Knowledge base
Frontline Conservation
Reporting from the machinery where the natural world is won or lost, policy, money, forests, oceans, climate, and the people holding the line.
Conservation rarely fails in one dramatic moment. It leaks away in budget lines, permit decisions, and the definitions of single words, the slow machinery that decides how much of the world keeps breathing. This is the reporting from that machinery: the policies, the money, the forests and oceans, the public and Indigenous lands, and the people standing between extraction and what is left.
We report it the way the rest of AEDO1's work is made, from the numbers, not the noise. Every figure traces to a primary source, and where the data disagree with each other, we show the disagreement instead of quietly choosing the version that reads best.
In the Report · 16
The Word That Protected Habitat: Inside the ESA 'Harm' Rescission
For fifty years, destroying a species' habitat counted as harming it. In July 2026 the federal government removed that definition from the books. Here is what changed, what didn't, and what the courts do next.
Read →The Fourth Global Bleaching Event Is Over. It Touched 84% of the World's Reefs.
NOAA confirmed in June 2026 that the record-breaking coral bleaching event that began in 2023 has ended. 'Ended' is doing something very specific in that sentence, and it does not mean the reefs recovered.
Read →Of Service to Those Who Serve
At Yellowstone's northern gate, an 1890s house in Gardiner, Montana throws its doors open, free, to the veterans, firefighters, and police officers who have spent their lives holding the door for everyone else.
Read →Six Million Square Kilometres of Pacific, Governed by the People Who Live There
The Melanesian Ocean Reserve would be the largest Indigenous-led marine reserve on Earth, an area the size of the Amazon. Its backers insist it is not a proposal. That insistence is the most interesting thing about it.
Read →Tropical Forest Loss Fell 36%. It Is Still 46% Higher Than a Decade Ago.
2025 was a sharp recovery from the worst year ever recorded. Both of those things are true at once, and reading only the first is how a catastrophe gets reported as a success. Bolivia, meanwhile, now out-loses the Congo with 60% less forest.
Read →Amazon Deforestation Is Falling. The Forest Is Still Burning.
Brazil's clearing rate hit an eleven-year low and may hit an all-time low in 2026. That is real, measured, and worth saying plainly. It is also not the same thing as the forest being safe, because deforestation and forest loss are two different measurements.
Read →Nobody Has Permission to Mine the Deep Sea. One Company Expects a Permit by Early 2027.
The UN body that governs the international seabed has approved no mining and has no finished rulebook. In January 2026 the United States streamlined its own permits for the same waters. Both sentences are true, and the space between them is the story.
Read →Two-Thirds of the Ocean Had No Landlord. On 17 January 2026, That Changed.
The High Seas Treaty entered into force after twenty years of negotiation. It now covers the largest habitat on Earth, an area belonging to everyone, and therefore, in practice, to no one. Here is what it does and what it still cannot do.
Read →Was 2025 the Second or Third Warmest Year? Eight Datasets, Two Answers, No Argument.
The WMO put 2025 at 1.44 °C above pre-industrial. Two of its eight datasets rank it second warmest; six say third. Nobody is wrong, and most of the uncertainty in that number comes from not knowing the 1800s, not from not knowing today.
Read →9.6% or 3.2%? The Ocean Protection Number Depends Entirely on What You Count
Two respected databases report the world's marine protection at figures three times apart. Neither is wrong. The gap between them is the most important number in ocean conservation, and it is not an accounting quirk.
Read →2025 Was Only the Sixth-Worst Year for Glaciers. Six of the Seven Worst Are the Last Seven Years.
The world's glaciers lost 408 gigatonnes of ice in 2025, a middling result by recent standards. That sentence is the entire problem. The rate has roughly quadrupled since the 1970s, and 'middling' now describes a number that would once have been unthinkable.
Read →90% of Amazon Deforestation Happened Outside Indigenous Lands. That Number Is Not a Model.
An October 2025 analysis projects the Brazilian Amazon would have lost 35% more forest without Indigenous territories and protected areas. The projection is a model and should be read as one. The observation underneath it is not, and it is the more remarkable figure.
Read →Forest Carbon Credits Are Sold On a Counterfactual. A Counterfactual Is a Model.
Peer-reviewed evaluations of REDD+ projects keep finding the same thing: real but modest climate gains, credited at many times their true value. The problem isn't fraud. It's that the product being sold is a claim about a world that never happened.
Read →After Four Centuries, England Will Release Beavers Into the Wild On Purpose
Beavers were hunted out of Britain roughly 400 years ago. In February 2025 the government finally created a licence to put them back, not as a free-for-all, but as a controlled bet that a rodent can do the work of an engineering firm.
Read →The $20 Billion Nature Deadline Passed in 2025. Nobody Will Know If It Was Met Until 2027.
The world's headline biodiversity finance target came due last year. The data that would settle it arrives two years late. An accountability mechanism that reports after the deadline it is meant to enforce is worth examining on its own terms.
Read →The Land Half of 30x30 Is 12.4 Points Short. Indigenous Territories Cover an Additional 13.6%.
The first global stocktake of the 30% target found protection at 17.6% on land. It also found that Indigenous and traditional territories cover at least 13.6% more, uncounted. The gap and the uncounted land are almost the same size, and that is not a solution.
Read →Go deeper
- IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Nature ↗
The global authority on the status of the natural world.
- Protected Planet, World Database on Protected Areas ↗
The data behind protected-area coverage and the 30x30 target.
- UN Environment Programme ↗
Key terms
- 30x30
- The global goal to protect 30% of land and ocean by 2030, adopted in the 2022 Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework.
- Protected area
- A clearly defined space managed for the long-term conservation of nature, the unit most conservation targets are actually counted in.
- Carbon credit
- A tradable certificate representing a claimed reduction or removal of greenhouse gases, usually measured against a modeled counterfactual.