Amazon mega-dam was built with 11,233 MW capacity, but has fallen far short, even as deforestation and drought make the goal more remote. The US$9.5 billion dam may never be profitable.
For many Himalayan pastoral societies, yaks are a cornerstone of their livelihoods as much as of their social and religious traditions. Climate scientists consider this cold-adapted creature a barometer of…
On Dec. 31, a fully grown male Sri Lankan leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya) was found shot and killed at the famed Uda Walawe National Park. It was also reported that…
Farmers and irregular occupants in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve in Acre are enjoying newfound political power and pressuring for the reduction of the first protected area of its kind in Brazil as it approaches its 30th anniversary in March.
This was meant to be a moment of triumph in the long battle to save the world’s forests. The year when the bold commitment hundreds of companies made to eliminate…
JAKARTA — Forest rangers in Indonesia’s Aceh province will this year be allowed to carry firearms for the first time in decades, in the latest move by local authorities toward…
More than one-third of the world’s remaining pristine forests, known as intact forest landscapes, exist within land that’s either managed or owned by indigenous peoples, a new study has found.…
Jaime Luis Arias grew up on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. An isolated coastal pyramid-shaped massif in northern Colombia, the Sierra Nevada is one of…
Deforestation during the final five months of 2019 hit the highest level since at least 2006 reveals data released this week by Brazil's national space research institute INPE. According to…
Global average temperatures on land and at sea in December 2019 were the second-highest recorded in the month of December since record-keeping began in 1880. That capped off a year…
COLOMBO — A group of Sri Lankan herpetologists closed out 2019 in style: by introducing to science three new gecko species from the biodiverse island that seemingly never ceases to…
2019 was the year the environment finally broke into the mainstream. Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s youth strikes and Extinction Rebellion, climate activism blossomed around the world, and green concerns were…
Three indigenous men in Amazonas state, and two peasant farmers in Maranhão, have been killed so far this month in violence experts say is spurred by Pres. Bolsonaro’s policies.
Governments could vastly improve the efficiency of money spent on conservation if they took a hard look at the species they prioritize, according to a recent study. The research probed…
JAKARTA — Indonesia is ramping up its fisheries in the waters around its northern Natuna Islands, following an incursion into the area by fishing boats and a coast guard vessel…
JAKARTA — President Joko Widodo’s focus on building tourism hotspots has created an increasingly hostile environment for indigenous communities and land rights activists in Indonesia, a new report says. There…
A six-week expedition to three small island groups near Sulawesi, Indonesia has yielded five new songbird species and five new subspecies. The new species and subspecies were described in a…
Toward the end of 2014, Tanya Rosen, a former New York-based international lawyer, found herself being followed by a car while walking back to her apartment in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.…
A proposed update to the global treaty governing plant and animal life on Earth calls for nearly a third of the planet to be designated as protected by 2030. That…
Goldman Environmental Prize winner Jacqueline Evans has launched the Moana Foundation to advance environmental and social activism in her home country of the Cook Islands. Evans won the Goldman Environmental…
The Estrondo mega-farm exports soy to the EU and China, but it is accused in a mega-land grab; it also has a long record of threatening traditional people.
Brazil is the most biologically diverse country in the world, harboring 10 to 18% of the world’s total biota. This biodiversity, however, is rapidly declining due to habitat degradation, overexploitation,…
EAST LAMPUNG, Indonesia — The government of the Indonesian province of Aceh, notorious for public canings carried out under sharia law, plans to put that same strict Islamic jurisprudence to…
Tropical forests Forest countries and food companies must build “trust,” one commentator says (Ethical Corporation). Chocolate producers see regulations as a possible solution to a long struggle with child labor…
JAKARTA — Environmental activists have called on the Indonesian government to swiftly crack down on plantation companies operating in protected forests, after the country’s highest court ruled such activities illegal.…
MANILA — Filipino scientists have discovered what might be the next big indigenous plant material for rehabilitating a mining site teeming with copper and arsenic — and it’s a largely…
Rare plant species are far more likely to go extinct than common species, yet we know surprisingly little about global species abundance. Most efforts to quantify species abundance focus on…
It looked like a game of parrot poker, but the token exchange counter set up by European researchers at a Spanish zoo was an experiment to determine if African grey…
Scientists believe they’ve uncovered a tipping point in the deforestation of landscapes across Earth: Once an area loses half its forest, the rest of the forest is often swift to…
Mongabay's traffic hit a new record in 2019, with pageviews increasing 34% to 102 million and monthly active users climbing 50% to 4.3 million. But the high level numbers don't…