Scientists and companies are looking to a small section of the textile market to address the clothing industry’s threats to climate and ecosystems. Cellulose fabrics are fibers extracted from plants,…
“For the first time ever, there is a government that is against fracking,” says Amarilys Llanos Navarro. An activist and lawyer with the Cesar Without Fracking and Gas Movement, an…
Led by a teacher and a family farmer, 15 traditional communities living in public forests in Brazil’s Amazonas state earned official recognition and the rights to collective use of their…
Protected areas are important for saving tropical forests and biodiversity, but for them to be effective, local communities living around the reserves need to have access to non-agricultural jobs, a…
JAKARTA/NORTH PENAJAM PASER, Indonesia — The Indonesian government’s strategy to minimize the marine impacts of building a new capital city on the island of Borneo is severely lacking, researchers and…
Update: Shortly after this story was published, INPE updated the September data. The numbers have been revised accordingly. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is surging ahead of the presidential election…
In a civilized world, commitments should be kept. Sometimes it is impossible due to uncontrollable factors, such as a pandemic or an extreme event. But when it comes to Brazil…
One of the first on-the-ground investigations into the Democratic Republic of Congo’s proposed oil exploration blocks suggests that in some of the regions marked for auction, many residents are wary…
As the rest of the world closely watched Brazil’s presidential election on Oct. 2, the country’s conservative bloc made significant gains in a Congress that it already dominates. This could…
Liberian forest communities were supposed to get a cut of logging fees. They say they got a sliver MONROVIA, Liberia — On Sept. 29, several Liberian communities affected by logging…
A new map finds that roughly a third of U.S. mature forests are on federal lands, which President Biden appears eager to protect to store carbon. But much mature forest is also privately held, especially in the Southeast, and is at risk.
Across the entire 847 million hectares of Amazonian territory, some 26% of its forests are showing evidence of deforestation and degradation — 20% have suffered irreversible loss and 6% are…
Dutch biologist Erik Meijaard isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers. In the past 15 years, he’s published some 120 opinion pieces in Indonesian newspapers, many of them critical about the state…
Follow any river to its upper reaches and you will encounter the headwaters, the flowing streams that join to carry water, nutrients and life to downstream ecosystems and economies. Troubles…
Deforestation proponents in Brazil routinely argue that cutting down the Amazon is an effective way to alleviate poverty. For example, the Bolsonaro administration's official statement to the 2021 United Nations…
Jean Wiener should be elated. The organization he leads, FoProBim, has just won a series of grants to help protect mangroves in Haiti. In the coming months, he and his…
As Mongabay contributor Aldem Bourscheit indicated in a previous article, during the Brazil presidential elections on Oct. 2, incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva may…
A yearlong investigation by Mongabay and Earthsight has uncovered new evidence of corrupt deals and illegal practices used by Brazil’s largest flooring exporter, Indusparquet, and its suppliers. From its headquarters…
In March this year, the Brazilian Congress began deliberating a bill that would exclude the state of Mato Grosso from the country’s formally recognized Amazonian region, or the Legal Amazon.…
Look up what drives deforestation in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the results are many: trade with countries like China and the EU, mining to satisfy growing demand for…
JAKARTA — Less than a quarter of companies producing or sourcing palm oil from Indonesia have forest-related policies in line with best practices, a new report says. The report, by…
The Americas have a long history of occupation based on the destruction of nature and the violent massacre of native peoples, all in the name of a particular idea of…
JAKARTA — Indonesia’s program to wean itself off coal by burning it alongside progressively higher amounts of woody biomass will threaten more than a million hectares of rainforest and result…
IWUOCHANG, Nigeria — It was morning in mid-March and the wooden canoe skimmed silently across the Ibeno River in the southern Nigerian state of Akwa Ibom. A young boy and…
Recent data confirm that 2022 is on pace to match 2021’s rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: the founder and CEO of Mongabay, Rhett A. Butler, is a sought-after commentator on…
Scientists warn that the Amazon is hurtling toward a tipping point, beyond which it would begin to transition from lush tropical forest into a dry, degraded savanna, unable to support…
While forest advocates had high hopes, the EU parliament voted this week not to declassify woody biomass as a renewable energy source, paving the way for more EU, U.S., and Canadian forests to be turned into wood pellets and burned.
Tropical deforestation is predominantly driven by agriculture, but vast tracts of cleared forest do not become productive land. That’s according to a global review of tropical deforestation published in Science.…
The European Parliament has approved a bill blocking the import of "dirty commodities" by members of the European Union, in an effort to combat global deforestation. Under the new bill,…
On the northern tip of Madagascar, scientists have described eight new-to-science species of geckos, all about the length of your thumb. For decades, scientists have studied the Lygodactylus madagascariensis species…
