Our global economic system relies on a wide range of financial services to operate. From bank loans to public offerings of shares and from insurance to trade finance. Most of these financial transactions will have an impact on the natural world: directly, for example, through a loan to a timber extraction company, or indirectly, [...]
Enzymes from hot springs, toxins from frogs, and the many, many medicinal uses of plants. Following our piece on zoonotic diseases, we explore how evolution has been a source of medical innovation. Did you know that a crucial ingredient in the test to diagnose COVID-19 was discovered in a freshwater [...]
As the COVID-19 pandemic has put both our health systems and our relationship with nature in the spotlight, Nina Seale investigates the relationship between health and biodiversity. Let’s begin with the elephant in the room: diseases that have transferred from animals to humans. Not just COVID-19, but Severe Acute Respiratory [...]
Jon Paul Rodríguez is the current Chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC). When the former Chair of the Commission, Simon Stuart, left the post in 2016 after 8 years, he joined Synchronicity Earth as Director of Strategic Conservation. The two men go back a long way, [...]
In this article, we seek to explore what conservation really is, trying to keep a balance between, on the one hand, clarity to a non-specialist audience, and on the other hand, not shying away from some of the most difficult and challenging issues. To help the reader find her/himself around the [...]
Isabelle Lackman founded Hutan in Kinabatangan, Malaysian Borneo with her then husband Marc Ancrenaz in 1998 with the aim of conserving the Critically Endangered Bornean orang-utan (Pongo pygmaeus). In the almost two decades since, Hutan has worked with the local community to restore areas of degraded forest and help people and orang-utans to live [...]
"Let us not talk falsely now, for the hour is getting late…” Bob Dylan Environmental philanthropy is virtually nonexistent. Since we were founded seven years ago, Synchronicity Earth has devoted significant time and resource into understanding why this is so. In fact, we were created as a response to the [...]