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  • Cooperation and Chocolate: The Story of One Colombian Community's Quest for Peace

    Plagued by an internal war, a group of villages in Colombia created a “Peace Community,” declaring themselves neutral in the conflict and focusing their efforts on cultivating the 150 hectares of cacao trees in collectively owned plots to sell to global markets. While villagers still experience violence, the earnings from their crops go into a collective pot and the community decides together how to distribute the funds. “To them, this is actually a very profound act of transcending traditional capitalist society models and building something together,” says an anthropologist who has studied the community.

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  • Indigenous agroforestry revives profitable palm trees and the Atlantic Forest

    The Jussara Fortress program helped the indigenous Guarani people turn small-scale production of jussara palm hearts, a delicacy, into the main source of income. Sustainable growing techniques protect the jussara, which was endangered by deforestation and over-harvesting. This, in turn, provides for a biodiverse system with environmental and health benefits for the Ribeirão Silveira Indigenous Territory. The program planted more than 100,000 of the trees, which need a decade to yield a small amount of marketable product.

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  • In Ghana, a New App is Striving to Save Fishermen's Livelihoods

    With more than 200 communities along the Ghana coast relying on small-scale fishing, a new app called DASE seeks to hold industrial trawlers accountable for illegally fishing in their seas. The app allows people to take a picture or video of the activity and upload it to a database where it can be used by law enforcement to act. The app is already being adapted for use in other African coastal countries.

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  • The bold plan to save Africa's largest forest

    Under an innovative scheme in the Democratic Republic of Congo, indigenous communities are obtaining the legal right to own and manage the forests where they reside. This ownership has shown success in slowing deforestation of the Congo rainforest and creating new economic opportunities for residents in these villages. “Rather than just being an add-on, community forestry is now being considered as a mainstream model for forest management,” says a coordinator for the Rainforest Foundation UK.

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  • It Spied on Soviet Atomic Bombs. Now It's Solving Ecological Mysteries.

    Environmental scientists are using modern computing software to correct, orient, and analyze satellite images from the Corona spy project, launched in the 1960s and ’70s to monitor the Soviet military. The images have revealed human environmental impacts, challenged long-held assumptions, and helped predict future challenges. Within the last two years alone, the images have contributed to new information about climate change including rock glacier movements in Central Asia, shoreline changes in Saudi Arabia, and ice loss in Peru, helping scientists fill in knowledge gaps.

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  • Fish out of water: How B.C.'s salmon farmers fell behind the curve of sustainable, land-based aquaculture

    Dwindling numbers of wild salmon have been reported in British Columbia’s coastal waters, so many organizations, governments, and fishers have advocated for land-based salmon farming. The transition to more sustainable practices from open net pen farms, though, has not been easy. Some say the science behind land-based salmon farming has not been decided yet. However, Kuterra was the first commercial-sized land-based salmon farming facility in North America and it harvests about 90,000 Atlantic salmon a year that is sold in grocery stores and restaurants.

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  • A Unique Alliance Could Help Warn Us of Toxic Algae

    A unique partnership between scientists, state agencies, and coastal communities in Washington state allows these different entities to monitor and manage toxic algal blooms. Known as the Olympic Region Harmful Algal Blooms Partnership, the initiative allows them to take water samples and analyze them for domoic acid, which is a deadly neurotoxin produced by algae. This collaboration allows fishers from tribal communities to know if it’s safe to harvest seafood and state officials to warn people when it becomes unsafe.

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  • Hurricane Sandy battered NYC 8 years ago. Since then, how has the city shored up against future superstorms? Oyster castles.

    As a way to soften the impacts of a future storm, an artificial oyster reef was installed in New York City. This green infrastructure can absorb the shock of waves and decrease the amount of flooding, as well as build up the shore over time effectively reversing erosion. Environmentalists argue that this type of barrier is more cost-effective than traditional seawalls and will adapt to sea level changes over time.

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  • Could Seaweed Help Save Us From Climate Catastrophe?

    Seaweed aquaculture is a growing field that scientists are investigating for a number of climate-related uses, from reducing methane emissions in livestock to replacing plastic in packaging. Governments, startups, and researchers around the world are getting into the algae business that is also helping to create new jobs. There are challenges with scaling many of these products, but recent research for many of these initiatives have shown signs of early success.

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  • Here's What It Takes To Keep Colorado River Fish From Going Extinct

    Scientists and environmentalists are working to keep several fish species native to the Colorado River basin from going extinct. Through interventions like fish hatcheries and wetland management, some fish numbers like the ponytail and razorback sucker have rebounded. They’re now looking toward implementing their success at other parts of the river system.

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