Oil exploration at odds with peatland protection in the Congo Basin
The peatlands of the Congo Basin are home to more than just massive carbon stocks and some of our closest — and most threatened — relatives in the animal kingdom,…
Qualified success: What’s next for Peru’s Operation Mercury?
More than a decade of illegal gold mining around the upstart town of La Pampa in the Peruvian Amazon has tainted local water supplies, razed forests adjacent to a world-class…
Complaint alleges oil company left Peru communities’ environment in ruins
Leaders of several indigenous communities have lodged a complaint with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, that a Netherlands-based oil company fouled the environment in Peru's slice…
Companies leave communities to grapple with mining’s persistent legacy
The scale of excavation for copper and gold in the 1970s and 1980s at the Panguna mine, then one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, was massive: It swallowed up…
Video: Abraham Khouw, the professor who joined the Save Aru movement
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. In late 2013, during a hearing convened by the local legislature of Indonesia’s Maluku province, a…
Mining could topple community-managed forests in Mexico: New film
Local forest managers in southeastern Mexico are sounding the alarm that their livelihoods are under threat, as companies press for access to the region’s gold, silver and other minerals. “They…
Early deforestation numbers for 2019 reveal trends in the Amazon
A new analysis based on estimated deforestation in the Amazon in 2019 pinpoints hotspots of forest loss and identifies several country-specific trends in the region. The figures project that deforestation…
Database offers new details on the dams that hold mining waste
On Jan. 25, 2019, the Brumadinho dam collapsed, releasing a slurry of water containing the waste products, or tailings, from the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine in southeastern Brazil.…
Video: Mika Ganobal, the civil servant who risked his job to save his homeland
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. When the politician in charge of Indonesia’s Aru Islands signed permits for a vast sugar plantation,…
Illegal industrial fishing hampers small-scale African fisheries
Fish are an indispensable source of food and protein for communities in many African countries. But the growth in industrial-scale fishing fleets around the continent has put that resource and…
Indigenous, protected lands in Amazon emit far less carbon than areas outside
Scientists know from a bevy of studies that the inclusion of indigenous peoples and local communities is critical to holding deforestation at bay across the tropics, even as a tide…
Subsistence farming topples forests near commercial operations in Congo
The effects of commercial logging, mining and farming can ripple beyond the boundaries of the operations, leading to the substantial loss and degradation of nearby forest for subsistence agriculture, a…
Deforestation clips howler monkey calls, study finds
Howler monkeys change their calls when they’re close to deforested areas, a new study has found. A team of researchers, led by anthropologist Laura Bolt of the University of Waterloo…
Indigenous lands hold 36% or more of remaining intact forest landscapes
More than one-third of the world’s remaining pristine forests, known as intact forest landscapes, exist within land that’s either managed or owned by indigenous peoples, a new study has found.…
Forest loss moves swiftly once 50% deforestation ‘tipping point’ reached
Scientists believe they’ve uncovered a tipping point in the deforestation of landscapes across Earth: Once an area loses half its forest, the rest of the forest is often swift to…
2019: The year rainforests burned
2019 closed out a "lost decade" for the world's tropical forests, with surging deforestation from Brazil to the Congo Basin, environmental policy roll-backs, assaults on environmental defenders, abandoned conservation commitments,…
10 noteworthy books on conservation and the environment from 2019
Grappling with the challenges of minimizing carbon footprints, memoirs of careers spent on the frontlines of conservation and stark warnings about the future inhabitability of our world, the roster of…
Deforestation for potential rubber plantation raises concerns in Papua New Guinea
PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea — The upstart deforestation over the past year and a half that's sidling up to Pochon Lili’s land has him worried. "As a landowner, I'm…
Tropical forests’ lost decade: the 2010s
The 2010s opened as a moment of optimism for tropical forests. Widely available satellite imagery via platforms like Google Earth brought new levels of accountability which, for the first time,…
Illegal hunting a greater threat to wildlife than forest degradation
The world has long associated plummeting populations of Southeast Asian wildlife with news of forest degradation and poignant images of deforested lands. Recent studies, however, bring to light another human…
Special series
Endangered environmentalists
- On anniversary of nun’s murder Amazon land rights activists at high risk
- Iran upholds heavy sentences for conservationists convicted of spying
- Two deaths trigger alarm at Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve
Indonesias forest guardians
- Reforesting a village in Indonesia, one batch of gourmet beans at a time
- Restoring Sumatra’s Leuser Ecosystem, one small farm at a time
- Indigenous Iban community defends rainforests, but awaits lands rights recognition
Amazon infrastructure
- BR-319 illegal side road threatens Amazon protected area, indigenous land (commentary)
- Barrage of mining requests targets Brazil’s isolated indigenous peoples
- Database offers new details on the dams that hold mining waste
Asian rhinos
- Indonesia-WWF split puts rhino breeding project in Borneo in limbo
- Indonesian officials wield sharia law in defense of Sumatran rhinos
- Love triangle complicates efforts to breed Sumatran rhinos
