Elephant in South Africa. Hong Kong has begun destroying its 29.6-metric-ton stockpile of confiscated ivory. On Thursday authorities in the semi-autonomous Chinese city crushed and incinerated a ton of seized…
Coffee produced under the Rainforest Alliance's certification system topped a billion pounds (455,000 tons) for the first time in 2013, reports Reuters. The volume of Rainforest Alliance-certified coffee beans surged…
Fire in Sumatra in February 2014. If fires return to Indonesia, they'd likely accelerate during the height of the dry season which coincides with July's presidential election. Environmental issues have…
Desert elephants in Namibia. Photos by Rhett Butler. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio has stepped up with a $1 million donation to the Elephant Crisis Fund, an initiative that aims to stop…
Trees in the rainforests of Borneo have faster growth rates than those in the Amazon, finds a study published in the Journal of Ecology. The research compared wood production among…
Environmental groups blasted a "lenient" sentence imposed on the director of a palm oil company that illegally destroyed an area of endangered peat forest in Indonesia's Aceh Province, reports the…
The government of New Caledonia last week officially created the world's largest protected area, establishing a multi-use zone that at 1.3 million square kilometers is three times the size of…
NASA data showing El Niño conditions forming in the Eastern Pacific. The Indonesian government has set aside 2 trillion rupiah ($173 million) to prepare for the potential impacts of El…
Harvested plantation with rainforest in the background in Indonesia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Luxury fashion brand Stella McCartney has pledged to eliminate fabrics sourced via destruction of old-growth and…
Legal forest reserve and cattle pasture in the Brazilian Amazon. By Rhett Butler. The revised Forest Code passed into law by Brazil in 2012 could authorize conversion of 400,000 square…
Altamira municipality. Courtesy of Google Earth. Brazilian municipalities are planning to use drones to map properties and monitor forest cover as they move to step up enforcement of the country's…
Close-up on GloF-DAS map data for Southeast Asia. Forest disturbance in Malaysia, Bolivia, Panama, and Ecuador surged during the first quarter of 2014, according to NASA data. NASA's Quarterly Indicator…
Amazon rainforest. While Brazil led the world in establishing new protected areas in recent years, it has also stripped legal protected status from some 5.2 million hectares (12.8 million acres)…
Natural forest that has been cleared by PT Triomas FDI on the Kampar Peninsula. All that remains are young ramin trees. The rest of the timber was transported to APRIL’s…
Deforestation for palm oil production in Malaysia The Malaysian state should play a more active role in supporting the transition toward less environmentally destructive palm oil production, says a coalition…
Chopping down rainforests and orangutan habitat for palm oil production in Malaysia Safeway has become the latest company to establish a policy that excludes deforestation-linked palm oil from its products.…
Environmentalists say greener palm oil is better for orangutans, whose habitat in Malaysia and Indonesia is being rapidly destroyed for oil palm plantation. Photos by Rhett A. Butler. Two consumer…
Rhino near Kruger National Park. Photo by Rhett A. Butler Howard G. Buffett, the son of Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett, has pledged $23.7 million to South African National Parks…
A global deforestation tracking tool developed by Mongabay and NASA has been honored as a Finalist for the 2013 Katerva Award. "It is a surprise and an incredible honor to…
Rainforest destruction for palm oil production in Malaysia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler Orkla, a Nordic conglomerate that owns MTR Foods, one of India's major food companies, has established a…
Satellite image, taken on March 7, 2014 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows fires outlined in red burning on Sumatra. Indonesian Pulp & paper…
Forest destruction in Riau Province, Indonesia on 06/23/2013. Greenpeace is calling on concession holders to urgently extinguish fires on their land, immediately stop the drainage and development on peat and…
Click image for interactive map Fires in Sumatra's Riau province have spiked to levels unseen since last June, finds new analysis from the World Resources Institute (WRI) that reveals widespread…
Human-caused climate change is altering the habitat of Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae). In an article recently published in PLOS ONE, a team of researchers led by Amélie Lescroël from the…
Male Potamites erythrocularis stream lizard. Photo by Alessandro Catenazzi. A 'new' species of lizard has been described from the cloud forests of Peru's Manu National Park, reports SERNANP, the Peruvian…
Rainforest in Sumatra, Indonesia. West Sumatra has officially joined Indonesia's effort to cut forest loss as a pilot province under the country's REDD+ program. The agreement, announced today, means that…
Clearing for oil palm in Riau Province, Indonesia. The Palm Oil Innovation Group (POIG), an alliance formed last year, has opened its doors to new members who commit to social…
Recent deforestation in Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Norway's massive sovereign wealth fund is continuing to invest in coal companies that are destroying forests in Indonesia despite divesting…
A group of prominent scientists have blasted Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s pledge to oppose the creation of any new protected areas in Australia. The Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers…
The government of Pakistan is in negotiations with the Federal Land Development Authority of Malaysia to establish industrial oil palm plantations in Sindh and Balochistan, reports the Daily Times. Pakistani…