In an exclusive interview with Mongabay, Marcelino Guedes, a researcher at Brazil’s Amapá Federal University, talks about how important the management of traditional knowledge is for strengthening the forest economy in Brazil to overcome the paradigm that sees standing forest as an enemy of development.
One year after a tailings dam collapsed in Brazil’s southwestern state of Minas Gerais, killing 259 people and unleashing a tsunami of toxic mud, affected indigenous inhabitants are still struggling to relocate away from the polluted waters of the Paraopeba River.
Deforestation and climate change could convert Amazon rainforest to savanna by 2050. New infrastructure development would quicken process.
The Isha Foundation, a spiritual organization headquartered in south India, is taking on the cause of revitalizing India’s imperiled rivers. With government and public support, it says it has successfully…
Indigenous group entered Brazilian museum and retrieved sacred funeral urns that courts said were rightly theirs, but which dam construction firm and authorities kept from them.
Amazon mega-dam was built with 11,233 MW capacity, but has fallen far short, even as deforestation and drought make the goal more remote. The US$9.5 billion dam may never be profitable.
Eighty-eight-year-old Le Huy Hoanh stands up from his bench and carefully poured tea in rural Vietnam, and mimes for us how he used to kill gods. With his long spear…
A researcher at the INPE Center of Land System Science, Antonio Donato Nobre, describes the state of degradation threatening the future of the Amazon rainforest in an exclusive interview with Mongabay.
Brazil started the decade as an example to the world, dramatically curbing Amazon deforestation, but under Jair Bolsonaro the nation is moving toward ecological ruin.
JAKARTA — Indonesia’s North Sumatra province, the only known habitat of the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis), has proven to be a precarious place for the ape. Just 800 individuals survive…
A company attending the COP25 climate summit says its dam will reduce Indonesia’s carbon emissions, but current science says tropical dams are greenhouse gas emitters.
The world urgently needs to embrace effective financial incentives to arrest the climate crisis, but attempts to greenwash hydropower are counterproductive and must be abandoned. As world leaders, industry groups,…
For two decades or more, alarms have been sounding for the Mekong Delta. It's being hammered by climate change, by a proliferation of upstream dams, by unsustainable and inappropriate farming…
SANTARÉM, Brazil, and BERLIN — I got off the mototaxi, a means of transportation that is part of everyday life in several cities in the Amazon, took off the helmet…
This article is the last of a two-part series on the Kaliwa Dam project. Part One: Controversial dam gets greenlight to flood a Philippine protected area GENERAL NAKAR, Philippines —…
This is the first article in a two-part series on the Kaliwa Dam project. GENERAL NAKAR, Philippines — In the barangay, or village, of Lumutan, the Dumagat-Remontados tribe speaks of…
JAKARTA — A severely injured and malnourished orangutan has been rescued from a plantation near a Sumatra forest where a hydropower project threatens the only known habitat of this particular…
KLP, with over $80 billion in assets, could divest in traders such as ADM, Bunge and Cargill that deal with Brazilian producers contributing to Amazon deforestation.
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — A court in Indonesia has annulled a permit allowing the development of a $3 billion hydropower plant in a forest that’s home to critically endangered tigers,…
Hydropower projects are back in focus in India, with the government declaring in the past sixth months that large hydropower projects would have renewable energy status. The government has also…
SAHANIVOTRY COMMUNE, Madagascar — The village of Farihitsara in Madagascar’s central highlands was littered with straw from the rice harvest when Mongabay visited in May. But people weren’t able to…
The government of Zambia has halted plans to build a hydropower megadam on the Luangwa River, one of the longest remaining free-flowing rivers in southern Africa. WWF reports that the…
This July represents a critical opportunity to protect rivers and the World Heritage sites that depend on them. Key government leaders will converge on Baku, Azerbaijan for the 43rd annual…
Indigenous reserves and other conserved lands in nine Amazonian nations are under extreme pressure as roads, mining, dams, oil drilling, fires and deforestation encroach.
I come from where the river burned. For much of my life, I’ve braced myself for the river jokes that often follow when I say that I’m from Cleveland. As…
Scientists call it flood-retreat agriculture. As a swollen river blankets a dry plain and then recedes, it replenishes the thin soil with enough nutrients to sprout grass for cattle and…
In a comment article published in the Nature last month, scientists argue that an “energy future in which both people and rivers thrive” is possible with better planning. For decades,…
Eight past environmental ministers assail policies. Amazon Fund and 334 Brazilian parks at risk; sweeping illegal deforestation amnesties head to approval.
BOKÉ, Guinea — As he looks out on a landscape devastated by bauxite mining, Lamarana Camara remembers when chimpanzees would wander freely through the thick forests that once surrounded his…
A first-of-its-kind analysis of Earth’s longest rivers found that they have been severely degraded by human activities and suggests ways for countries to maintain and restore rivers around the world.…