ATTAPEU PROVINCE, Laos – In July, a hydroelectric dam collapse in Laos released five billion cubic meters of water into surrounding countryside – the equivalent of two million Olympic swimming…
JAKARTA — A devastating tsunami that killed more than 400 people in Indonesia has left the last surviving population of Javan rhinos unscathed — but has highlighted once again the…
Severe flood events have become five times more common over the last century as a result of natural atmospheric oscillations and human-driven climate change.
The most popular stories last week from our Spanish-language service, Mongabay-Latam, followed farmed salmon escapes in Chile, a new biosphere reserve in Ecuador, and high-tech forest monitoring in Peru. Patagonia’s…
MALANG, Indonesia — Wildfires are sweeping across a savanna and protected rainforest in Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park in Java, home to one of the world’s rarest leopard subspecies and…
BELEQ, Indonesia — “Alhamdulillah, my family is safe,” says a misty-eyed Jumayar, giving thanks to god. His home, once proud and tall, lies crumpled beside him in a tangle of…
The most popular stories from our Spanish-language service, Mongabay-Latam, this past week investigated how land trafficking is destroying Lima’s fragile hill ecosystems; government inaction and oil spills in Venezuela; open…
Laos will suspend new hydropower projects and carry out safety inspections of all existing dams, the government announced last week. The Aug. 7 decision came in the aftermath of the…
Two weeks after a dam in the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower facility collapsed in southern Laos, sending millions of tonnes of water crashing through villages downstream, authorities are still counting the…
GEORGE TOWN, Malaysia — Muddy carpets and soaked furniture lay in moldering piles on the streets of this state capital. It was Sunday morning, Oct. 29, 2017. Eight days earlier,…
With each bout of persistent and intense rainfall in Ladakh, a cold desert region in India’s northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, the locals begin to worry. It brings back…
UTTARAKHAND, India — H.P. Upreti, an ex-serviceman, vividly recalls the day, five years ago, when one of the worst natural disasters struck his hometown of Srinagar in India’s Uttarakhand state.…
In 1998, severe flooding caused by heavy rains and exacerbated by deforestation killed more than 4,000 people in southern China. To reduce the chances of such an event happening again,…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government is preparing to punish state-owned oil and gas firm PT Pertamina over a major oil spill stemming from one of its undersea pipelines in eastern…
In early March, an Anglo American Brasil pipeline rupture spilled 318 tons of iron ore into a local river. Now a second spill of 647 tons has occurred polluting the Santo Antônio do Grama River .
The Norwegian mining giant has denied a new toxic spill in Brazil at its Alunorte aluminum refining facility, but admits to a “clandestine pipeline to discharge untreated effluent.”
Forest fires are no longer driven mainly by deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, with climate change induced drought now taking a major role.
Experts say 2017 Brazilian wildfires were caused not principally by drought, but mostly set by people, and worsened by human-caused forest degradation. Agency budget cuts worsened the crisis.
A criminal case against 21 mining company executives involved in the Fundão iron tailings dam collapse – Brazil’s worst environmental disaster – is again moving forward after being put on hold in July.
This week’s podcast featured a discussion between Mongabay’s founder and CEO Rhett A. Butler and Jane Goodall, the world’s most recognizable conservationist and one of this media outlet’s esteemed advisory…
27 percent of Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park in Goiás state has burned; flames blazed for 12 days. Arson is suspected, with recent park enlargement a possible motive.
A new study found that mining caused nearly 10 percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 2005 and 2015, not the 1-2 percent assumed by past assessments.
Brazilian politicians and economically dominant social classes have for centuries exploited nature as if it was infinite. It is not. The consequences are more than evident.
Mocoa, Colombia – The recent landslide disaster in Mocoa, the capital city of Colombia’s southwestern Putumayo region, left 254 people dead and 203 hospitalized, according to the latest report issued…
JAKARTA — Six weeks after the last of the Bukit Duri evictees moved into their new dwellings here in the Indonesian capital, the atmosphere was friendly but painful. Some tenants…
Severe floods have ravaged the state of Assam in northeastern India. Touted as the worst flood in more than a decade, floodwaters have swept away over 2,800 villages, submerged more…
razilian prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into alleged environmental crimes by Roberto Carvalho, the chief executive of Samarco, the firm held responsible for the country’s largest-ever environmental disaster. Samarco’s…
Last year, an extended dry season brought on by El Nino set the stage for one of the worst natural disasters Indonesia has seen, the devastating forest and peatland fires…
umbling trains are part of the everyday background noise in Brazil´s Rio Doce valley. Enormous freight trains pass up and down the valley’s length roughly every hour, day and night,…
“I was making ice cream, and didn´t hear the noise,” remembers Neuza da Silva Santos. “My sister arrived yelling that the dam had broken, and I went outside. The river…
