Environmental headlines

Politics is idiosyncratic to each country, but trends in economic policies span borders. The political economy of the Pan Amazon is the legacy of strategic development plans that began in…

Climate change has been shown to affect the timing of reproduction in birds. Studies investigating the effects of higher temperatures have found that many bird species have started breeding earlier…

The world won’t be able to limit global temperature rise as called for in the 2015 Paris Agreement without eventually eliminating the use of fossil fuels, according to Simon Stiell,…

We live in a rapidly urbanizing world, with half of humanity now concentrated in cities. Without adequate and affordable housing, more than a billion people live in informal settlements or…

As we head into the mid-year climate talks in Bonn, Germany, the corporate co-opting of the climate agenda has never been starker. Public pressure must be brought to bear on…

Mayra Parra presses play on her laptop, and the video on the screen comes to life for the Perez family in the town of Abriaquí, Colombia. As a spectacled bear…

In the Yucatec Maya language, Balam-Kú means “jaguar temple.” That’s the name of the biggest state reserve in Campeche, in southern Mexico. Part of the Maya rainforest, this area is…

When it comes to the Belo Monte dam complex on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon, biologists and fishers agree on one thing: this hydroelectric power plant, theoretically the…

The Gran Chaco, South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon, has been steadily replaced by croplands and cattle ranches for decades. Now, the semiarid lowland faces a new threat: the…

In April, the National People's Congress, China's legislative branch, passed the "Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) Ecosystem Protection Act" (hereafter referred to as the QTP Act). The QTP Act is China's first…

In front of his rural home in the district of Thyolo in southern Malawi, Douglas Tana grows maize on a tenth of a hectare, or a quarter acre. Before 2010,…

A new report has highlighted the maritime border zone between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines as a hotbed for the illegal wildlife trade, and called for urgent intergovernmental action to…

Pico de Orizaba National Park is one of the most important protected areas in central Mexico. The park spans 19,000 hectares (47,000 acres), is home to a pine forest with…

The Pan Amazon spans approximately 825 million hectares, of which approximately ninety million hectares have been lost to deforestation; this corresponds to ~13% of the original forest cover. At first…

In April, South Korean conglomerate Hyundai announced that it would prevent its excavators from being used in illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon. This followed a recent Greenpeace report that…

JAMBI — A quintet of Jambi residents gathered one morning in May at the home of Leni Haini, an Indonesian environmental activist who last year received a prestigious award from…

JAKARTA — Environmental activists and marine experts have criticized the Indonesian government’s decision to lift a 20-year-old ban on exporting sea sand, saying the policy will exacerbate ecological damage for…

Rosaleen Duffy has long drawn the ire of those who support a forceful “guns and gates” approach to protecting wildlife. A professor of international politics at Sheffield University in the…

Large-scale soy production for European markets has long been associated with deforestation in South America’s forests, including in the continent’s second-largest, but lesser-known, forest, the Gran Chaco in Argentina and…

Mark Wishnie felt pleased when he heard the news: Joe Biden announced his support of a $50 million debt investment for the timber farmland project he heads at Latin America’s…

BELO-SUR-MER, Madagascar — The situation was dire in Kirindy Mite National Park during a visit in November 2022. The previous year, a huge tract of forest had been ravaged by…

The past decade has seen a wave of academic and activist writings criticizing the use of militarized conservation to protect nature. In this commentary piece, we argue that the use…

PUERTO CAYO and PUERTO LÓPEZ, Ecuador — Luis Torres had just finished unloading the day’s catch in Puerto Cayo when he agreed to speak to Mongabay Latam. It was a…

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn was a fellow. *Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from…

TALANG PARIT, Indonesia — For more than two decades, the residents of this Indigenous community in Riau province, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, have watched as their lakes dried…

A court in northern Thailand has agreed to hear a citizen-led lawsuit filed against the government for inaction to address air pollution that experts say reduces people’s life expectancy and…

With Lula taking office early this year, the fund was resumed and should get new donations from the U.K. and the United States.

When growing up in the Congo Basin forest, I witnessed the consequences of forest destruction by logging and industrial agricultural plantations. In some areas, Indigenous communities used to live alongside…

Urban green spaces — parks, gardens and other green areas where people can go to enjoy some fresh air — are more than just pretty places to relax. New research…

A survey of all five vertebrate groups — mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish — plus insects, found nearly half of populations are shrinking, while just 3% are increasing, overwhelmingly due to human pressures.