On May 15, authorities in the northeastern province of Si Sa Ket in Thailand arrested two Cambodians and six Thai workers for illegally removing a large Siamese rosewood tree from…
When conservationists set up treetop cameras in Côte d’Ivoire’s Tanoé-Ehy forest, they hoped to get video of the elusive Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey (Piliocolobus waldroni), a critically endangered species…
For the past 15 years, the European Union and tropical timber-producing countries have developed innovative collaboration mechanisms to fight illegal logging and timber trade, and to make sure wood imports…
Soaring gold prices, brought on by the economic meltdown and COVID-19 uncertainty, have led to a rapid, largely un-policed, expansion of illegal gold mining in the Amazon.
JAKARTA — Martamis says he’s worried about how he’ll pay for his daughter’s education once schools reopen. He’s an oil palm farmer from the village of Lubuk Mandarsah in Indonesia’s…
JAKARTA — Indonesia is reopening dozens of conservation areas to local and foreign tourists after months of closure, even as the number of COVID-19 infections in the country continues to…
SAHN, Sierra Leone — The day they came, Margaret Fascia was in her forest garden of cocoa trees, pineapple plants, palms, ferns and cassavas. Like most days of the week,…
Climate change threatens ecological and economic systems. That is why investors are increasingly looking to invest in companies with a plan to address one of the largest drivers of climate…
In his 2006 book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, science writer David Quammen says, “Some people admire soldiers, or surgeons, or firemen, or astrophysicists, or medical missionaries, or cowboys. I admire…
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…
Filipino lepidopterist Jade Aster T. Badon is accustomed to traveling to some of the remotest parts of the Philippines in search of new butterfly species. In August 2019, he made…
MBONJO, Cameroon — The first time Emmanuel Elong wrote a letter to Vincent Bolloré was in 2013. “The impact of the group that you are controlling on our lives is…
Between 1885 and 1908, Belgium’s King Leopold II exerted control over a vast area of Africa that would later become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His rule was characterized…
It was the middle of the afternoon in one of the world’s largest metropolises when the sky went black. Thousands of miles away, tens of thousands of fires raged, plunging…
QUITO — As COVID-19 sweeps across communities in the Amazon rainforest, the Indigenous Waorani in Ecuador are celebrating a bittersweet victory after a provincial court ruled in their favor in…
Investing in forests to fight climate change seems like a sure bet. Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, pump out oxygen, and live for decades. What could go wrong?…
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…
In a corner of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, a handful of clandestine roads neatly slice the dense jungle canopy into rectangles. From the sky, an entourage of bulldozers can be…
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.
Recognized as one of the 50 most influential women scientists in fire studies in the world by the journal Fire, Dolors Armenteras is also a pioneer in Colombia in monitoring…
The Canadian province says 23% of its forests are old growth, but a new study shows only 1% is left. And without immediate protection that could be sacrificed to supply the booming wood pellet biomass energy industry.
POLONNARUWA, Sri Lanka — For centuries, Sri Lanka’s ancient civilization diverted river water to large reservoirs and man-made canals for agriculture. After the collapse of the island’s hydraulic civilization about…
Tropical rainforests have an outsized role in the world. Of the Earth’s ecosystems, rainforests support the largest variety of plants and animal species, house the majority of indigenous groups still…
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…
The COVID-19 pandemic and the arrival of fire season in two of the world’s major rainforests are on a collision course, scientists and public health researchers say, and the results…
The threshold beyond which the world’s mangrove forests can survive could be reached within the next 30 years if sea levels continue to rise at their current pace and greenhouse…
In northeast India, a 2018 report released by the Indian Government revealed that an area of 8500 square kilometers is still being used to practice shifting cultivation (SC) - an…
Scientists have discovered a new insect-eating pitcher plant, Nepenthes cabanae, in the Philippines’ southern Mindanao region. Thriving in a small area within a known conflict zone, the pitcher plant has…
In September 2019, the noon sky over a part of Jambi province in Indonesian Sumatra turned crimson. Fires had been raging through Indonesia for the past few months, and certain…
