In November, Mongabay revealed a massive illegal shark fishing and finning operation across the fleet of Dalian Ocean Fishing (DOF), a distant-water fishing firm that has claimed to be China’s…
Famed undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau had a favorite shark: the oceanic whitetip, or Carcharhinus longimanus. He said they were the most dangerous of all sharks, more so than the great…
Likely the world’s most popular garment, jeans use huge amounts of water to grow irrigated cotton, a major factor in destroying the Aral Sea. Today, the industry, though making sustainability pledges, still does much harm.
KATHMANDU – Wild yaks (Bos mutus) are believed to have once roamed the regions north of Nepal’s Himalayas. The iconic large bovine, considered the ancestor of the domesticated yak (Bos…
Tuna is ubiquitous in Japan, from high-end sashimi to go-around sushi chains and every neighborhood grocery store. But despite tuna’s central place in Japanese food culture, few know what really…
During the decade-plus in which he ran a program in China designed to reduce demand for wildlife products like shark fin, tiger bone, rhino horn and elephant ivory, Steve Trent…
When Adhi Tayuh Braka joined one of China’s largest fishing fleets in 2018, he planned to catch tuna, knuckle down and save money to get married. To pass the time,…
Organized crime cartels and Chinese laborers continue draining the Amazon of jaguars and other endangered species, threatening ecosystems with collapse.
Scientists and companies are looking to a small section of the textile market to address the clothing industry’s threats to climate and ecosystems. Cellulose fabrics are fibers extracted from plants,…
Wide-eyed, slow-moving and roughly the bulk of a small loaf of bread, pygmy lorises seem fairly unassuming at first glance. They spend their slow, nocturnal lives meticulously picking through the…
Having spent 27 years as a wild cat scientist, I have been fortunate to run my fingers through the coarse fur of a 170 kg tiger while wrapping a GPS…
In the eastern waters off Hong Kong, a group of scientists searching for coral-eating nudibranchs stumbled upon a colorful surprise: three new species of sun corals. These orange, purple and…
In late June 2002, the container ship MOL Independence docked at a Singapore port after a voyage of almost a month from Durban in South Africa. On board was a…
Scientists have puzzled over the distinctive form of giraffes at least since Charles Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (figuratively) butted heads over how the towering ungulates got their long necks. The…
Anything goes in a Laotian “Special Crime Zone,” a haven for illegal wildlife, narcotics and human trafficking. Asia’s wild tigers remain imperiled, say conservationists, as “tiger farming” continues in Asia.
BASOKO, Congo — In Yaliwasa, northern DRC, logs from 200-year-old hardwood trees lie rotting deep into the world’s second largest rainforest. They were cut in a hurry to be exported…
China’s distant-water fishing fleet eclipses that of other nations, and so does its rap sheet, according to the authors of a recent report based mainly on data released by China.…
With national borders created for geopolitical rather than ecological reasons, it’s unsurprising that the ranges of more than half of all terrestrial mammals, birds and amphibians cross at least one…
The recent discovery near Mount Everest of “super large” deposits of lithium, the key element in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has raised concerns over the fate of water resources…
The seizure earlier this month in Nigeria of nearly a ton of pangolin scales and elephant ivory bound for Asia has once again highlighted the plight of pangolins as among…
On the 1st of February 2022, the Year of the Tiger starts. The Chinese zodiac is an increasingly popular pseudoscientific classification scheme with followers in Asian countries, like China, Japan,…
When researchers found a begonia plant twice as tall as a person, they knew they had something extraordinary. Of the more than 2,000 known begonia species, most are the size…
Over the past decade, the European Union entered into collaborative agreements with tropical timber-producing countries to fight forest crime and verify the legality of wood imported into the EU. Within…
In 2021, Mongabay’s investigative journalism set out to hold powerful figures accountable for deforestation and pollution, and the mistreatment of vulnerable communities trying to protect local ecosystems. Using data-driven analysis…
Acting on a tipoff, Vietnamese police pried open a basement door in Nghe An province and flicked on the light switch. Videos from the August 2021 raid show officers filing…
After forests are logged, felled trees are typically sent to sawmills, where they’re processed into boards, or lumber. It’s in this processed form that wood typically enters the international commodity…
When China announced, in late September, that it would stop financing the construction of new coal plants overseas, Indonesia looked to be one of the most impacted countries. The Southeast…
The largest and most accurate set of simulations done to date project dramatic crop productivity declines for low-latitude staples like corn in the next ten years and through 2100.
Confining conservation efforts to only 30% of Earth's land may render a fifth of mammals and a third of birds at high risk of extinction by 2030, according to a…
Since the 1950s, the rich tropical forests of the Greater Mekong region have been steadily depleted by the world’s growing appetite for timber. Did you know that if all the…
