Environmental headlines

It all started with the monkeys. What began as a research effort to understand the black lion tamarin, one of the rarest of the New World monkeys, has blossomed into…

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In a move that has prompted outrage in Cambodia and beyond, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court on May 5 sentenced five activists from the environmental group…

JAKARTA — To improve ecosystem management in Borneo, look at the population trends of key bird species on the island, researchers say. The scientists from the Center for International Forestry…

After Brazil, the South American country that lost the greatest area of primary forest over the past twenty years is Bolivia. The land-locked nation has seen its diverse forests rapidly…

A solitary whale frequently spotted in the Bohol Sea in the southern Philippines has long had a nickname: Bughaw, or "blue." Now, thanks to recently published research, the whale also…

Wild animals, especially big cats, have captivated human interest for as long as we have existed. The very first figurative art, laboriously carved out of woolly mammoth ivory over 40,000…

The Bornean subspecies of the Rajah scops-owl (Otus brookii) was first described from the montane forests of the Malaysian state of Sabah in 1892. Since then, however, its whereabouts have…

While Yanomami people were under attack by illegal gold miners with automatic weapons for the third time this week in northern Roraima state, Brazil’s Lower House approved a bill that exempts environmental impact assessments and licensing for development projects, further endangering the country’s ecosystems and traditional communities.

People have been planting trees to restock forests for a very long time. In the 16th century, for instance, wealthy landowners in Britain and Europe established tree plantations to supply…

The Australian government has moved to create two new marine protected areas that cover an expanse of ocean twice the size of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The two…

Beginning along Honduras’s northeastern coastline and stretching south into its dense interior rainforests lies the Río Plátano Biosphere. Named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982, the Río Plátano is…

BANGKA, Indonesia — For more than two decades Ardianto has walked to the coastal mangrove trees from his village in Indonesia’s Bangka Island at sunrise with a triangular net, searching…

Much of the land that’s been cleared for pasture in the Brazilian Cerrado could potentially be restored to its previous savanna state while still leaving enough space for the country’s…

Demand for shark fins and oil has led fishers in southwestern Madagascar to set gill-nets in deeper waters. They are finding — and possibly harming — previously-unknown populations of these…

During 18 months, Mongabay investigated allegations challenging the “sustainable” status of the Brazilian palm oil supply chain, unveiling the opposite, with impacts including deforestation and water contamination, discovering what appears to be an industry-wide pattern of brazen disregard for Amazon conservation and for the rights of Indigenous people and traditional communities in northern Pará state.

Created in 1987, the pathbreaking treaty not only phased down scores of ozone depleting chemicals and is helping heal the ozone hole — it also offers a flexible, regularly updating example for future environmental treaties.

In an unprecedented vote, 98% of shareholders of commodities-trading giant Bunge Limited have voted in favor of a proposal made by activist investment funds to strengthen the company’s non-deforestation policies.…

When Viktor Nikiforov heard about the dead Caspian seals along Russia’s Dagestan coast near the city of Makhachkala, he and a group of researchers went to have a look. On…

JAKARTA — Indonesia says it will stop building new coal-fired power plants after 2023 to meet its carbon-neutral goals — but the more than 100 plants to be built by…

JAKARTA — Researchers in Indonesia are working to identify the best practices for safely releasing threatened manta rays and devil rays that are caught alive unintentionally by fishers. Populations of…

An area of forest larger than Madagascar has regrown around the world since 2000, concludes an analysis published by Trillion Trees, a joint conservation initiative between BirdLife International, WCS, and…

There’s a tree-planting frenzy everywhere you look. In August 2019, the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India announced that more than a million Indians had planted 220 million trees…

On the land where their ancestors once lived, Indigenous and Afro-Brazilians band together in the face of hostility to preserve their cultures and traditions in the capital of Bahia state

LAMONGAN, Indonesia — President Joko Widodo met with fishermen in East Java last week for a discussion on fishing gear policy, infrastructure and how the COVID-19 pandemic had affected their…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought zoonotic diseases into the global spotlight in a way nothing has done for a century, even though zoonoses — diseases passed between humans and animals —…

"Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are," the French lawyer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in his 1826 opus, Physiologie du Goût. This is quite…

MANILA — As the climate crisis bites, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has unveiled its ambitious plan to scrap funding for coal mining and power plants, and ban support for…

I am not here to give you a startling new angle on the climate crisis. I cannot claim to have the silver bullet, the awe-inspiring technology that will solve all…

From Tripoli to Phoenix, the world’s thirst in great desert cities is deepening, even as agribusiness guzzles more water to feed them. Humanity’s arid urban places are colliding with a key Planetary Boundary, scientists warn.

WOB Timber, a logging company based in Hamburg, Germany, has been ordered by a court to pay a $4 million fine for illegally trading Myanmar timber. The April 27 decision…