Wildlife & land conservation

This archive tracks meaningful progress in protecting wildlife and preserving land — from habitat restoration and endangered species recoveries to new protected areas and conservation policy wins. These stories focus on what’s working, grounded in evidence and reported with care.

Bear roaming through the misty old-growth forest of the Great Bear Rainforest agreement protected wilderness

Great Bear Rainforest agreement protects millions of acres under Indigenous leadership

The Great Bear Rainforest agreement, signed in February 2016, protected 85% of old-growth trees across 6.4 million hectares of British Columbia’s coast — a temperate rainforest roughly the size of Ireland. Reached after nearly 20 years of negotiation, it placed 26 First Nations at the center as co-managers, embedding Indigenous authority into conservation law.

Danube river band from the predikaloszek view point in Hungary with Visegrad and Nagymaros, for article on Mura-Drava-Danube transboundary conservation

Five countries sign declaration to create world’s first five-nation protected area on “Europe’s Amazon”

In March 2011, environment ministers from Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovenia gathered in Gödöllő, Hungary, and signed a declaration to protect a 700-kilometer corridor of wild rivers known as “Europe’s Amazon.” The agreement laid the groundwork for what became, a decade later, the world’s first UNESCO five-country biosphere reserve — a rare instance of rivers drawing nations together.

Eye of reptile, for article on biodiversity convention

UN Convention on Biological Diversity enters into force with 168 signatories

The Convention on Biological Diversity became binding international law on December 29, 1993, committing nations to protect the planet’s living systems as “a common concern of humankind.” Born at the Rio Earth Summit a year earlier, it drew 168 signatures — the largest sign-on to any environmental treaty at that point. It reframed conservation from saving single species to safeguarding the full web of life.