Alipay has had millions of trees planted across China as part of a green initiative, it was announced on Earth Day. The ‘Ant Forest’ program within the Alipay app rewards users for making environmentally friendly decisions in their daily lives through a points system which can then be used to plant trees. At present, trees are being planted in areas of China with low vegetation, with the company saying it has planted 100mn trees so far. Ant Forest was first launched in 2016.

Deep inside Northern California’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest, wildlife ecologist Mourad Gabriel is dressed in camouflage, waiting for the raid. He’s accompanied by more than a dozen armed officers with the U.S. Forest Service, local sheriff’s office, and other agencies on a hot August afternoon. Their plan: to seize and dismantle a nearby illegal marijuana grow site, hundreds of which are discovered on California’s national forests each year.

There is no doubt that the mass destruction of trees — deforestation — is increasing day by day and also this process is sacrificing the long-term advantages of live trees only for short-term profit. As per reports from National Geographic, forests may still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land but, they are vanishing at an alarming rate. Also, another report by World Bank states that between 1990 and 2016, the world lost around 502,000 square miles ( 1.3 million square kilometers) of the forest area that is larger than South Africa’s area (1.22 million square kilometers).

Tropical forests that regrow on abandoned agricultural land contain within a few decennia already most of the species of the original old-growth forest. Within 20 years the species richness is already 80% of that of old-growth forests. Their species composition, however, is totally different. Tree species are different, as well as their abundances, a team of around 80 researchers writes in Science Advances.

Sikhs around the world are taking part in a scheme to plant a million new trees as a “gift to the entire planet”. The project aims to reverse environmental decline and help people reconnect with nature as part of celebrations marking 550 years since the birth of the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak.

Scientists are optimistic that innovative techniques can pinpoint the true origin of timber.

Plans to triple the area of plantations will not meet 1.5 °C climate goals. New natural forests can, argue Simon L. Lewis, Charlotte E. Wheeler and colleagues.

The math is simple. Humans are cutting down 15 billion trees a year and replanting only 9 billion, creating an annual net loss of 6 billion trees. Planting trees by hand is time consuming and expensive, making it difficult to keep up with bulldozers clear-cutting over 40 football fields of trees ever minute. We’ve had impressive efforts, such as India planting 66 million trees in a day, but that was a large-scale event, which required organizing millions of volunteers. It would be difficult to recreate something like that on a regular basis.

The introduction of The Green New Deal resolution and the appointment of a House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, has propelled climate change back into the national policy debate. That’s why today, on the International Day of Forests, hundreds of citizens across the nation are urging members of Congress to stand up and protect America’s forests and to hold the US forest industry accountable for its contribution to climate change.

Norway has become the first country to ban deforestation. The Norwegian Parliament pledged May 26 that the government’s public procurement policy will be deforestation-free. Any product that contributes to deforestation will not be used in the Scandinavian country. The pledge was recommended by Norwegian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Energy and Environment as part of the Action Plan on Nature Diversity. Rainforest Foundation Norway was the main lobbying power behind this recommendation and has worked for years to bring the pledge to existence.

Thousands of people have been evacuated from a New Zealand town as firefighters battle a wildfire stoked by winds in the country's South Island. The blaze, which began six days ago near the city of Nelson, is now threatening the town of Wakefield. A state of emergency has been declared and about 3,000 people have fled their homes in the district of Tasman.

Insects like the cold-hardy emerald ash borer could see mass die-offs, but survivors could have hardier offspring

Brazil’s indigenous peoples face a powerful foe in the new president, says Fiona Watson of Survival International

KOTA KINABALU: Swedish furniture retailer Ikea has completed the replanting of three million rainforest trees at Luasong in east coast Sabah as part of its efforts to rehabilitate the degraded forest since 1998.

At the edge of a forest on the northern plains of Cambodia, an indigenous community is building its own security system. By Matt Blomberg.

The felling of rainforests in the Amazon is at its highest rate in the past 10 years, official figures show, with the authorities blaming illegal logging. An area of 7,900 sq km (3,050 sq miles) – roughly five times the size of London – was levelled alone in the 12 months to July, a study revealed. It comes amid fears that the policies of Brazil’s newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro, could further damage the declining rainforests.

Parks are doing what they can to keep the nation’s natural treasures safe for future generations — and out of your car's trunk.

Tree cover loss in the tropics was outweighed by tree cover gain in subtropical, temperate, boreal, and polar regions.

A team of researchers from the University of Maryland, the State University of New York and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has found that new global tree growth over the past 35 years has more than offset global tree cover losses. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes using satellite data to track forest growth and loss over the past 35 years and what they found by doing so.

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s an idea that's grounded in physics.