Circular Economy, Pt 3: Are there circular solutions for global housing unaffordability and climate change?
Mongabay Explores
According to UN-Habitat, a global housing affordability is underway, with 1.6 billion people currently in need of adequate, affordable homes. That number could rise to three billion in just a few years. Home prices in urban markets have reached "impossible" of unaffordability while temperatures continue to rise as a result of climate change. On this third episode of the Mongabay Explores podcast season on the circular economy — the effort to design goods to be less resource-intensive, from their manufacture to disposal and recycling — Louise Dorignon, a postdoctoral research fellow and...
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Circular Economy, Pt 2: How Finland is leading the world in circular economy planning
Mongabay Explores
In 2016, Finland became the first nation to design a circular economy roadmap, in an effort to design goods to be less resource-intensive, from their manufacture to disposal and recycling. Tim Forslund of the Finnish Innovation Fund (SITRA) was one of its architects and joins this episode of Mongabay Explores to detail his nation’s circularity plan and the challenges ahead. Over 50 nations now have such plans in development, and while Finland is years ahead of them all, it hasn’t yet seen a reduction in its economy's resource consumption so far. Forslund explains why, and how policies...
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Circular Economy, Pt 1: EV issues are about ‘more than just cars’
Mongabay Explores
The fifth season of Mongabay Explores dives into the circular economy: the effort to design goods to be less resource intensive, from their manufacture to disposal and recycling. In this episode, we speak with circular economy researcher and policy expert Jessika Richter, associate senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, who discusses the environmental and social impacts of electric vehicles (EVs), and what we can do to mitigate them. As she says, any conversation about solving transportation emissions that only discusses cars misses the bigger picture: “We need to go back to, exactly,...
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Congo Basin, Bonus: Pollution & impunity in the DRC
Mongabay Explores
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), pollution from extracting minerals commonly used in the energy transition like cobalt and copper is on the rise, and miners generally ignore their legal obligations to clean it up. Cases of such pollution have killed and displaced people and caused major health problems, say residents and community organizations. The DRC is estimated to hold 64% of the world's cobalt reserves (3.5 million tons of cobalt, plus 31 million tons of copper) and could benefit from these metals by becoming a major player in the energy transition. But the...
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Congo Basin, Part 6: How the Congo Rainforest is shaped by elephants
Mongabay Explores
The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) plays a critical role in shaping the Congo rainforest, experts say. Though they represent incalculable and intrinsic value, there is much scientists still do not know about this critically endangered species of megafauna. On this final episode of the Congo Basin season of Mongabay Explores, Fiona "Boo" Maisels, a conservation scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and Andrew Davies, assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, detail the 'irreplaceable' value of African forest...
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Congo Basin, Part 5: Where's the money for Congo Basin conservation?
Mongabay Explores
How much does it cost to protect the Congo Rainforest? The world's second-largest rainforest provides critical ecological services that millions of people and myriad species rely on. It is also a massive carbon sink, storing tens of billions of tons of carbon in its trees, soils and peatlands. One would think protecting it would be an international priority, and yet funding commitments have historically struggled to adequately finance forest protection in the region. Experts say many commitments end before funding can be fully disbursed, and efforts rarely translate to a better life for local...
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Congo Basin, Part 4: A 'just energy transition' requires justice in the DRC
Mongabay Explores
The global 'just energy transition' has increased demand for critical minerals – such as cobalt and copper – for products like lithium-ion batteries, solar panels, and other renewable energy sources. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which produces nearly 70% of the global supply of cobalt, has a poorly regulated mining sector that's fueled by demand for these natural resources and which has forced Indigenous communities off their land and otherwise done little to lift millions of Congolese citizens out of poverty. The DRC has now opened up land for oil and gas exploration, too, and...
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Congo Basin, Part 3: Big challenges and potential for ape conservation
Mongabay Explores
Recent research shows that great apes of the Congo Basin stand to lose up to 94% of their habitat due to climate change. In the world's only habitat of bonobos and mountain gorillas, time (and land) is running out to save them. Hunting, natural resource extraction, disease, and other human impacts threaten their prospects. On this episode of the Mongabay Explores podcast, we speak with Terese Hart, a researcher with the ICCN (the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature); Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, a wildlife veterinarian and founder of the NGO Conservation Through...
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Congo Basin, Part 2: Can we right the wrongs of fortress conservation?
Mongabay Explores
The debate about how to best protect the Congo Basin's rainforest increasingly finds experts and Indigenous leaders arguing that it's time for a change, one that brings local and Indigenous people into the conversation. Fortress conservation, a model exported to Africa during the colonial era, typically expels local people from land they once relied on for food, fiber and medicine, but experts argue the concept that this model uses – that of a 'pristine wilderness' untouched by humans – is a flawed construct. Many protected areas in Africa still use this conservation model, though, to...
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Congo Basin, Part 1: Second-largest rainforest in the world at a turning point
Mongabay Explores
The Congo Basin contains the world’s second-largest rainforest, a staggering 178 million hectares: containing myriad wildlife and giant trees plus numerous human communities, it is also one of the world's biggest carbon sinks. On this first episode of a new season of Mongabay Explores, we take you to the Congo Basin and begin with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which contains 60% of central Africa's forest, but which also aims to open up protected areas and forested peatlands to oil and gas development. We speak with Adams Cassinga, a DRC resident and founder of...
info_outline"Sumatra is like a fossil relic of rare species...a giant, rhino horn-shaped island blanketed in the richest rainforest you can imagine...there's nothing like it," one of our guests declares.
The 6th largest island in the world and the 2nd largest economy in Indonesia, Sumatra is the only place in the world where you can you find tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutans all living together in an incredibly rich landscape of rainforests that, until recently, were largely untouched by human activities.
But that's changing rapidly, and this series from Mongabay Explores dives into what's special about Sumatra, its amazing biodiversity heritage, and what's at stake as forests fall for uses like oil palm plantations, mines, and hydropower dams. We'll also discuss positive trends for conservation and solutions that meet human and nonhuman needs.
Host Mike DiGirolamo speaks with two guests: Rudi Putra, a biologist who won the Goldman Environmental Prize for his inspiring conservation work in Sumatra and who now serves as chairman of the Leuser Conservation Forum, plus Greg McCann, a biologist and Assistant Professor at Taiwan's Chang Gung University, whose People Resources and Conservation Foundation team is exploring and documenting the incredible richness of Sumatra so that it can be better conserved.
View all of Mongabay's news coverage from Sumatra here, visit Rudi Putra's organization Leuser Conservation Forum's website to learn more about their work, and Greg McCann's organization PRCF has multiple projects in Indonesia described here (and details on the project in Dolok Simalalaksa/ Hadabuan Hills he discusses are here).
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Series theme song "Putri Tangguk" is inspired by traditional Indonesian gamelan music and licensed via POND5.
Episode artwork: Sunset over Sumatran rainforest by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.
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