Deforestation News

Mayra Parra presses play on her laptop, and the video on the screen comes to life for the Perez family in the town of Abriaquí, Colombia. As a spectacled bear…

In the Yucatec Maya language, Balam-Kú means “jaguar temple.” That’s the name of the biggest state reserve in Campeche, in southern Mexico. Part of the Maya rainforest, this area is…

The Gran Chaco, South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon, has been steadily replaced by croplands and cattle ranches for decades. Now, the semiarid lowland faces a new threat: the…

The Pan Amazon spans approximately 825 million hectares, of which approximately ninety million hectares have been lost to deforestation; this corresponds to ~13% of the original forest cover. At first…

In April, South Korean conglomerate Hyundai announced that it would prevent its excavators from being used in illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon. This followed a recent Greenpeace report that…

Politics is idiosyncratic to each country, but trends in economic policies span borders. The political economy of the Pan Amazon is the legacy of strategic development plans that began in…

Large-scale soy production for European markets has long been associated with deforestation in South America’s forests, including in the continent’s second-largest, but lesser-known, forest, the Gran Chaco in Argentina and…

Mark Wishnie felt pleased when he heard the news: Joe Biden announced his support of a $50 million debt investment for the timber farmland project he heads at Latin America’s…

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…

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn was a fellow. *Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from…

JAKARTA — Most peatlands in Indonesia that need protection are currently not protected, a new study has found. It identifies 5.65 million hectares (13.96 million acres) of peatlands — an…

SÃO PAULO — On Tuesday, Brazil’s Lower House of Congress overwhelmingly voted and approved a bill to restrict the legal recognition of Indigenous territories throughout the country. Among many changes,…

A renewable energy project that received millions of dollars in climate financing from the Indonesian government is bulldozing rainforest in the nation’s Papua province, according to a new article by…

The Brazilian Congress approved a series of actions to dismantle the president’s ambitious environmental agenda, including attacks on Indigenous people's rights and stripping powers of ministers.

Why do people clear forest? To anybody who has lived on the forest frontier, the answer is as simple as it is obvious: it is essential to the livelihoods of…

Indigenous territories with secure land rights not only reduce deforestation inside their lands in the Brazilian Amazon, but also lead to higher secondary forest growth on previously deforested areas, says…

The Amazon, home to the largest tropical forest on the planet, is an irreplaceable natural asset with enormous biodiversity and a critically important component in global carbon and water cycles.…

Thirty-five years ago on a sweltering April night, Enrique Cárdenas, a biology and natural sciences teacher, watched El Papantón burn. The mountain, which stands 1,939 meters (about 6,360 feet) tall,…

Drug trafficking, logging, oil palm plantations, oil spills, highways, illegal fishing, expanding Mennonite communities — in the Peruvian Amazon, there’s no shortage of threats against Indigenous peoples or their lands.…

READER ADVISORY: This story contains images of dead animals that some viewers may find disturbing. LODJA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Disaster struck Héritier Mpo’s tiny NGO in the central…

Imagine a burned forest in California. The charred remains of trees, the soot on the forest floor and the smoke in the air might make it seem like all is…

Bunge, Cargill, COFCO, Amaggi, ADM do Brasil, Viterra and General Mills bought soy and corn in an area where “grain laundering” is admitted by producers and civil servants.

JAKARTA — Top officials from Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s biggest palm oil producers, will meet European Union policymakers in Brussels amid a diplomatic standoff over a new deforestation rule…

It's been seven years since the last significant El Niño — one of the strongest on record. It triggered disease outbreaks, caused changes in weather conditions that affected fisheries and…

Flitting through the forest foliage, darting between branches and flawlessly negotiating their way around gargantuan tree trunks, bats have evolved exquisite adaptations to their forest homes. Although inaudible to human…

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn was a fellow. *Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from…

Interbreeding with domestic cats, and also with other wildcat species, is altering the behaviors and genetic profiles of some small wildcats, creating conservation dilemmas about how best to define and protect these species.

Peru has attracted millions of dollars in forest conservation projects over the years, has a series of international agreements and targets to protect forests and has 254 public and private…

The world’s largest producer of biomass for energy, Enviva, has seen its stock price tumble, as operational, financial and legal problems pile up, with investors possibly also concerned about the company’s tarnished green image.

The founding CEO of the world’s most prominent standards organization for carbon credits sold on voluntary markets will step down. David Antonioli will leave the U.S.-based nonprofit standard-setting organization Verra…