Global wildlife is facing a deepening crisis as the latest United Nations assessment warns that nearly half of the world’s migratory species are in decline due to human activity, habitat destruction, and climate change.
As the global community marks 2026 World Wildlife Day today (March 3), this year's focus is on
Medicinal and Aromatic Plants: Conserving Health, Heritage and Livelihoods. However, beneath these celebrations, a difficult question emerges: who will bear the cost of conservation when traditional donor funding becomes uncertain and in the face of climate change?
Governments meeting in Rome last week acknowledged that global efforts to protect nature are still not moving fast enough, even as biodiversity loss continues to affect ecosystems, livelihoods, and economies worldwide.
Governments convened in Rome on Monday (February 16) for a critical round of UN biodiversity negotiations, launching the world’s first global review of how countries are acting to protect nature.
British Monarch King Charles says science is the solution to protecting nature and halting global biodiversity loss, which is threatening humanity’s survival.
The world is pouring trillions of dollars each year into activities that destroy nature while investing only a fraction of that amount in protecting and restoring the ecosystems on which economies depend, according to a new United Nations report released on January 22.
The world has entered what United Nations researchers now describe as an era of Global Water Bankruptcy, a condition where humanity has irreversibly overspent the planet’s water resources, leaving ecosystems, economies, and communities unable to recover to previous levels.
Despite early warnings reportedly reaching communities before the cyclones (Ditwah and Senyar) struck coastal regions in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia late in November 2025, over 1,500 people lost their lives and hundreds went missing even as millions were impacted by these disasters, which caused massive destruction. Scientists say that these disasters reflect a changing climate system, which is making cyclones more hazardous than what we considered “typical” in the past.
“The work of collecting seeds saved me from depression,” caused by her daughter's suicide at the age of 29, said Maria do Desterro Soares, 64, who lives in the poor rural community of Jatobá in northeastern Brazil.
For the past two years, Samuel Ndungu, a smallholder farmer, has been growing organic food and supplying it to the local market in Githunguri, just outside Nairobi.
Our traditional “year-ender” usually kicks off with a grim litany of world disasters and crises over the past 12 months, highlights IPS partners and contributors and culminates in a more positive-sounding finale. This time I’d like to begin on a more personal note intended also as a metaphor.
For years, smallholder farmers across Kenya have been engaged in a legal battle with the government over a law that criminalizes the practice of saving, sharing and exchanging indigenous seeds.
At dawn in the mangrove-choked Rufiji estuary, paddles from wooden canoes slice through still waters as a soft voice drifts across the tide.
Nature is a double-edged sword for global business. A groundbreaking report will reveal how businesses profit from exploiting natural resources while simultaneously impacting biodiversity.
“I see more philanthropic support aligning with systems thinking, linking climate stability, biodiversity protection, Indigenous leadership, and community resilience,” says Michael Northrop, Program Director at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
As geopolitical challenges and tensions escalate globally, one thing is clear: fragmented politics will not fix a fractured planet. This is why the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) – the world’s highest decision-making body on the environment – is so critical to address our shared and emerging environmental threats.
Although Africa holds more than 30 per cent of the world’s critical green minerals—including cobalt, lithium, manganese, and rare earth elements vital for building batteries, wind turbines and solar panels— this has not translated into prosperity for the continent.
Although inequality among countries still accounts for a far greater share of income inequality worldwide than national-level inequalities, discussions of inequality continue to focus on the latter.
The language of agricultural sustainability changes like the seasons—from “climate-smart” to “regenerative,” “agroecological,” and “nature-positive.” Each term reflects good intentions, but the growing list risks duplication, confusion and delays.
The heat in the Hangar Convention Center of the Amazonia, in the northeastern Brazilian city of Belém, has reached the negotiation rooms of the climate summit. Over the past 72 hours, one of the most delicate and significant discussions of this climate meeting has been taking place: the path to progressively abandon the production and use of coal, gas, and oil.
The year 2024 was the hottest on record globally. In Asia and the Pacific, Bangladesh was the worst-hit country, with about 33 million people affected by lower crop yields that destabilized food systems, along with extensive school closures and many cases of heatstroke and related diseases. Children, the elderly and outdoor low-wage earners in poor and densely populated urban areas suffered the most, as they generally had less access to cooling systems or to water supplies and adequate healthcare. India, too, was badly affected, with around 700 heat-related deaths mostly in informal settlements.