Word: forests
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There are two important things to know about tracking wild elephants, and it's better to learn both of them before you're actually in the jungle, tracking wild elephants. First, elephants are fast. In thick forest - in this case, the vast Ulu Masen ecosystem in the Indonesian province of Aceh, where leeches writhe beneath your feet and white-handed gibbons hoot from the treetops - they can outpace even deer. Second, elephants can't climb trees. This is good, because that's precisely what you're meant to do if one of them charges...
...Green plants use light to transform carbon dioxide, absorbed from the atmosphere, and water into organic compounds, with oxygen as a by-product. The process is called photosynthesis, and it enables forests like Ulu Masen to play a critical role in regulating our climate. Forests store an estimated 300 billion tons of carbon, or the equivalent of 40 times the world's total annual greenhouse-gas emissions - emissions that cause global warming. Destroy the trees and you release that carbon into the atmosphere, putting the great challenge of our age - averting catastrophic climate change - beyond reach. Forest destruction accounts...
...good news is that protecting forests "is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to take a big bite out of the apple when it comes to emissions," says Greenpeace spokesman Daniel Kessler. Ulu Masen will be one of the first forests to be protected under a pioneering U.N. program called REDD - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries - that offers a powerful financial incentive to keep forests intact. Here's how it works. Preserve Ulu Masen, and over the next 30 years an estimated 100 million tons of carbon are prevented from entering the earth...
...endangered - in fact on the verge of extinction - and the local population is just 150. Although that's considered relatively good, sightings are never guaranteed. But we were lucky. Troops of large, red-nosed males, with their harems and button-nosed babies, whooped their way across the dripping rain forest. Young males gathered separately, to groom or fight each other in the mangroves. (See TIME's photo essay "Bonobo Eden...
...will link Peru's Pacific coast to Sao Paulo on Brazil's southern Atlantic coast. A few years ago it would take a week to get from Cuzco, in the Andes, to Quince Mil, with the road reaching elevations of 14,000 feet and descending fast into thick, tropical forest. The same route, now being paved by a Brazilian construction company, will take around six hours when the road is finished. "The road means radical change for the population. It is a great opportunity for people throughout the valley to get their products to markets," says Samanez, who expects...