… quite a lot actually. Good and bad. But you can add reducing carbon emissions from degradation to the list. New paper by Iain McNicol here. Importantly, they seem to work just fine from a carbon perspective even when  people are allowed to use the land. So these don’t have to be strictly protected areas to […]

We have an article out in Science, trying to lay out the inherent challenges of quantifying forest carbon offsets, and arguing that much monitoring effort if essentially pointless – it is false precision. And the costs that this pointless measurement entails fall on those least able to bear them, and detracts from real climate action. Summary […]

Our PNAS paper is just out, with a splashy infographic too: Paper here: https://www.pnas.org/content/119/7/e2109217118 Infographic: http://10facts.glp.earth BBC write up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60295788    It’s quite a dense paper – there’s about 30 years of work by the Land System Science community condensed in there – here’s the abstract:   “Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, […]

This is just out in PNAS, and shows that African savannas have a very distinct tree flora compared to nearby forests, based on a huge dataset of floristic inventories. This provides a new line of evidence that savannas and forests are alternative states in many climatic and edaphic conditions. Why does that matter? Well, if […]