Pesticides have been dropped from planes and even helicopters with the aim of evading IBAMA, the Brazilian environmental agency, for years as a method to clear remote and hard-to-reach areas…
PUTUMAYO, Colombia — When Jonh Jairo Mueses-Cisneros was approached by leadership at Corpoamazonia about turning Colombia’s southwestern department of Putumayo into a bird-watching hotspot more than 10 years ago, he…
Achieving net-zero carbon emissions by the middle of the century was one of the goals of the COP26 U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, last November. Guyana claims to have…
Last year, when Colombia’s parliament approved a reform of the nation’s environmental crime laws, the legislation received stark opposition from a surprising assortment of environmentalists, human rights activists and smallholder…
Josefina Tunki is a mother, even though she doesn’t have any biological children. In 2019, she became the first president of the Shuar Arutam People (Pueblo Shuar Arutam, PSHA, in…
In the Argentine city of Rosario, an award-winning urban agriculture program is marking nearly two decades as a model for how to put local farming and agroecology at the heart…
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is rich and not afraid to show it. In July, the world's second-richest person blasted out to space in his own spaceship. Come 2022, he looks…
The tooth-billed bowerbird gave itself away with a not-quite-right call. Suspicious, I’d panned my binoculars toward the sound and there he was, the mimic, high in the canopy of a…
The Carib language is slowly disappearing from the villages of its descendants in Guyana. But in the remote village of Kwebana in the country’s Barima-Waini region, a schoolteacher, a community…
At the COP26 climate summit last month, when Brazilian Environment Minister Joaquim Leite announced the country would update its climate goals to include zero illegal deforestation by 2028 (replacing the…
There once was a stretch of Trans-Canada highway so perilous it was known as “The Meat Maker.” The then-infamous section of road that transects Banff National Park, a breathtaking expanse…
Yasuní National Park in Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest has long been famed for being one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, home to thousands of species of plants, birds,…
Low German Old Colony Mennonites, who have been settling across Latin America for the past 100 years, have cleared 495 hectares (1,223 acres) of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon so…
This story was written in partnership with Mongabay Latam and Rutas del Conflicto. Leaving the headquarters of the Wayuú Women’s Force, Mülo’u took the first taxi she saw. It was…
Today, being an environmental defender in the Peruvian rainforest means challenging death. It means facing narcotrafficking, land encroachment, deforestation, and illegal logging and mining. It implies traveling hundreds of kilometers,…
Steven Donziger, the U.S. advisory lawyer for the Ecuador legal team that won a $9.5 billion ruling against Chevron over oil contamination in 2011, surrendered to a six-month prison sentence…
A drone camera soars over a timber yard where thousands of tons of logs are strewn across the ground. In one clip, a bulldozer scoops up a heap of wood…
Early on the morning of Nov. 15, five Constitutional Court judges arrived by canoe to the Indigenous Cofan community of Sinangoe in Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest, wearing rubber boots and…
Nestled on the ocean floor in Southeast Asia are five sensor-filled boxes that will reveal the future of coral reefs. For the past year, from their secret location, the Bluboxx…
DANA, Jordan — Rugged hills frame a valley surrounded by evergreen oak, pistachio and pine trees in the village of Dana, where stone houses built centuries ago perch on the…
Peru is home to many Indigenous communities that don’t appear on official maps. Without government recognition, these communities’ existence rests solely on their community names and on the knowledge of…
Before the pandemic, Ecuador’s Indigenous communities were on a roll, winning a series of lawsuits against the state for selling, or trying to sell, their land to oil and mining…
The heads of the world’s biggest oil companies denied accusations they misled the public on climate change, despite evidence of pending environmental damages and funding for climate denial campaigns presented…
Liliana Dávalos had only been studying geology for a few days at the National University of Colombia in 1991 when the program director told the whole class that women were…
In February, JPMorgan, the biggest bank in the U.S., organized an online event on "The Amazon rainforest and you," promoting sustainable investment. Now, a new report says the bank reaped…
Croatia’s Lošinj archipelago is home to a large resident population of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), which suffered a decline between 1995 and 2003. Driving the drop, among other factors, is…
MANCHIONEAL, Jamaica — Nestled deep in the northeast coast of Jamaica, hidden in the thick fertile forests of Portland parish, sits the multigenerational fishing community of Manchioneal. Families have been…
In the ongoing debate about how to tackle the interconnected crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and inequality, one term has recently been getting particular attention among policymakers, corporations and…
Earlier this year, the Peruvian government established a new agrobiodiversity zone a tenth the size of its capital, Lima, high in the Andes. Here, in the Marcapata Ccollana community, the…
A new version of a tool to measure forest carbon credits, TREES 2.0, was published last month. It includes novel avenues for measuring carbon storage and purports to bring clarity…