New roads open wilderness landscapes to development, and commodity markets drive the expansion of the agricultural frontier. These two causes of deforestation are at the centre of deforestation policy discussions.…
DUBAI — It was Sara Olsvig's love of ice that brought her to the desert of Dubai for the 2023 U.N. climate summit, COP28. As an Inuit child growing up…
Mina Setra remembers a time before oil palm plantations changed the landscape of her childhood home. Setra, an Indigenous Dayak Pompakng, grew up when forests surrounded her village in the…
JAKARTA — Since its inception in 2017, the Jakarta-based Sustainable District Association, or LTKL, has brought together district governments and other stakeholders to take collective action toward greater sustainability, mainly…
TACLOBAN, Philippines — “I can’t walk but I can fish,” says 68-year old Rodolfo Deliva, a lifelong fisherman. For nearly two decades he’s relied on his crutches to get around…
There is only limited potential for finance to change agricultural practices in the Andean Amazon, because landscapes are largely populated by smallholders who are notoriously risk-adverse in how they manage…
Nepal’s community forestry program has been hailed as a success for helping increase the country’s forest cover from 26% to 45% in 25 years. As part of the program, pioneered…
The agricultural producers of the Amazon have access to radically different levels of credit depending upon national policies, the willingness of each country’s financial services industry to engage rural populations…
Sustainability initiatives have been organised for most of the agricultural commodities of the Pan Amazon, including palm oil, soy and beef, but also for coffee and cacao. Several of these…
The most lucrative agricultural system in the Amazon is neither soy nor palm oil, but coca leaf, which is cultivated for both legal and illegal markets. There are two species,…
“Our wildest dreams never included what we are doing now,” says conservationist Paul Rosolie in a new podcast interview with Mongabay. What began as a grassroots initiative of his and…
Many of our staple food products are highly dependent on industrial agriculture and global supply chains, but small farmers in the Amazon continue to produce foodstuffs for their families, local…
While Indigenous peoples comprise just 6% of the global population, they manage or have tenure rights over at least 38 million km2 in some 87 countries. In many places Indigenous…
Cacao (Theobroma cacao) is native to the Amazon rainforest and has been cultivated and consumed throughout the Americas since before Columbus. Cacao can be broadly segregated into to contrasting types…
More than a year and a half since the iron ore mining stopped, the lives of Vanusia Souza dos Santos and her community in the heart of Brazil’s Bahia state…
There are two major cultivated species of coffee: arabica (Coffea arabica) and robusta (Coffea canephora), each with a multitude of varieties adapted to a broad range of ecological conditions. Arabica…
In 2009, a village in southern India became a part of a long experiment. The Shola Trust, an NGO, trained the village’s Indigenous communities to harvest stems of a vibrant…
“Humanity has opened the gates to hell by allowing the climate crisis to worsen”, said Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General at the U.N. Climate Ambition Summit in September. This year, 2023,…
One of the world’s largest palm oil companies appears to have overseen a network of companies responsible for deforestation of tens of thousands of hectares, according to a new investigation…
Coffee and cacao have much in common. Both are descended from understory trees adapted to the low-light conditions of the forest floor. Each have multiple cultivated varieties that differ with…
The spikes in commodity prices in the first decade of the twenty-first century coincided with a global boom in biofuels. The interest in biofuels was motivated allegedly by a concern…
Pramila Pradhan, 51, embraced thengapalli, a form of forest stewardship, because of her mother-in-law, who took her along on forest patrols. Thenga means stick, and palli means turn or rotation.…
It’s been called a “new scramble for Africa”: a modern incarnation of European powers’ 19th century imperial seizure of vast swathes of Africa. Under the guise of fighting the climate…
Palm oil is different from most agricultural commodities because the raw harvested product, fresh fruit bunches, must be processed within 48 hours or it will spoil. This fact dictates that…
Colombia Colombia is Latin America’s largest producer of palm oil, with nearly 450,000 hectares (1.1 million acres) of oil palm plantations in 2020, with another 100,000 immature plantings that will…
La Guajira, COLOMBIA — On Oct. 9, Colombia’s first wind farm, Jepírachi, officially reached its end of life after running for almost two decades in Uribia, in the northeastern region…
Oil palm is highly suited to cultivation in the ecological and climatic conditions of the tropics and its cultivation in South America has expanded steadily over the last three decades.…
The cultivation of soy and maize has brought additional benefits to the farm economy in Mato Grosso because it has increased the supply and affordability of feed rations for livestock…
At the COP28 climate summit set to be held in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates later this month, carbon markets are sure to be high on the agenda. And some…
Fire, illegal logging and invasive species have claimed 20% of the forests on the southwestern slopes of Mount Kenya in the last 20 years. The 700 members of the Chehe…