- There are many important conservation and environmental stories Mongabay isn’t able to cover.
- Here’s a digest of some of the significant developments from the week.
- If you think we’ve missed something, feel free to add it in the comments.
- Mongabay does not vet the news sources below, nor does the inclusion of a story on this list imply an endorsement of its content.
Tropical forests
Malaysia estimates it will take a decade to build the Trans-Borneo Highway, connecting Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo with Brunei (The Malaysian Insight, The Edge Markets).
The NGO African Parks will manage the 150,000-square-kilometer (58,000-square-mile) Iona National Park in Angola (Africa Geographic).
Locusts have descended on Kenya, in the country’s worst infestation in 70 years (The Guardian).
Malaysian lawmakers are expected to strengthen penalties levied against illegal loggers (Reuters).
A dispute over land and resources may have left six indigenous people dead in Nicaragua (BBC News) …
… While in Brazil a man was killed during a raid to stamp out illegal deforestation (Reuters).
An economic study found that the U.S.’s biofuels policy has had an “insignificant” impact on deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia (Agrinews).
Numbers of the pig-like white-lipped peccary have dropped by as much as 90%, a study has found (ScienceDaily).
Other news
Bumblebees have lost almost half their habitat in North America (The Washington Post).
Some Republican lawmakers in the U.S. see addressing climate change as electorally necessary (The Washington Post).
A baboon in South Africa’s Kruger National Park kidnapped, then gently groomed, a lion cub (Africa Geographic).
Researchers wonder whether the platypus can withstand the assaults from feral cats, habitat loss and wildfires (The New York Times).
The loss of sea ice in northern Japan is both a benefit and a hindrance to spotted seals (The Washington Post).
Illegal fishing off the Somali coast is upending the small-scale fisheries on which communities depend (Hakai Magazine).
Millions of trees may have died after a tree-planting project in Turkey (The Guardian).
Andean condor numbers are dropping due to deaths related to pesticide use (The Revelator).
U.S. President Donald Trump didn’t mention climate change in his State of the Union address, but said he has a plan to plant a trillion trees (Undark) …
… Even as his administration moves to open up once-protected areas in the western U.S. to grazing, drilling and logging (The Washington Post).
Currents are speeding up across more than three-quarters of the world’s oceans as a result of climate change (The Washington Post, The New York Times).
Scientists have observed Alaskan brown bears hunting sea otters for the first time (Hakai Magazine).
Banner image of brown bears courtesy of Denali National Park and Preserve via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
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