Anthropologist Maud Mouginot recalls an encounter with bonobos early one morning in 2019 deep in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo that helped revise her impression of them…
JAKARTA — The tropics continue to lose primary forest at an alarming rate, with an area of tree cover half the size of Panama disappearing in 2023, new data from…
The global race to secure minerals critical to the clean energy transition is driving toxic pollution with severe health repercussions for communities living near some of the world’s largest cobalt…
Flooding caused by heavy rains in central Peru in March displaced hundreds of Indigenous families and destroyed their sustainable agroforestry projects, raising concerns about how they’ll recover and what steps…
The conservation group African Parks says it has contracted the law firm Omnia Strategy LLP to investigate allegations of human rights abuses at Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of…
Last week, Indigenous leaders from around the world joined business leaders and politicians for the World Economic Forum's 2024 Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. While much of the discussion on…
LUBUMBASHI, Democratic Republic of the Congo — On Dec. 2, Togolese authorities intercepted 38 monkeys at the airport. They were being sent from Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic…
In 2023, Mongabay launched the fourth season of its serial podcast, “Mongabay Explores,” highlighting the Congo Basin. The six-part series takes a close look at the second-largest rainforest in the…
Despite the COP28 climate summit agreeing on groundbreaking language on forests, countries are still no nearer to closing the “finance gap” necessary to stop the destruction of rainforests, according to…
It started with monkey poop. A few years ago we analyzed the feces of wild baboons, chimpanzees, red-tailed monkeys, and red colobus in Uganda and found unexpectedly high levels of…
The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) makes the Congo Basin rainforest what it is today. As a key seed disperser, its dietary habits help construct the giant carbon-sequestering tree community…
In the two decades since the Franco-British multinational Perenco established operations at Muanda, at the mouth of the Congo River, surrounding communities have suffered the loss of the natural resources…
How much does it cost to protect the Congo Rainforest? Where does the money come from? Who pays and how is that money used? What models of forest protection work?…
A pan-African coalition of farmers, fishers and others meeting this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo will make the case for reorienting food production systems and agricultural policy across…
The approach to the “village of elephants” in the Sangha Rainforest in the Central African Republic must be made in complete silence. Not even the faintest rustle of backpack on…
The Rainforest Foundation UK claims that all the leading carbon credit verification schemes have allowed millions of credits to enter the voluntary carbon market which do not accurately represent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) produces around 70% of the global supply of cobalt and it is also Africa’s leading producer of copper. Despite the billions of dollars in…
On this episode of the Mongabay Explores podcast, Terese Hart, a researcher with the ICCN (the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature); Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, a wildlife veterinarian and founder…
JAKARTA — The tropics lost 10% more primary rainforest in 2022 than in 2021, as forest loss in deforestation hotspots like Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continued…
The past decade has seen a wave of academic and activist writings criticizing the use of militarized conservation to protect nature. In this commentary piece, we argue that the use…
When growing up in the Congo Basin forest, I witnessed the consequences of forest destruction by logging and industrial agricultural plantations. In some areas, Indigenous communities used to live alongside…
The concept of a “pristine wilderness” is a flawed one, researchers argue, but this pervasive idea — one where human absence is required in order to preserve land — occupies…
The Congo Basin contains the world’s second-largest rainforest at a staggering 178 million hectares (just under 440 million acres). It is also one of the biggest carbon sinks on the…
More than 60% of people in Central Africa have no access to electricity. An ambitious proposal aims to change that with a network of pipelines, refineries and gas-fired power plants…
A pioneering global study published March 15 in the journal Nature showed that humid tropical forests recovering from degradation and deforestation have the potential to absorb a vast amount of…
Campaigners sue Ghana’s government to block mining of Atewa Forest biodiversity hotspot Twenty NGOs and individuals are taking legal action to prevent the Ghanaian government from mining bauxite in the…
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — The first big news of the COP27 climate conference was a forest promise: UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a 26-nation partnership to conserve woodland…
After five months of waiting, the Indigenous pygmy peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have secured a major victory. Earlier today, the president of the DRC, Felix…
Healthy ecosystems are often noisy places: from reefs to grasslands and forests, these are sonically rich thanks to all the species defending territories, finding mates, locating prey, or perhaps enjoying…
African cocoa plantations have seen massive growth in recent years on its path to help feed the world’s veracious appetite for a popular delicacy – chocolate. The Ivory Coast, the…