For conscious consumers, palm oil tends to be the pariah of tropically grown crops. This is due to the well-publicized fact that oil palm plantations are highly destructive to biodiversity,…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. This post details the analysis we carried out to estimate the revenues generated by the Korindo Group from harvesting timber as it…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Part 1: ‘Maybe they didn’t expect us to find it’ In April 2019, an Indonesian delegate stepped onto the stage at a…
An exclusive study shows that 114 properties have been certified inside indigenous territories awaiting demarcation in the Brazilian Amazon, spurred in large part by a recent statute that leaves these reserves unprotected from such illegal land grabs.
A first ever study has quantified carbon emissions across Brazil’s entire soy sector in detail and pinpointed the highest deforestation related emissions in the Cerrado savanna, followed by the Amazon.
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…
Worsening Amazon floods with reduced fish catches, along with government policies that shred welfare programs and encourage deforestation, are increasing food insecurity in riverine communities.
Two Māori iwi, or tribal groups, are campaigning for a portion of the New Zealand government’s new COVID-19 economic stimulus package to help save their treasured, ancestral Raukūmara Forest from…
In an attempt to derail the onslaught of anti-environmental policies put forward by Pres. Jair Bolsonaro, NGOs, prosecutors and opposition political parties are taking the government to court.
Land grabbers, landed estate owners and even oil companies stand to benefit from a new guideline released by FUNAI, the federal indigenous affairs agency, which opens up 237 indigenous territories in Brazil for sale, subdivision and speculation.
The illegal harvesting of valuable Brazilian wood is rife as loggers supply the EU, US and other nations. Mongabay goes deep into the rainforest to meet some of the workers illegally felling trees.
A series of measures by the Bolsonaro government that attack the environment are putting indigenous peoples at risk, say the authors.
Late rainfall, intense drought, dry riverbeds, more forest fires, less food available — indigenous communities across the Amazon suffer social transformations due to climate change.
Global outrage at Environment Minister Ricardo Salles caught on video saying "run the cattle herd" through the Amazon, "changing all the rules and simplifying standards" while public distracted by pandemic.
A bill in Congress on the verge of passage this week would allow land grabbers to self-declare their ownership of government land, ultimately converting vast stretches of Amazon rainforest to cattle ranches.
Some 600 indigenous people have seen their crops die due to the expansion of agribusiness in the state of Pará, Brazil. The streams used by the Munduruku have also been damaged, if not dried up.
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.
A thick, acrid scent of smoke marks the last summer season in Australia, which has become known as the “black summer.” Between June 2019 and March 2020, a series of…
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.
A sweeping policy change by the Bolsonaro government opens unregistered ancestral indigenous lands to landgrabbers, loggers, ranchers, and soy growers, with huge risk for the Amazon.
The world has lost 178 million hectares (439 million acres) of forest cover over the past 20 years, which the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) equated to as “about…
Two environmental agency coordinators with a record of deeply reducing illegal mining and deforestation in the Amazon’s Xingu basin were sacked after they led a recent successful raid.
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.
The government of South Korea is subsidizing the development of biomass power so heavily that it’s hindering the adoption of renewable energy technologies like solar and wind, new research finds.…
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.
BORACAY ISLAND, Philippines — The bats that swarmed Boracay's evening skies were once as iconic as the pristine white sand beaches that made this tiny island in the central Philippines…
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.
