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.
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.
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.
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.
Jaú National Park was created by government decree in September 1980, drawing a protective boundary around 2.3 million hectares of Amazon rainforest in Brazil — an area roughly the size of Slovenia. The park safeguards an entire blackwater river basin, jaguars and giant otters, and one of Earth’s most intact tropical ecosystems.
Yasuní National Park was established in 1979, when Ecuador drew a boundary around roughly 10,000 square kilometers of Amazonian rainforest where the equator, Andes, and Amazon converge. A single hectare there holds more insect species than all of North America. The park remains home to the Huaorani and two uncontacted peoples who have lived there for generations.
CITES, the first global treaty governing the wildlife trade, became binding law on July 1, 1975, after 80 countries had gathered in Washington two years earlier to finalize the text. It now covers more than 40,900 species across 185 parties — a quiet paperwork revolution that showed nations could agree to police what crosses their borders for nature’s sake.
Earth Day began on April 22, 1970, when an estimated 20 million Americans gathered at more than 12,000 events to demand their country pay attention to the planet. In New York alone, a quarter-million people filled a car-free Fifth Avenue. Within three years, it had helped shape a generation of landmark U.S. environmental law.
Albert National Park opened in 1925, carving out protected wilderness across the volcanic highlands of the Belgian Congo — the first national park on the African continent. American naturalist Carl Akeley had lobbied hard for it after meeting mountain gorillas in the Virunga highlands, and was later buried within its boundaries. A fraught beginning, and an enduring one.
Although individual countries designate their own national parks differently, there is a common idea: the conservation of ‘wild nature’ for posterity and as a symbol of national pride. As of 2023, there are over 6500 national parks worldwide.
In 1662, English writer John Evelyn stood before London’s Royal Society and warned that England’s forests were vanishing under the weight of shipbuilding, iron-smelting, and careless felling. His paper Sylva called not just for restraint but for active replanting — one of the earliest formal Western arguments that nature must be tended, not simply taken.
