This article was co-produced with The Gecko Project. JAKARTA — Indigenous people in Indonesia’s easternmost Papua province are protesting against a company that’s preparing to raze their ancestral forest for…
An innovative collaborative group is working to restore Brazil’s savanna by sowing native plant seeds on degraded agricultural lands; it’s an effort that’s working, say participants.
Of the world’s remaining forests, only 40% are intact, with high ecological integrity, according to data from the newly developed Forest Landscape Integrity Index, the first of its kind to…
JAKARTA — An area of natural forest the size of 1,500 football fields has been cleared since January in an oil palm concession in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua by…
A day after Brazil announced 11,000 square kilometers of annual deforestation, France, the EU’s biggest buyer of Brazilian soy flour, announced plans to become more self-sufficient on the commodity.
Brazil’s Serra do Divisor National Park is at risk from a BR-364 branch road running from Acre state to Peru. Brazil’s Congress is about to strip away the park’s protections, risking wholesale deforestation.
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.
Almost a fifth of Brazil’s soy and grains already flow down Amazonia’s rivers. Now a boom in private river port construction, with little government oversight, further threatens the region’s waterways.
The planned 650 MW dam on the Rio Branco in Brazil’s Roraima state is scheduled to become operational in 2028; it could do extraordinary socio-environmental harm.
JAKARTA — Palm oil giant Korindo Group is alleged to have set fires to clear rainforest in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua, a practice that is banned by law. The…
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.
Brazil’s current 10-year Energy Expansion Plan calls for three more large dams in Amazonia by 2029, and the country’s 2050 National Energy Plan lists many more — putting the environment at risk.
JAKARTA — Pulp and paper giant Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited (APRIL) has allegedly violated its own sustainability commitment by purchasing wood from a company clearing rainforest in Indonesian…
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…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government is doubling down on a plan to establish large-scale agricultural plantations across the country, in a move that threatens widespread deforestation and the disenfranchisement of…
In 2009, traditional Brazilian Amazon communities and Catholic nuns brought the transnational mining company to the negotiating table and galvanized Amazonia’s land rights struggle.
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…
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that slaughterhouses are among the outbreak hotspots for the disease because of the low temperatures and crowded production lines. But they are also ideal locations for the emergence of new viruses due to the contact between humans and the blood and entrails of cattle.
PALAWAN, Philippines — At the heart of the island province of Palawan in the western Philippines, a verdant mountain range larger than Bangkok stands like a natural bulwark. It’s a…
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…
As the world heads towards 2021 with COVID-19 still raging overhead, it might be easy to forget about the other global crises. But a new app, debuted today, aims to…
In a befuddling move, the Bolsonaro administration last Friday cut all agency funding to fight deforestation and put out fires in the Amazon and Pantanal, then reversed the decision; even as both biomes burned.
The Kayapó Mekrãgnoti Indigenous people have launched a blockade of the BR-163 highway, a key Brazilian commodities shipment route, mostly in protest over lost funding to prevent reserve invasions.
A recent report shows that one of the world’s most highly regarded, and wealthiest, universities invested heavily in land in Brazil’s Cerrado grasslands, where land-grabbing and other environmental crimes are rife.
The historical record shows that Indigenous reserves are only safe from invasion by illegal deforesters once fully protected by government — protections rapidly eroding in Bolsonaro’s Brazil.
Wary of Western medicine and of the prejudice and neglect they say they suffer at hospitals, Amazon's Kokama people decided to turn to traditional healing practices, administered by shamans. The Kokama were the first Indigenous group in Brazil to be infected with COVID-19, and to date there have been more than a thousand confirmed cases and 60 deaths within the community.
Despite a growing realization worldwide of the need for environmentally responsible investing, financial institutions and fund managers who have otherwise committed to going green are still funding the sector most responsible for deforestation.
While individual investors have no idea where their money is applied, large finance firms camouflage participation in companies that foment tree-cutting in the Amazon.
For two years, regions of Brazil that depend on precipitation fed by Amazonian vegetation have seen rainfall below historical averages, impacting crops and harvests. A recent bulletin from a federal agency points to agribusiness itself as one of the drivers of this pattern.
In April, Brazil’s environment minister urged Pres. Bolsonaro to “run the cattle,” using the nation’s focus on COVID-19 as a diversion to dismantle environmental rule of law; some new executive acts appear to do just that.
