Energy News

BINTUNI BAY, Indonesia — Residents of this part of the island of New Guinea have long known they live atop a coal deposit. Some local people recall hearing traditional stories…

It was one of the worst environmental disasters the world has witnessed. Ten years ago, on April 20, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon exploratory rig exploded, killing 11 people and…

Julian Hunt is tasked with scouring the Earth, its libraries, and his own mind to engineer a way to cleaner energy. At the multi-government-funded International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis…

JAKARTA — Indonesia will not set a more ambitious emissions reduction target to counter increasingly dire climate change projections, saying it wants to focus instead on its economic growth. The…

Environmental groups are seeking an injunction against a move by South Korea to bail out a builder of coal-fired power plants, saying the rescue package goes against the country’s climate…

JAMBI, Indonesia — “If the forest is gone, where else can we live?” Teguh Santika is an indigenous woman from the Batin Sembilan community. Her home is in the Harapan…

Illegal gold mining led to deforestation of thousands of hectares of forests inside indigenous reserves in the Brazilian Amazon, according to new satellite image analysis by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP). Mongabay had exclusive access to the report prior to its release.

MANILA — The hundreds of islands that make up the Visayas region in the central Philippines are connected by a vast fleet of decades-old cargo and passenger ships. These vessels…

A court in Brazil has granted the Kinja indigenous people an unprecedented right of reply to racist invective, in a move that legal experts say could be a game changer against rising discrimination by President Jair Bolsonaro’s government.

JAKARTA — Mining companies in Indonesia are among those being hit by weakened demand as the COVID-19 pandemic impacts the global economy. But the environmental reprieve as a result of…

The peatlands of the Congo Basin are home to more than just massive carbon stocks and some of our closest — and most threatened — relatives in the animal kingdom,…

Scientists are already warning of gradual permafrost CO2 releases; but future abrupt thaws could send huge amounts of methane skyward, causing a surge in global temperatures.

Leaders of several indigenous communities have lodged a complaint with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, that a Netherlands-based oil company fouled the environment in Peru's slice…

LAKE POSO, Indonesia – In the aftermath of a violent communal conflict that set neighbor against neighbor around this ancient lake in the mountains of eastern Indonesia, local leaders were…

A new study assessing the cumulative impacts of human activities on wildlife found that the vast majority of terrestrial species are facing “intense” pressure due to humanity’s footprint across the…

A survey of 40,000 existing and 3,700 planned dams finds that the structures could fragment fish habitat in the Amazon, Niger, Congo, Salween and Mekong river systems by 25% or more.

JAKARTA — Authorities in Indonesia have launched an investigation following the discovery of radioactive contamination in an empty lot in a housing complex near a nuclear research facility. The Nuclear…

The construction of the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon is the narrative engine that drives Sequestrada, the first full-length film by U.S. cinematographer and sociologist Sabrina McCormick.

JAKARTA — Felicia Siregar was only 2 years old when her father, Golfrid Siregar, an outspoken Indonesian environmental activist, died in suspicious circumstances last October. Four months on, Felicia is…

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s parliament has for the first time prioritized passing new legislation on renewable energy, and activists have seized the opportunity to call for a shift away from coal.…

JAKARTA — Proponents of a hydropower plant to be built in the only known habitat of a critically endangered orangutan species say it’s important for meeting the future energy needs…

JAKARTA — Indigenous activists in Indonesian Borneo have scored a big win in a lawsuit against a coal mining firm that sought to operate on their land. After a two-year…

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.

Deforestation and climate change could convert Amazon rainforest to savanna by 2050. New infrastructure development would quicken process.

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.

JAKARTA — Activists say they’ve identified the business tycoons who control land in the area slated for Indonesia’s new capital and who could potentially benefit from the $33.5 billion mega…

2019 closed out a "lost decade" for the world's tropical forests, with surging deforestation from Brazil to the Congo Basin, environmental policy roll-backs, assaults on environmental defenders, abandoned conservation commitments,…

In Indonesia, a major producer and consumer of coal, politicians often argue that continued reliance on the highly polluting fossil fuel remains an economic necessity. Challenging this conventional wisdom, a…

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.