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Newsweek
5 days ago
- Politics
- Newsweek
Saving the World's Rainforests Isn't Rocket Science. Here's How to Do It
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. As diplomats and activists scramble to secure hotel rooms in Belém, Brazil for the next U.N. COP30 in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the biggest problems our planet faces is how to protect the world's last remaining rainforests—nature's most powerful climate solution. Despite the 29 previous COPs, attended by thousands of scientists, politicians, and activists, forests are still being destroyed at an ever-increasing rate, lost to massive cattle ranching, palm oil, illegal logging, mining, land-grabs, and man-made fires, which are ravaging the Amazon, Congo, and everywhere in-between. A rainforest in Darien province, Panama is pictured. A rainforest in Darien province, Panama is pictured. Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images Tropical rainforests are the cradle of life on Earth—and the world's lungs. By converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on a massive scale, rainforest conservation should be at the forefront of action to save our planet from climate change and ecological collapse. While international conservation groups can play a supporting role, it is national governments who must take responsibility for protecting our last pristine forests and marine ecosystems. Fancy billion-dollar carbon capture machines, or "breakthrough" technologies for climate mitigation, or reforestation with billions of young trees, will never come close to the power of old-growth tropical rainforests to protect biodiversity and simultaneously provide the oxygen the planet and humans need to survive. The destruction of the Amazon and Congo, this year at its highest level in decades, and the rapid loss of Southeast Asia's rainforests, is pushing the limits of our planet's ability to survive in the face of rising oceans, global warming, catastrophic extinction events, desertification, and unsustainable urban development and land use. Very few developing countries are fighting back successfully, and showing us that we can indeed save our rainforests. Despite supposedly unstoppable global forces—such as demand for hamburgers or chocolate spread—a few nations have stopped the burning, protected their rainforests, and are now busy increasing their size. One small but proud nation, Panama, shows how it can be done. It starts, inevitably, with political will. In Panama's case, this is the recently elected government of President José Raúl Mulino. Since being elected into office last year, Panama's government has undertaken unprecedented steps to protect the country's rainforests, wildlife, and marine ecosystems. Steps taken by Panama in the past year include enacting a province-wide illegal logging moratorium in Darien to stop anarchic cutting and clearing of tropical rainforests until a new permitting system is deployed, while hiring, equipping, and training 240 new national park rangers with the trucks, boats, and equipment they need—with an additional 50 rangers on the way. Panama has also made use of new technologies like satellite monitoring, marine radars, cellular trail cameras, and systems like EarthRanger and Skylight, to increase the effectiveness in terrestrial and marine reserve protection. A large effort is underway to support Indigenous communities like the Naso Kingdom to protect their 400,000-hectare Comarca. Also, nature and ecotourism are now a leading strategy for the country's sustainable development. Another critical policy response focuses on the government itself. Panama has restructured the Environment Ministry to remove non-effective officials and return to the field and build awareness to motivate Panamanians to protect their natural treasures. In addition to rainforest protection, Panama is protecting the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (CMAR), one of the world's largest marine reserves. By using satellites to monitor this vast area, 16 illegal fishing boats were interdicted last month in the Cordillera de Coiba Marine Protected Area, the largest bust in the country's history. Unlike other governments dependent on international aid from the U.S. and Europe, Panama is leading by financing nature protection from its own government budget. Outside help comes as critical co-investment, not handouts creating more dependency. Global Conservation is assisting Panama by supporting advanced protection systems and training for the country's largest national parks—Darien, La Amistad, and Coiba—and the Naso indigenous territory, some of the most important forests and marine ecosystems in Mesoamerica. This year, Global Conservation assisted Darien National Park to train 25 new rangers and helped 28 rangers at Coiba National Marine Park to inaugurate and deploy a powerful Marine Radar system, installed to identify and interdict illegal fishing within the marine reserve. While Panama still faces tremendous conservation challenges, it's well on its way to meeting these challenges head-on, and solving them. Taking concrete steps to protect the forest and securing real budgets for enforcement is something akin to a revolution in nature protection. In most developing countries in which Global Conservation works, the typical story involves a handful of rangers, with little more than a broken-down truck or boat, struggling heroically but in vain to protect the parks from unscrupulous logging syndicates and thousands of miners, without any training, zero political support, and no resources. As diplomats and officials prepare to travel to Belém and spend two weeks arguing over climate, making, as is typical of COPs, progress at glacial speed, other nations must show how to get things done now. The Panama Solution is an example of the way forward for immediate, effective, and much needed rainforest and marine protection by a small developing nation, which is replicable in almost any country in the world. The time is now to be bold and to protect our forests and seas—our greatest nature-based solution to solve the climate crisis. Juan Carlos Navarro is minister of Environment of Panama. Jeff Morgan is executive director of Global Conservation. The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
