The April Fool
From France to Iceland to the United States, April Fools’ Day will be celebrated on Tuesday with practical jokes and elaborate hoaxes, so make sure to triple check viral posts and don’t leave your back open to any stray sticky notes. The jokesters’ custom has been around for hundreds of years, although its exact birth is difficult to pinpoint. These days, depending on your location, it could be marked with a fish secretly pinned to someone’s back or a whoopee cushion or even news reports of flying penguins (yes, that actually happened). In the U.S., the pranks are typically followed by screams of “April Fools!” to make sure all are aware that they were the unsuspecting recipient of a practical joke. Here are some thing to know about April Fools’ Day and its history…
White House aides have drafted a proposal that would levy tariffs of roughly 20% on most imports, the Washington Post reported. The report cited three people familiar with the matter. It also said White House advisers cautioned that several options are still on the table, meaning the 20% tariffs may not come to pass. Another plan being considered is the country-by-country “reciprocal” approach, according to the Washington Post. The report comes a day before April 2, when President Donald Trump is set to announce his larger plans for global trade. The date has loomed over Wall Street, where stocks have been struggling in part due to uncertainty around rapidly changing global trade policy. Unlike the tariffs already announced by the Trump administration, the new plan is expected to be more widespread and permanent as opposed to targeting specific countries or industries. 
Donald Trump’s trade war is alarming the global markets, sending shares sliding in their worst month in over two years. Stock markets across the Asia-Pacific region are in retreat this morning, as investors fear Trump will announce swingeing new tariffs on Wednesday, which has been dubbed “Liberation Day” by the US president. Japan’s Nikkei has lost 3.9%, down 1,457 points at 35,662 points today, while South Korea’s KOSPI is down 3%, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 has fallen 1.7%. In China, which has already been hit by Trump tariffs this year. the CSI 300 is 0.9% lower. …Today’s selloff comes after Donald Trump told reporters that the reciprocal tariffs he is set to announce this week will include all nations. …On Friday, core inflation rose by more than expected, while consumer sentiment weakened to its lowest level since 2022. 
In a move that merges sustainable finance with industrial-scale environmental stewardship, Sydney-based natural capital investment manager New Forests has partnered with Japan’s Oji Holdings Corporation, one of the world’s largest pulp and paper producers, to establish the Future Forest Innovations Fund. With an initial commitment of US$300 million ( US$297 million from Oji and US$3 million from New Forests ), the fund aims to acquire and manage 70,000 hectares of plantation forests across Southeast Asia, North and Latin America, and Africa… The partnership signals an alignment between traditional manufacturing and ecological impact investing. Oji Holdings, which already manages 635,000 hectares of plantation forests worldwide, is leveraging this initiative to meet its 2030 net sequestration goal of 1.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, integrating climate action into its global forest footprint.
Indonesia is one of the active exporters of logs and sawn wood, so the waste generated is very large. One of the applicable technologies developed for the utilization of wood saw waste is to process it into liquid smoke through the pyrolysis process. The application of liquid smoke to plants can affect plant’s growth and production processes due to the presence of acetic acid and methanol. The purpose of this research was to find out about the properties of Surian sawn waste liquid smoke and how it could be used as a biofertilizer an Arabica coffee seeds. …The effectiveness of liquid smoke from sawn wood waste for the increase in height, stem diameter, and the highest number of leaves of coffee seeds was obtained at a concentration of 2.5%.
Wood, a traditional and sustainable structural material, has long been used in construction and furniture due to its availability and mechanical properties. However, natural wood’s strength is often insufficient for advanced engineering applications. Now, 
The world is running out of time to halt deforestation. Yet instead of stepping up, the US is dismantling forest protections and undermining global progress – highlighting the dangers of global forest policy that fails to hold the wealthiest, most powerful countries accountable. …But the latest actions by the US highlight just how dangerous and unbalanced this paradigm is. …Under the pretense of national security, Trump’s orders aim to gut environmental safeguards and fast-track industrial clearcutting in some of the US’s most precious and climate-critical forests. …Meanwhile, as Europe strengthens forest accountability, US state officials are pushing to exempt the country from new deforestation protections.. These officials, echoing industry talking points, are urging the EU to exclude US wood products from a law requiring due diligence to prevent imports or exports tied to deforestation or forest degradation. Their argument? That the US doesn’t need oversight.
Gland, Switzerland – The number of fungi species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species has surpassed 1,000, confirming that deforestation, agricultural expansion and urban development are driving these species to decline worldwide. The IUCN Red List now includes 169,420 species, of which 47,187 are threatened with extinction. The addition of 482 newly assessed fungi species brings their number on the IUCN Red List to 1,300, of which at least 411 are at risk of extinction. “Fungi are the unsung heroes of life on Earth – yet they have long been overlooked. …we have taken a vital step forward: over 1,000 of the world’s 155,000 known fungal species have now been assessed for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the most comprehensive source of information on extinction risk. Now, it’s time to turn this knowledge into action and safeguard the extraordinary fungal kingdom,” said Dr Grethel Aguilar, IUCN Director General.
Last year was Ukraine’s worst year for wildfires in more than three decades of record-keeping, as shelling along front lines in the war with Russia triggered an unprecedented number of blazes, scientists said. Forest fires in Ukraine in 2024 burnt more than twice the area destroyed by fire in the entire 27-country European Union in 2024. Satellite data showed nearly 9,000 fires torched a total of 965,000 hectares in Ukraine in 2024. Ukraine has around 10 million hectares, or 100,000 sq km (38,610 sq miles), of forest. Around a third of the area burned last year was farmland… Maksym Matsala, a forest researcher at Sweden’s University of Agricultural Sciences, said the main cause was artillery and falling shells igniting fires. He said the jump in fires last year was partly because of a large build-up of dead and damaged trees since Russia’s invasion in 2022, which had created plentiful fuel for fires during extremely dry weather in 2024.
A new study is bringing hard data to understand how butterfly numbers have declined steeply in recent years, due to the combination of habitat loss, climate change, and pesticide exposure. A group of scientists is hoping to fix at least one of these problems for one species, by moving an entire forest in Mexico. The sacred fir trees, where monarch butterflies spend their winters, are struggling under climate change. Recently a team of researchers planted a thousand sacred fir trees at a new location at higher elevations to kickstart a new, future-proof forest for the butterflies to overwinter. Quirks producer Amanda Buckiewicz spoke to Cuauhtémoc Saénz Romero, a forest geneticist at the University of Michoacán in Mexico, and Greg O’Neill, a climate change adaptation scientist with the BC Provincial Government in the Ministry of Forests.
In the past, intact forests absorbed 7.8 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually – about a fifth of all human emissions – but their carbon storage is increasingly at risk from climate change and human activities such as deforestation. A new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) shows that failing to account for the potentially decreasing ability of forests to absorb CO₂ could make reaching the Paris agreement targets significantly harder, if not impossible, and much more costly. “Right now, our climate strategies bet on forests not only remaining intact, but even expanding,” explains Michael Windisch, the study’s lead author and PIK guest scientist. “However, with escalating wildfires like in California, and continued deforestation in the Amazon, that’s a gamble. Climate change itself puts forests’ immense carbon stores at risk.” … “We must act immediately to safeguard the carbon stored in forests,” Windisch emphasises. 
BENGALURU/JAKARTA
