DHAKA — Wasim Ali, 45, lived in one of the 55,000 houses destroyed by the deadly Super Cyclone Amphan in May of 2020. The tropical storm whipped up a tidal…
Indonesia’s planned new capital city on the island of Borneo, Nusantara, is being touted by the government as a "green" city. However, its construction may lead to a surge in…
At 49, Hamid Ali has moved house at least eight times in his life. The reason each time has been the same: the erosion of the char lands, or river…
There are moments in researchers’ lives when they realize the significance of something they hadn’t paid much thought to in the past. For primatologist Catherine Hobaiter and her team, one…
The world’s largest bank of the partially decomposed plant matter known as peat in the tropics is even more extensive than initially thought, according to a new study. The peatlands…
While modern water infrastructure assets such as dams and aqueducts have provided human civilization with electricity and potable water for a long time, it has also deprived us of it…
The increasing difficulty of accessing clean water is forcing young women in coastal areas of Bangladesh to try to halt their menstrual cycles by misusing contraceptive pills, putting their long-term…
If locusts return by the millions this September, as forecasted, South African farmers hope to follow their movements via a state-of-the-art tracking system, allowing for targeted elimination with pesticides.
Fifty-two-year-old Dhonjoy Mondol grows rice on his plot in the district of Sunamganj in northeastern Bangladesh. This year, he harvested 12 metric tons of rice from the 4-hectare (10-acre) plot;…
Freshwater’s life-giving benefits are being gravely threatened by humanity’s manipulations of the hydrological cycle, impacting the climate and biodiversity, and undermining Earth’s operating system.
Iluka Alain was a bit surprised when the two men turned up on a motorcycle in December 2021 in Bofekalasumba, the village where he’s chief in the northwestern Democratic Republic…
KIRKWOOD, South Africa — About 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, inland from the coastal city of Gqeberha, a brilliant patch of green stands out against a landscape recovering from six…
BLANTYRE, Malawi — A harvest of just four sacks of maize, each weighing 50 kilograms, or 110 pounds, means only four and a half months of food security for Ellena…
SATKHIRA, Bangladesh — Over the past three decades, Moyna Rani Mondol, who lives right on the coast in Bangladesh's southwestern district of Satkhira, has lost her home around 10 times…
The UK and EU were the primary users of woody biomass for energy. But Japan and South Korea have drastically stepped up their burning of wood pellets — potentially threatening forests, biodiversity, and the climate.
For the first time, a portion of the EU government has challenged the sustainability of burning forest biomass to make energy, a controversial policy pushed by the forestry industry but condemned by environmentalists.
Spotted hyenas appear to be adapting to climate change in Tanzania’s famous Serengeti National Park, surprising researchers who expected changing rainfall patterns would force the carnivores to spend more time…
In some respects, it was expected. The same doomsday scenarios. The same periodic reminders of more horror to come. The same organization of working groups. The same approach grounded in…
A new book by Wake Smith, “Pandora’s Toolbox,” explores controversial ideas for artificially cooling the planet. Smith discusses the hopes and hazards of geoengineering in an exclusive Mongabay interview.
Japan and South Korea are increasingly burning biomass, such as wood pellets, to make energy, with potentially adverse impacts on the global climate, deforestation and biodiversity.
Just east of Birmingham in the U.K. sits the sixth-largest university in the country, Coventry University, home to 38,000 students and a relatively new center for the study of agroecology — a…
The Mediterranean is a cradle — of civilization, of agriculture, of history. But the region, stretching across southern and southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, is also a…
As hot and muggy as most tropical rainforests are, you only need to leave their florid confines and step onto a recently razed plot of land to feel an immediate…
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a national emergency on April 18 as the death toll from floods in KwaZulu-Natal province climbed over 440, with dozens of people still missing.…
Bangladesh, a country of some 180 million people, has one of the smallest carbon footprints in the world. Its emissions reduction targets under the Paris Agreement are similarly modest: 5%…
The satellite imagery is staggering: an Antarctic ice shelf roughly the size of New York City collapsing into the ocean. Its demise, captured and reported by NASA scientists in mid-March,…
Only aerial footage captures the true scale of the horror: Houses have been flattened, roads ruined, and everything looks like it’s been covered in a film of dark-brown syrup. A…
For the past decade, an association of small farmers has been growing vegetables amid a strip of filao trees that grow on the sand dunes along the coastline in the…
Deforestation due to leather production, alarm over COVID-19’s spread to fur farms, and animal rights activism are all inspiring a booming fashion industry using plant leaves, fruits and microorganisms to imitate animal skins and fur.
With a four-page letter, the Pacific island nation of Nauru pushed the world closer to a reality in which large-scale mining doesn’t just take place on land, but also in…