CITES has finally given pangolins the care and protection they deserve. Its about time that happened. We are yet another major step closer to ending the war on ivory with the closure of markets in China and Hong Kong in the next few years time. And the government of Indonesia is getting smarter about the consequences of burning peatland and have created an agency to restore and protect the remaining peatlands. This should restore and protect the peatlands, but also help fight against climate change, because those peatlands are full of carbon.

 

In some parts of the tropics, reforestation is happening on a vast scale, with a spectrum of human influence from natural succession to active regeneration efforts. Wright & Muller-Landau (2006) predicted that rural-urban demographic shifts would cause secondary forests to expand and cushion against continued deforestation. Global initiatives are also being implemented (eg. the UN-sponsored REDD+) and an estimated 1 billion hectares of degraded tropical forest/woodland is suitable for recovery. However, these secondary forests are often given less protection than primary forests, and other authors (notably DeFries et al. 2010) have challenged the link between urbanization and forest cover.

For me, the greatest source of hope comes from Malaysia and, particularly, Brazil. Both are populous, rapidly developing countries which have seen paradigm shifts in attitude and policy over the last two decades. If similar progress occurs throughout Southeast Asia and West-Central Africa (although relatively depauperate compared to other regions), conservationists stand a fighting chance of protecting tropical diversity (and, by extension, global diversity). The scale of habitat destruction and looming threat of climate change means that landscape-level reforestation will play a critical role.