Today, only around half of Borneo’s original rainforest cover remains. Indigenous Dayak communities could hold the key to its survival, with traditional rattan production a lifeline for local people, the forest and wildlife. In Katingan District in Central Kalimantan, WWF and IKEA are working with them for people and planet. Into the wild - Reaching the Kamipang water catchments area is a proper jungle journey into the heart of the peat swamp forest. Its final leg relies on narrow two-person canoes whose small smoky motors fizz and pop, protesting their load as they grind through shallow peaty canals at midnight. Headtorch beams penetrate the black, startling frogs and water skaters, and then surrender to flickering low voltage light, smiling faces and a broad dry deck. “We chose this place because it’s some of the last remaining peat swamp forest in Central Kalimantan,” says Ibu Rosenda Chandra Kasih, WWF Programme Manager in Central Kalimantan. “It’s prime habitat for orangutans and a lot of other endangered wildlife.” Starting off as a field and community officer, Sendy, as she’s known to her team, is an indigenous Dayak and has worked with WWF in Central Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo for twenty years. The place is half a million hectares, recovering from historic illegal loggingv but its also home to around 6.000 orangutans.

Climate change is threatening the livelihoods of thousands of cotton-growing communities in Pakistan. Together with WWF and IKEA, Khanewal locals Ramzana Bibi, Sarfaraz Bati and Irum Shehzadi are helping their communities fight back, through pioneering climate-resilient cotton production and developing micro-enterprise. Realising a dream - “We’re poor people,” says Ramzana Bibi. “I wake up at dawn, pray, wake up the kids, feed them and send them to school. Then I clean my house and go off to find work.” Ramzana is a cotton picker in Khanewal, a typical agricultural district in Punjab province which produces nearly 80% of Pakistan’s cotton. She lives with her husband, a casual labourer, and their four children in a one-room house in a small dirt yard between the local mosque and primary school. Every day from September to November, she picks cotton. It’s back-breaking work under hot sun and the rewards are slim – she makes around 200-300 rupees ($1.25-$1.90) a day for picking half a mound (20kg) – so in the off-season, she works as a maid or joins her husband, taking whatever work is available.

Where the Atlantic and Sahara embrace, and mighty ocean and boundless desert fuse, a vast coastal wetland stretches the length of the Mauritanian coast, its seemingly infinite sandbanks, islands, mudflats, lagoons and seagrass beds a place of contrast and diversity. Together, they form the magnificent Banc d’Arguin.

Legend has it that high in the heart of the Balkans, two shepherds fell asleep by a remote mountain spring. And by accident, they let its waters flow on to the plain below, creating two huge, sparkling blue lakes, Mikri and Megali Prespa. Perched high above sea level, straddling Albania, Greece, and the Republic of North Macedonia, the Prespa lakes are amongst the oldest and largest in Europe, first formed more than two million years ago.

Legend has it that five hundred years ago, Doña Ana, wife of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, fled the Andalusian court and took refuge in a magical pine forest on the Atlantic coast at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River south of Seville. || An oasis that has given us so much, Doñana’s bounty is neither limitless, nor beyond failure. A bellwether of our relationship with nature, the choices we make today will determine its future and the fate of the natural world upon which we all depend.

Off the Atlantic coast of West Africa lies a lone, small, densely forested island with a tiny lighthouse. Otherwise untouched, it also boasts another more impressive beacon — a magical golden beach. Here, every year, between July and October, driven by instinct, thousands of green sea turtles from all over West Africa return to the very place they were born.

In Southern France, where the Rhône meets the Mediterranean Sea, there’s a magical place where water and land embrace, where countless ponds, islets, marshes, reeds and streams fuse and stretch toward an infinite horizon, and blend with the sky. The Provençal people call it the place with no borders — ‘n’a cap marca’. Welcome to the Camargue — a waterland without parallel. Not just a kingdom of birds but a source of blessing and bounty for people as much as wildlife.

Lynda Mansson, Director General of the MAVA Foundation, introduces a new series of stories offering insight and inspiration for contemporary conservation from five iconic natural sites supported by the Foundation and its distinguished founder, Luc Hoffmann. It’s been said that sharing knowledge is a way of achieving immortality. For the MAVA Foundation, soon to end its grant-making after funding frontline conservation in some of the world’s most unique natural environments for more than a quar

After just over a year at the helm, Global Fishing Watch CEO, Tony Long, reflects on how a freely accessible and near real-time digital map of the global ocean is exposing illegal fishing and changing the rules of the game, and calls on all governments to contribute data and join the movement for universal transparency.

Around the world, camels are disappearing, along with the cultures and traditions of the people who have kept them. Hindu pilgrims washing away their sins in the sacred lake, Ferris wheels on the horizon, the crackle of distant loudspeakers, hot air balloons in the dawn sky, and camels. Everywhere camels, as far as the eye could see—barking, stinking, munching, spitting, crapping, and snorting in all their glory.

– how WWF and IKEA are marrying commerce and conservation in Maramureș, Romania, and helping protect some of Europe’s last remaining old growth forests. Photographs by iLCP Fellow James Morgan, words by Justin Woolford for WWF.

“If you want a confession, I found God and His creation, pure nature, in the old growth forest. And at that moment I decided I had to do everything possible to protect it so my children could see it for real, not just in books and museums.” Radu Vlad, Forest & Regional Project Co-ordinator for WWF’s Danube-Carpathian Programme, cuts an imposing figure, unmistakably a man of the Transylvanian forests he’s been campaigning to protect for over a decade. Those in the ancient county of Maramureș in t

“It all starts with the seedlings!” says Le Thi Thuy Nga (left), the manager of Tien Phong forestry company in central Vietnam’s Thừa Thiên-Huế province. “All of ours are propagated...