National Geographic
09-04-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
Saudi Arabia's vast desert was once a lush, green paradise
A new study of stalagmites in caves in central Saudi Arabia provides strong evidence that the region was lush and green for much of the last eight million years—a phenomenon known as 'Green Arabia,' but until now only a hypothesis. The study also indicates that the central band of the world's 'barrier' deserts— from the Sahara in the west, across Arabia and to India's Thar Desert in the east—were at times well-watered, savannah-like landscapes that encouraged the migrations of primates and other animals out of Africa, including Homo sapiens and some of our hominin ancestors. 'The sand seas that we are used to seeing have not always been the case,' says archaeologist Michael Petraglia, the director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University. 'That has had a huge effect on human evolution.' A tree grows in an arid region where the water table is just below the sand in Oman's Rub al Khali desert. Photograph by Bill Hatcher, Nat Geo Image Collection Petraglia is a senior author of the study, published in Nature. He has worked on the Green Arabia theory since 2010, mainly using studies of sediment cores taken from the region's ancient dried-up lakes. The cores contained traces of the plants that once grew there and the types of sediments produced by the climate, and showed that Arabia—and likely the Sahara and the eastern deserts—had been humid for long periods. But the sediment cores only dated back to the last half million years or so. The new climate data from the central Saudi Arabian caves, however, was used to reconstruct the region's climate over the last eight million years—a dramatic advance. The key data comes from seven caves at As Sulb, an eroded limestone plateau northeast of Riyadh in central Saudi Arabia, where 22 rock samples were taken in 2019. The samples were mostly from stalagmites, which grow upward from a cave floor as mineral-infused water slowly drips on them (their counterparts, stalactites, grow down from the cave ceiling.) Ancient petroglyphs depict fauna and flora that used to thrive in these now arid lands. Left: An ibex is seen on a rock in Najran Province, Saudi Arabia. Right: Aliya the goddess of fertility is seen alongside hunters, camels, ibex, and a cheetah in Najran Province, Saudi Arabia. Photograph by Eric Lafforgue, Hans Lucas/Redux (Top) (Left) and Photograph by Eric Lafforgue, Hans Lucas/Redux (Bottom) (Right) Petroglyph rock art depicts palm trees in Saudi Arabia (left) and an ostrich, also in Saudi Arabia (right). Photograph by Eric Lafforgue, Hans Lucas/Redux (Top) (Left) and Photograph by Eric Lafforgue, Hans Lucas/Redux (Bottom) (Right) University of Malta archaeologist Huw Groucutt, one of the study authors, says stalagmites more often contain the evidence that scientists are looking for, including the traces of lead, uranium, and thorium used to date them. Uranium-thorium dating works by comparing radioactive traces of uranium in the samples to the thorium it decays into. This method provides accurate dates over the last 600,000 years. But uranium-lead dating is a relatively new technique that compares the uranium isotopes to the lead they decay into over a longer period. This can date a stalagmite over a much longer time—around 7.44 million years ago, in this case. Often overlooked The new climate record agrees with evidence Petraglia has championed in other studies about Green Arabia, which suggest the entire band of deserts that separate most of Africa from Eurasia—including the Sahara and deserts farther east—were verdant for long stretches of time. He says Arabia is often unnoticed in diagrams that purport to show the routes animals and early humans used to disperse from Africa. But a green Arabia could have been a key route for such migrations. And when Arabia was humid, Petraglia says, the Sahara and other deserts would have been humid too—climate changes that may have been caused by periodic variations in Earth's orbits around the sun. 'These findings have been spectacular,' Petraglia says. 'This is an entirely new source of [climate] information, not only for Arabia but for many places around the world.' A bedouin camel trader wanders into the desert of the Empty Quarter, a desert that spans the Arabian Peninsula. While scientists think a green savannah may have allowed humans to easily cross the region, more evidence is needed to confirm this theory. Photograph by Jeremy Horner, Panos Pictures/Redux The new paper describes evidence of at least six humid phases in Arabia over the last eight million years, and possibly two more unconfirmed humid phases. Groucutt explains that the stalagmites grew larger only when the environment was wet enough for water to seep through the ground and into the cave, while the isotopes in the rock samples revealed when these times of growth had occurred. The study shows that Arabia's humid periods in length from more than a million years to tens of thousands of years—long enough for waves of animals and early humans to wander into Arabia from northern Africa and continue on into the fertile lands beyond. And there is more to come. Petraglia explains that scientific research on caves in the region has been conducted for several years, but it has all been unpublished until now: 'we're just at the beginning of cave work in Saudi Arabia.' Groucutt describes expeditions that have already taken place to retrieve samples from caves in the northern parts of the Arabian peninsula, which could help refine the geographical extent of the humid phases. Blown away Palaeoclimatologist Paul Wilson of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the new study, says he was 'blown away' by the reconstructed climate record, which had far greater detail than any that had existed until now. His own research with deep-sea sediments showed they contained less dust from the Sahara during several wet periods over the last 11 million years that also correlate with variations in Earth's orbit around the sun. But while Africa has been well studied in recent years, Arabia has mostly been overlooked, he says: 'This is a really powerful validation of some of the things that we've long expected.' This US City should top your 2025 travel list
