Yishan Wong is building a system that can transform desert land into fertile ground for the trees we need to help stop climate change. Until recently, a remote corner of the Big Island of Hawaii was barren. The area was originally an ancient sandalwood forest, but hundreds of years ago, when the trees were cut down to sell the wood and cattle started grazing on the land, it became what is now essentially desert. Today, a startup is piloting a new system to bring the forest back on a 45-acre plot—and to demonstrate an approach to reforest the planet quickly enough to fight climate change. Read Full Story

If we keep cutting down trees or destroying marshes, it won’t matter how many emissions we stop: The planet won’t be able to reabsorb the carbon we’ve released in time. Fossil fuels get the most attention in the fight to reduce carbon emissions, but preserving nature is also critical. Even if we drastically cut our emissions, it won’t do much good if we release the carbon that’s stored in living plants and soil. How much carbon is that? A new study found that there are more than 260 billion tons of carbon in “living carbon reserves,” including mangrove forests and peatlands, that are at risk of being lost. If it’s released now, planting trees won’t recapture it quickly enough for the world to reach the target of zero net emissions by 2050. Read Full Story

We need to massively reforest the planet, in a very short period of time. Flash Forest’s drones can plant trees a lot faster than humans. This week, on land north of Toronto that previously burned in a wildfire, drones are hovering over fields and firing seed pods into the ground, planting native pine and spruce trees to help restore habitat for birds. Flash Forest , the Canadian startup behind the project, plans to use its technology to plant 40,000 trees in the area this month. By the end of the year, as it expands to other regions, it will plant hundreds of thousands of trees. By 2028, the startup aims to have planted a full 1 billion trees. Read Full Story

If firefighters have a totally accurate picture of what will burn, they can predict how fires will move—and work to prevent them from exploding ahead of time. If you zoom in on a new map of California, you’ll start to see that the fields of green that represent the forest are actually made up of individual green points, and each point represents a real, individual tree. The tool, called the California Forest Observatory , uses AI and satellite images to create an ultradetailed view of the state’s forests—aiding work to prevent the type of catastrophic megafires that the state is experiencing now. Read Full Story

The administration’s new executive order on tree planting seems toothless. Its logging expansions are very real. In late September, the Trump administration finalized a plan to allow logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest—the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. A little more than two weeks later, on October 13, he issued an executive order calling for a new council to “implement a strategy” for the Trillion Trees Initiative, a global effort to grow and conserve a trillion trees within the next decade. Read Full Story

Why cut down trees when you can grow wood in the exact shape you need? Scientists have already figured out how to grow meat in a lab, nurturing animal cells to multiply into chicken cutlets and burger patties . Now, MIT researchers are hoping to do the same with wood, to quickly produce in a lab what would take decades to grow in nature. From there, they could even coax wood tissue to grow into fully-formed shapes—like, say, a table—in order to mitigate the environmental harm of the logging and construction industries Read Full Story

The Weyerhaeuser campus paved the way for environmentally conscious corporate buildings. Now it’s under threat. Within eyesight of drivers on I-5 in Federal Way, Washington, a celebrated exemplar of modernist landscape architecture and building design peeks out from a forest of evergreens. Like a skyscraper turned on its side, the building appears to be a low concrete bridge stretching across the landscape. The long horizontal tiers of its five floors are draped in ivy and overlook a pond and a meadow. It’s surrounded by lush gardens of wildflowers, and threaded through with walking trails that disappear into the maples and pine trees beyond Read Full Story

There’s a lot of former forestland in the country. What if we planted trees on it again? The U.S. was once covered in around 1 billion acres of forest. While much of that land has been developed, a recent study led by the Nature Conservancy found that there are still as many as 127 million acres of former forestland in the lower 48 states—an area about twice the size of Oregon—that could feasibly be reforested. In that space, we could plant 68 billion trees, which could capture more than 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, roughly as much as the pollution from 67 million cars. Read Full Story

How scientists are making sure increasingly powerful fires don’t wipe out forests forever. Last spring, a tree-planting crew hiked into the hills near Paradise, California, to take on a challenge: What’s the best way to replant a forest when it’s very likely that it could burn again? Read Full Story

A circular economy partnership lets the Eileen Fisher get a second use out of its old clothes, and gives the furniture company a new option for covering its products. A new line of pillowcases and a lounge chair at West Elm may look new, but they actually have a long history. That’s because they originally started life at Eileen Fisher clothing. The two companies are working together on a circular economy project to help both reduce their environmental impact. Read Full Story