forest degradation News

In 2016, Pres. Maduro proclaimed the Orinoco Mining Arc. Today armed gangs and the military fight over its riches at the expense of the environment and small-scale miners.

Brazil is fast-tracking the Ferrogrão grain railway planned for the Tapajós Basin without prior environmental review, and despite protests from indigenous groups.

Under President Correa, Ecuador partnered with China, building megaprojects like the Coca Codo Sinclair dam, with negative outcomes for local communities and the environment.

Last Thursday, at the UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany (known as COP23), the World Resources Institute (WRI) announced that $2.1 billion in private investment funds have been committed to…

With COP23 well underway, scientists warn that President Temer’s policies could doom the Amazon and Brazil’s Paris goals, while destabilizing the global climate.

In Paris, Brazil promised to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 37 percent by 2025. But the country’s emissions grew by 8.9 percent in 2016, largely due to deforestation.

To avoid impeachment on corruption charges, Brazil’s president has bought Congress and wealthy elite ruralists with a wave of decrees that will destroy the Amazon.

As COP23 negotiators meet in Bonn, indigenous and rural leaders warn that time is running out to protect global forests — a crucial hedge against perilous global warming.

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.

Brazil’s Temer has forgiven 6o percent of $3.5 billion in fines for environmental crimes, so long as perpetrators pay other 40 percent. No new means of enforcement was announced.

Federal police arrest a gang of timber thieves who cut rare ipê trees on an Amazon indigenous reserve and used falsified records for export to U.S., Europe and Asia.

The president has undermined Brazil’s slavery law, making it very difficult to prosecute the wealthy elites enslaving roughly 155,000 Brazilians, critics say.

During the wet season, manatees swim Amazon basin floodplains; in dry times they migrate to lakes. Hundreds of planned dams could disrupt that cycle.

14 million Amazon animals and plants — caiman skins, turtles, parrots, orchids and more — are legally exported annually. Illegal trafficking levels are unknown.

Soy-fed chicken sold in British supermarkets and fast food chains — including Tesco, Morrisons and McDonald’s — appear to be driving deforestation in the Bolivian Amazon and Brazilian Cerrado.

We take a closer look at the evidence for the effectiveness of forest certification schemes on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast. The first installment of Mongabay's new "Conservation Effectiveness"…

100 families, given legal title to their land by the Brazilian government, are being threatened by illegal miners. The Temer government has yet to respond.

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.

Public protest and congressional action have forced Brazil’s politically embattled president to reverse his decree allowing mining in vast RENCA Reserve.

Tropical timber has earned a bad reputation. When we think of timber from lush, tropical forests, it conjures up images of valuable old-growth trees pillaged by logging companies and illegal…

Study warns that six hydroelectric mega-dams proposed for Andean highlands would put environment and food security at risk in Amazon basin.

Brazilian court finds Norte Energia consortium guilty of failure to keep housing commitments for those displaced by mega-dam in Amazon. Installation license suspended.

Conservationists call for total halt to deforestation and implementation of sustainable agroforestry in Brazilian state of Maranhão.

Environmentalists and indigenous people condemn Chinese owned Mirador and Panantza-San Carlos copper mines in Ecuador’s biodiverse Cordillera del Cóndor region.

Brazilian president’s order to open 17,800 square miles of Amazon rainforest to mining met by crushing opposition; voided by judge (this story has been updated).

In order to preserve a species from the impacts of human activities that degrade or fragment its habitat, it’s necessary to understand how the species responds to changes to the…

Efforts to protect wildlife often focus on keeping forests and the habitat they represent from being cut down. But research published in the journal Nature last year suggested that forest…

Scientists and conservationists have long believed that the rapid loss of Southeast Asia’s old-growth, “primary” rainforests in recent decades would leave one of its most iconic inhabitants, the orangutan, with…

Trees from one of South America’s fastest-disappearing landscapes are ending up as charcoal on the shelves of European supermarkets, according to a report by the NGO Earthsight. The London-based watchdog…

Greenhouse gas emissions reduction programs often focus on the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities that lead to tropical deforestation. However, according to a new study published last week in…