A Mongabay investigation into palm oil contamination in the Brazilian Amazon has helped federal prosecutors to obtain a court decision this week to scrutinize the environmental impacts of pesticides used…
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…
PHNOM PENH — On the edges of Boeung Tamok, Phnom Penh’s largest lake, 25-year-old Kong Khun sheltered from the late June heat in a bamboo hut. Despite clear skies, Khun…
Editor's note: Following the publication of this podcast, Spain’s Minister of Fisheries announced that the EC will allow Spanish trawlers to fish in 41 of the 87 areas where it is…
For decades, satellite images have clearly captured how rampant deforestation is destroying the Amazon rainforest. But what about the trees that remain standing? What do their dimensions tell us about…
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…
The East African Court of Justice (EACJ) has ruled in favor of the Tanzanian government after a five-year legal battle between evicted Maasai communities and the state. According to the…
In 2006 and 2010, Congolese researcher Raoul Monsembula collected catfish and other species from the rivers in Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Then he hopped…
Although Bangladesh’s waterways carry tremendous economic and geostrategic significance for both Bangladesh and India, environmental management issues have rendered most of these routes useless. Bangladesh and India signed a protocol…
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…
KATHMANDU — This past July 20, Radha Krishna Rijal noticed a strange animal struggling in the drainage channel of his house in the Parshyang neighborhood of western Nepal’s Pokhara Valley.…
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…
The Caribbean island is currently being convulsed by a wave of civil unrest and gang violence, immediately triggered by soaring gas prices. But a dire environmental crisis underlays and feeds Haiti’s socioeconomic and political disorder.
It was 35 years ago that Ailton Krenak, while painting his entire face with the black dye of the jenipapo fruit, protested against violence against Indigenous peoples in one of…
An Australian court has set aside the federal government’s approval for major gas company Santos Limited’s drilling plans in the Timor Sea, north of the island nation, ruling in favor…
ASUNCIÓN MITA, Guatemala – Cecilia López and Luz Elena González were in good spirits as they left, walking beneath blue and white plastic streamers strung across the school property in…
Sea ice extent didn’t reach record lows this summer, but air temps over Greenland and ocean temps in some Arctic seas were extraordinarily high. Polar warming also likely continues influencing global extreme weather events, scientists say.
Narwhals are chaotic. At least, that’s what researchers thought until they developed a new math-based method to detect patterns in their seemingly irregular movements. Narwhals (Monodon monoceros) are known as…
Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett Ayers Butler has won the 2022 Heinz Award for the Environment for his efforts to advance environmental journalism worldwide. Butler started Mongabay in 1999 and…
A spate of North Atlantic right whale deaths that began in 2017 shook the scientists who study the critically endangered species. That year, 17 whales died, and the losses prompted…
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…
TERBOL, Lebanon — Sitting cross-legged in the summer sun, Fatima collects seedpods from fava beans in Terbol, a quiet village surrounded by cypress trees and vineyards in the Beqaa Valley…
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…
Small- and large-scale fishers report an increase in the volume and variety of fish species in the Patos Lagoon and the coast of Rio Grande do Sul state. Such abundance came after a bill banning motorized trawling on the state’s coast was passed and signed into law in 2018. Drafted by fishers and scientists and passed unanimously in the state parliament, the law goes against the interests of President Bolsonaro’s allies.
KATHMANDU — When conservationist Bed Bahadur Khadka roamed the banks of the Rapti River near Chitwan National Park to monitor gharials released from a breeding center in August 2020, he…
STUNG TRENG, Cambodia — A long-dormant plan to build a mega dam on the mainstream of the Mekong River in Cambodia’s northeastern Stung Treng province appears to have been revived…
Critics say that “the white rhinos of old-growth forests” in British Columbia are rapidly being felled by timber companies, even as the provincial government largely postpones its 2020 pledge to protect the remaining ancient forests.
The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (or MST, its acronym in Portuguese) is one of the largest social movements in the world. Born in the early 1980s at the end…
