forest degradation News

Like virtually everything in 2020, COVID-19 defined the year for tropical rainforests. Conservation was particularly hard hit in tropical countries.

Every year, growing swaths of the Amazon rainforest are degraded by logging, fragmentation, and human-sparked fires. New research using airplane-based laser scanning of trees shows that degraded forests are hotter,…

Major roadbuilding, including the “reconstruction” of the BR-319 highway, now threatens the Brazilian Amazon’s last, vast intact rainforest, vital to Brazilian ecosystem services.

Tamandua and Baita are two of the last three remaining members of the Piripkura Indigenous people in northwest Mato Grosso state, Brazil. They’re also survivors of a massacre, increasingly being…

The reconstruction of the BR-319 highway — a north-south cut through what remains of Brazil’s Amazon forest — is being fast tracked by Pres. Bolsonaro, but the project risks huge socio-environmental impacts.

An international team led by Brazilian researchers recently published a study in the journal Nature showing that restoring habitats that are currently degraded by agricultural activity is key to mitigating…

A new tiny orchid species with fiery orange flowers has been discovered on a mountain peak in the northern Philippines’ Cordilleras range. The wild orchid species was named Dendrochilum ignisiflorum…

337,427 square kilometers of Amazon forest were degraded between 1992 and 2014 ¬(mostly due to logging and understory fires), compared to 308,311 square kilometers completely cleared.

One recent study shows how hotter tropical forests may add significantly to climate change woes. But another suggests how active restoration of degraded tropical forests could help avoid climate disaster.

Located in northeastern Brazil, the Caatinga, with its shrublands and dry forests, is seen by many as poor in biodiversity. As a consequence, the region receives little investment for conservation…

Humans have not treaded lightly on the Earth. Over the centuries, we have left our mark on almost every ecosystem, contributing to a steady, and increasingly rapid, decline in the…

HO CHI MINH CITY — In a move wildlife conservationists are hailing as a victory, Vietnam has established a new nature reserve encompassing critical habitat for numerous species, several of…

JAKARTA — A U.N. fund has approved a $103.8 million payment to Indonesia for preventing deforestation-based carbon emissions — its biggest payout yet, and one that critics say can’t be…

Spurred by a deadly Brazilian dam disaster in early 2019, a partnership between the U.N. and industry leaders has released new guidance on managing mining waste. Released Aug. 5, the…

Brazil is well positioned to benefit from forest restoration and agroforestry, but policies in states like Maranhão fail to address that potential and could contribute to further deforestation.

Agribusiness entities that deforested vast swaths of the Cerrado biome in Brazil to grow corn are now suffering a drop in production because of climate changes brought about by their own actions.

MANILA — “How can we rehabilitate a Philippine eagle during a lockdown?” That was the first thought Jayson Ibañez says crossed his mind after he answered a phone call bearing…

JAKARTA — Palm oil from a company that burned a pristine orangutan habitat in Sumatra has entered the global market due to an oversight, possibly ending up in products made…

JAKARTA — Indonesia is set to receive $56.15 million from Norway, the first payment based on the results of the Southeast Asian country’s efforts to preserve its vast tropical rainforests…

Late rainfall, intense drought, dry riverbeds, more forest fires, less food available — indigenous communities across the Amazon suffer social transformations due to climate change.

38 indigenous groups in Brazil are reporting 537 COVID-19 cases. In Mato Grosso state, a new map tracks the virus, while officials push measures that put indigenous land rights at risk.

Research measured the impacts of human disruption: bird flocks declined and vanished, seed dispersion changed, while the Rupununi region showed just how bountiful an undisturbed ecosystem can be.

Scientists studying the impact of 75 road projects in five countries in the Amazon Basin have found that they could lead to 2.4 million hectares (5.9 million acres) of deforestation. Seventeen percent of these projects were found to violate environmental legislation and the rights of indigenous peoples.

On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we look at what’s driving the intense fire seasons we’ve seen around the world in recent years, what can we expect from the…

President Jair Bolsonaro has revived a plan, conceived in the 1970s, to extend the BR-163 highway, the main soy corridor in Brazil, north to the border with Suriname. The Trombetas State Forest, one of the four conservation units the road would cut through, stores 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide — more than Brazil’s entire emissions in 2018.

The Brazilian savanna has always been a dry place, but the massive conversion of native vegetation to soy is making it far dryer, as is deepening, climate change-driven, drought.

One of the Amazon’s most deforested regions, Lábrea, in Brazil, is remote, poorly policed and suffering from a land tenure crisis. As a result, land grabbing, illegal logging and murder are routine.

Environmental degradation has already triggered disease outbreaks in Brazil. The risk of a new emergent zoonotic disease arising there, like COVID-19, is intensified by Bolsonaro’s forest policies.

The only positive effect of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is that it has generated public awareness of the risks of emerging diseases. One may hope that this will result in…

On 9 March 2020, Mongabay published a commentary written by Philip M. Fearnside on the “Solimões Sedimentary Area”, an oil and gas project that would implant thousands of wells spread over the western portion of the Brazilian Amazon. EPE, the Brazilian Energy Research Office, sent a response to Mongabay claiming “conceptual mistakes.” Fearnside, now, comments on these claims.