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Today the biggest, most ambitious forest conservation deal ever has been announced: The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement. After more than seven years of hard-fought campaigning to end the on-going destruction of Canada's Boreal Forest, Greenpeace and eight other non-governmental organisations have agreed to a truce with the logging industry: we will suspend the battle for the Boreal."

"However, with increasing development pressure, market-based incentives are needed to ensure that private forests remain as forests." WRI officials hope the new online resource will illustrate the history of these forests, and help landowners better understand how numerous forces are affecting the region.

Sinar Mas Group, the notorious international palm oil pariah, recently made a remarkable announcement: The company's subsidiary, Golden Agri Resouces (GAR), intends to implement a forest conservation policy. Among other things, GAR's Forest Conservation Policy commits it to a goal of "no new development" on peat lands, High Conservation Value Forest areas or High Carbon Landscapes, respecting Indigenous and local communities, and achievement of RSPO certification for all its holdings by 2015.

Indonesia will rehabilitate degraded forests and plant millions of hectares of new forests to meet its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent from projected levels by 2020, reports Reuters.

A lot depends on how 'peat' and 'natural forest' are defined and how rights are agreed upon. Strong lobbies from the forest and tree-crop plantation industry argue that the economy will be harmed if 'business as usual' is interrupted. According to news sources, definitions of 'natural forest' and 'peat' differ between drafts prepared by the Indonesian Government's emissions reduction taskforce and by the Ministry of Forestry. There are several key issues that need to be resolved.

"Yesterday, Brazilian politicians took a decisive step towards opening the door to massive new Amazon deforestation, by voting in favor of radical changes to the Brazilian Forest Code - the primary legal instrument for protecting the Amazon.  If these changes become law they will let hundreds of forest criminals off the hook, and massively expand the amount of forest under threat from the chainsaws"

"Speed is not a word typically associated with trees; they can take centuries to grow. However, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change."

"Google.org demonstrated a new platform on Thursday that, if implemented in conjunction with a proposed United Nations program, could provide a significant tool to combat climate change. Its new "high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine" can process terabytes of information on thousands of Google servers while giving access to the results online. The platform, which was demonstrated on Thursday at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, would allow anyone using the tool to monitor whether or not trees were being chopped down in a given forest. It analyzes satellite images to show forest changes over a given time period."

Some estimates predict that by 2013, 80% of the North American forests could be gone.

"[Forests] reduce the effects of floods, prevent soil erosion, regulate the water table and assure a high-quality water supply for people, industry and agriculture," said the Forestry Department Assistant Director General, Eduardo Rojas-Briales, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Forests are part of the natural infrastructure of any country and are essential to the water cycle."

"Archangel Ancient Tree Archive"

Central America has suffered the highest rate of forest loss in Latin America over the last 10 years, despite a growing number of plans aimed at curbing the decline, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports.

"Forres-based charity Trees for Life will keep the six animals in a 30.4 acre enclosure on its Dundreggan Estate in Glen Moriston, Inverness-shire. It hopes the boar will control the spread of bracken which shades out other wild plants. Once a native species, the mammal was hunted to extinction in the UK by the 13th Century. "

"Contrary to conventional belief, as the climate warms and growing seasons lengthen subalpine forests are likely to soak up less carbon dioxide, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study. As a result, more of the greenhouse gas will be left to concentrate in the atmosphere."

"Negotiators at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen didn't see eye to eye on much last month, but almost everyone agreed on one thing: To protect the planet we need to save its forests."

"Rich nations must contribute more to a climate change fund and help fight deforestation, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at a conference Thursday on saving the world's forests - a key defense against global warming."

11 rare and endangered Siberian Tigers starved to death while confined to 'cold, cramped metal cages' at the Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo in China's North-East. This treatment raises questions about China's conservation efforts, suggesting that "zoos and wildlife parts may be deliberately breeding more animals than they can afford, hoping to sell off the carcasses onto a black market where tiger parts fetch a high price for use in traditional medicines and liquor."

The steady loss of forests, soils, wetlands, fisheries, species and coral reefs around the world is closely tied to the lack of value we put on nature, says three-year study.