There have been a comparatively small number of images over the course of history that have gone beyond just showing people something to change the way they see it. On a journey to the Canadian Arctic with her husband and fellow photographer Paul Nicklen, National Geographic photographer Cristina Mittermeier helped capture one such image, of […]
There was a collective sigh of relief in the climate sector when U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order putting the powerful nation back in the Paris Agreement on climate change, alongside other orders to restrict new oil and gas leases and expand the country’s sustainable energy sector. But 27-year-old Varshini Prakash’s breath is […]
Despite the fact that the One Health approach was well on its way to preventing the COVID-19 pandemic before it ever broke out, few people had ever heard of this approach’s existence. Nevertheless, if it accomplishes what it has been designed to do since it emerged in the early 2000s – that being, to prevent […]
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Dr. Jane Goodall that hasn’t already been written in short biographies hundreds of times is the fact that she’s still working. Well into her octogenarian years, she has a living legacy to her name and mark on the planet that would have easily warranted retirement decades ago. On Earth […]
Carole Dieschbourg became one of the youngest ministers in Europe when she stepped into office as Minister for the Environment for the world’s twentieth-smallest nation, Luxembourg, back in 2013. In 2018, she was re-elected for a second term and is since holding the title of Minister for the Environment, Climate and Sustainable Development. In the […]
It could be said that Joji Cariño was born to do what it is that she does – defend and uplift the rights of Indigenous peoples. She comes from the Ibaloi people of the Philippines, whose pasturelands were grabbed by the U.S. colonial government at the turn of the 20th century for the construction of […]
Laman saw her first forest fire when she was six years old. It was 2002, and the highly-flammable landscape of decayed natural debris known as peat was burning around her home in Indigenous Dayak village of Kampuri in Kalimantan, Indonesian. Her grandfather dug ditches around their house to keep the fires – which can stay […]
There came a point in Durreen Shahnaz’s career at which she describes feeling like a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear. It was not, in fact, when she had been one of the few women, let alone Bangladeshi, working on Wall Street at Morgan Stanley in the financial heydays of the […]
The decline of well-funded, in-depth journalism has taken down with it the subgenre of science journalism at a time when it is needed most, to serve as a watchdog on misinformation and inform people as accurately as possible on the status of the planet. “Journalism, especially in the environmental domain, has the power to make […]
“In 2019, almost 90 percent of the deaths of environmental advocates in Brazil occurred in the Amazon. In less than a year, my own people, the Guajajara people here in Maranhão, lost five guardians of the forests – all of them murdered.” These are the stark words of Brazilian Indigenous leader Sônia Guajajara, spoken upon […]
When Patricia Zurita began her career working for the Ecuadorian Ministry of Environment, oil accounted for 70 percent of the country’s GDP, much of which was extracted from some of the most astoundingly beautiful ecological areas in Latin America. Zurita’s delicate challenge was to thread the needle between the oil industry’s disproportionate role in the […]
The sounds of Susan Chomba’s youth were the cackles of hyenas, her grandmother’s voice telling tales over a fire, and the barks of baboons, which ran through her village on the slopes of Mt. Kenya with their babies on their backs. But this was a “short-lived” luxury, she says, as by her late teens, many […]
Having performed alongside Wyclef Jean in New York City, in front of Emmanuel Macron at a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gala, and spotlighted by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label for Black History Month, DJ Switch, by the age of 13, has progressed further on the world stage through her ethos-driven musicmaking than most aspiring leaders […]
In the center of Freetown stands an enormous tree, the Cotton Tree, which is something of a North Star when navigating through the Sierra Leonian capital. Its sweeping head of branches can be seen from a distance, holding court as the city’s most precious landmark for centuries, having witnessed the resettlement of freed slaves and […]
Last year was an important year for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and this year is even more so. With 2020 seeing the close of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, a set of goals created in 2010 to curb the rapid loss of the variety of life on Earth, there was a deluge of […]
