Most of the attention around palm oil production has focused on where the crop has the largest footprint: Southeast Asia. Yet oil palm plantations are rapidly mushrooming throughout the tropics, from…
The Lebialem Highlands, located in Cameroon’s southwest, is a global biodiversity hotspot, a place long protected from development by its ruggedness and small human populations, though that is no longer…
A study published in the journal Science Advances this month found that, between 2000 and 2013, the global area of intact forest landscape declined by 7.2 percent, a reduction of…
Great apes need intact, safe habitat to thrive. But deforestation and hunting have imperiled that safety, with four out of six species now Critically Endangered, including Eastern and Western gorillas,…
Nests, footprints and dung have been leading primatologists to new gorilla populations in the Congo Basin nation of Cameroon for over a decade. In 2002, researchers discovered nearly 100 Western…
Ghaa’s life changed with the sound of a gunshot. The bullet likely killed his mother and shrapnel from the exploding shell struck Ghaa on the side of the head; a…
Massive forest fires in the Congo and Amazon, surging deforestation in Brazil, and tentative steps toward reform in Indonesia and Myanmar: there were no shortage of major happenings in tropical…
Cables obtained by the non-profit Oakland Institute through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that U.S. government officials pushed the Central African nation of Cameroon to approve a deeply…
UK authorities have taken action against 14 companies sourcing timber from Cameroon linked to illegal logging. Six companies received a notice of remedial action, seven received a letter of warning,…
Michelin Group, one of the world's three largest tire companies, has just adopted a zero deforestation policy for its rubber sourcing. The move is significant because rubber is a major…
Other stories in Mongabay's Conservation, Divided series: Part 1: Has big conservation gone astray? Part 2: How big donors and corporations shape conservation goals Part 3: Conservation today, the old-fashioned…
The development of an oil palm plantation, which was thought to have been pretty much abandoned by the American company that ran it, has resumed in the Southwest Region of…
This is the fourth in a four-part series on palm oil in Cameroon. Read the first, second and third parts for more discussion on the topic. There’s an upwelling of interest in…
A new report by the Rainforest Foundation UK found that protections for Africa’s tropical forests are failing to actually protect biodiversity and forest communities. In recent years, hundreds of millions…
ameroon’s Korup National Park is home to elephants, chimpanzees, red colobus monkeys, drill, and a myriad of noisy species, whose squawks, squeals and howls fill the forest air. For more…
This is the third in a four-part series on palm oil in Cameroon. Read the first, second, and fourth parts for more discussion on the topic. Getting to Mundemba in Cameroon…
This is the second in a four-part series on palm oil in Cameroon. Read the first, third, and fourth parts for more discussion on the topic. n Cameroon’s 500,000-hectare (1,931-square mile)…
This is the first in a four-part series on palm oil in Cameroon. Read the second, third, and fourth parts for more discussion on the topic. ucked amongst the hilltops…
Cross River gorillas benefit from reduced threat and strengthened law enforcement thanks in part to mobile data collection, management and analysis with CyberTracker monitoring.
Gorillas have been caught on camera in the Ebo Forest of Cameroon for the first time ever. Ebo Forest is comprised of nearly 2,000 square kilometers (about 770 square miles)…
In southeast Cameroon, World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) has helped support a number of conservation initiatives, including the creation of three national parks. But WWF’s presence in Cameroon since…
International NGOs are denouncing the charges brought against Nasako Besingi, a leader in the fight against a project by U.S. agribusiness giant Herakles Farms to develop oil palm plantations in Cameroon.
Norway and several European Nations, along with the United Nations and the World Bank, today committed to a new initiative that takes aim at the underlying causes of deforestation in…
While most people love chocolate, few are aware of the problems associated with the production of its main ingredient, cacao. The cacao business has traditionally been an ugly one, associated…
Protesters demonstrate in front of Bolloré’s headquarters near Paris calling on the multinational conglomerate to return land, or compensate farmers, over disputed concessions for plantations in Cambodia and three African…
. Communities in the Central African rainforest can now report illegal logging in their territories as it happens, potentially enabling real-time law enforcement action. The system, developed in a partnership…
Worker harvesting fresh fruit bunches in an oil palm plantation in Riau, Sumatra. Photos by Rhett A. Butler. Declining crop prices usually spell bad news for farmers, and poor smallholders…
Click charts to enlarge Loss of tropical forests accelerated roughly 60 percent during the 2000s, argues a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The findings contradict previous research…
Society for Conservation Biology warns that Africa could follow Southeast Asia in losing substantial amounts of its forest Africa’s people, forests and wildlife are in trouble if the mostly unbridled…
Logging in Gabon. Photos by Rhett A. Butler Selective logging is causing long-term changes to tropical forests in Africa by facilitating the growth of weeds and vines, which reduces plant…
