After being stripped of her post for vigorously opposing mining in her community, a local official in the Philippine province of Palawan is heading back to City Hall following a…
Smelters and manufacturers that use coltan, tin and tungsten in cars, mobile devices and other electronics can't be sure the minerals have been extracted without using children or forced…
Based on the best scientific data available, the unprecedented Amazon Water Impact Index draws together monitoring and research data to identify the most vulnerable areas of the Brazilian rainforest. According to the index, 20% of the 11,216 Brazilian Amazon microbasins have an impact considered high, very high or extreme; half of these watersheds are affected by hydroelectric plants.
JAKARTA — A court in Jakarta has rejected a lawsuit by a remote island community against a gold-mining operation that overlaps onto their villages, in a ruling deemed “problematic” by…
Conservationists feared that chimpanzees in Comoé National Park might have been wiped out during a decade of civil conflict in Côte d'Ivoire. But camera-trap footage found a healthy population and…
Before Jair Bolsonaro took office as Brazil’s president in 2019, Canadian investment bank Forbes & Manhattan was facing problems with its business activities in the Brazilian Amazon. The situation began…
Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is a sanctuary for half of the world’s remaining population of endangered mountain gorillas, alongside forest elephants and many other species. But two road projects…
Legal restrictions meant to protect Brazil’s Indigenous territories from outside threats are failing to deter illegal deforestation and cattle ranching, fueling fears for the safety of uncontacted and isolated Indigenous…
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…
MAKOKOU, Gabon — In August 2020, the Massaha community in northeastern Gabon made a formal request to the government to declassify a logging concession allocated to a Chinese company, Transport…
A new investigative report details human rights abuses committed against Indigenous Batwa people between 2019 and 2021 in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park (KBPN) located in eastern Democratic Republic of the…
At least 358 human rights defenders were killed in 2021, according to an analysis by Front Line Defenders (FLD) and the international consortium Human Rights Defenders Memorial. Of the total,…
JAKARTA — A palm oil company whose permit was revoked at the start of the year and which was ordered to halt operations is allegedly continuing to clear forests in…
In early February, wildlife rangers in the remote northern forests of West Africa’s Republic of Benin became some of the most recent victims of the Sahel’s long-running Islamist insurgency when…
JAKARTA — An area of natural forest a tenth the size of Seoul has been cleared by a subsidiary of South Korean paper giant Moorim in Indonesia’s Papua region, a…
It’s a long way from Kyiv to Itaituba, but Brazil’s busy wildcat gold prospectors don’t need a map. The war on Ukraine has sent international gold prices soaring and word…
Organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah have filed a complaint with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples about a once-secretive deal aimed at locking up…
As thousands of people protested in Brazil’s capital against a “death package” of bills deemed anti-environmental and anti-Indigenous, the lower house of Congress agreed to fast-track one of those bills,…
Lazarus Nwobegai, who holds a government permit to harvest timber around Mount Cameroon National Park, knows perfectly well it's illegal to hunt the chimpanzees and other threatened primates that live…
TAMPAKAN, Philippines — For nearly a decade, Nora Sukal was the public face of Indigenous opposition to the Tampakan project, a planned gold and copper mine on Blaan tribal land…
Major investment managers including BlackRock and Capital Group are among more than a dozen U.S. and Brazilian institutions heavily financing mining companies that are destroying Indigenous reserves and their inhabitants’…
Brazil’s lower house of congress has overwhelmingly approved a bill that would loosen regulations for the use of pesticides, raising concerns that approval in the Senate would unleash further environmental…
In 2021, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s biggest province, Tshopo, lost 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) of intact forests to fires. Researchers based in the provincial capital, Kisangani, suspect the record-breaking…
MAKENI, Sierra Leone — Residents of Koidu, in eastern Sierra Leone, are pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the operators of a diamond mine they say has dumped toxic mine waste,…
JAKARTA — Local opposition to a mine on Indonesia’s Java Island, and the heavy-handed police crackdown on protesters, has turned the national spotlight on a spate of development projects touted…
JAKARTA — In the nearly two years since Indonesian lawmakers passed a controversial mining law, the legislation has increasingly been used by police to arrest villagers and local activists opposed…
NIMBA COUNTY, Liberia — In 2020, villagers from the Blei and Sehyi Kodoo districts agreed to allow Solway Mining Incorporated to explore for iron-ore deposits in their territory in the…
MAASAI MAU, Kenya — Two years ago, Kenyan authorities evicted 30,000 people from their homes in the Maasai Mau section of the Mau Forest. The evictees, many of whom had…
LUBUMBASHI, Democratic Republic of Congo — Armed assailants recently attacked the home of Congolese environment lawyer Timothée Mbuya. Mbuya, head of human rights NGO Justicia, is fighting a defamation lawsuit…
PUTUMAYO, Colombia — When Jonh Jairo Mueses-Cisneros was approached by leadership at Corpoamazonia about turning Colombia’s southwestern department of Putumayo into a bird-watching hotspot more than 10 years ago, he…
