H&M and Zara/Inditex, two of the world’s largest clothing companies, today pledged to eliminate old-growth forest destruction from their products. The commitment lends support to a new front on efforts to cut deforestation from supply chains of global brands.

Safeway has become the latest company to establish a policy that excludes deforestation-linked palm oil from its products. Safeway Inc. (NYSE: SWY), the second biggest U.S. grocery chain, made the commitment in response to a shareholder proposal by the New York State Common Retirement Fund.

Technology giant Microsoft has bought the first carbon credits generated under a rainforest conservation project in Madagascar, reports Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which organized and backed the initiative. The deal, which WCS says represents the first sale of government-owned REDD+ credits in Africa, will help finance conservation efforts in Makira Natural Park, an area of…

Indigenous leaders have set up roadblocks in Malaysian Borneo to protest Sarawak’s newest dam, report environmental activists who oppose the project.

An oil company’s use of a high-frequency mapping sonar system was responsible for a mass whale stranding in northwest Madagascar in 2008, finds a new report.

Four previously unknown species of legless lizard have been described in California, report researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Cal State-Fullerton. The species, all members of the Anniella genus, were hiding in plain site, living in marginal habitats that included “a vacant lot in downtown Bakersfield, among oil derricks in the lower…

An inconvenient truth is not what most people want to hear before they’ve had their first cup of coffee in the morning. Our coffee break is “me time,” and we want to enjoy it. If the temperature is too high, put some ice in your cup. But for some 26 million people around the world…

A team of Malaysian and American researchers have mapped the genome of the oil palm, the oilseed that is widely used as a cooking oil and in cosmetics, cleaning products, and processed foods. The genome sequencing, which was published today in the journal Nature, identified the gene responsible for regulating the crop’s oil yield. The…

New technology makes it possible to automatically identify species by their vocalizations. The software and hardware system, detailed in the current issue of the journal PeerJ, has been used at sites in Puerto Rico and Costa Rica to identify frogs, insects, birds, and monkeys. Many of the animals identified by the system are typically difficult…

0 percent of the rainforests in Malaysian Borneo have been heavily impacted by logging, finds a comprehensive study that offers the first assessment of the spread of industrial logging and logging roads across areas that were considered some of Earth’s wildest lands less than 30 years ago. The research, conducted by a team of scientists…