The Amazônia Minada reporting project has revealed 1,265 pending requests to mine in Indigenous territories in Brazil, including restricted lands that are home to isolated tribes.
JAKARTA — Fires have flared up in at least 10 provinces in Indonesia, with some of the burning occurring in peatlands. The burning, including in protected forests, marks the start…
Despite growing international awareness of the importance of protecting and restoring our vital ecosystems, President Bolsonaro’s far-right government has taken a wrecking ball to much of the environmental progress made…
On Sept. 3, 2019, the remains of Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen, a Karen environmental and community rights defender who was disappeared in 2014, were found in an oil drum submerged under…
Wild pigs have reputation as a destructive lot. Farmers and scientists alike know that, when they’re too numerous, their constant rooting and wallowing can run roughshod over crops and regenerating…
Since Lucely Pio was a little girl, she has been collecting medicinal plants in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savanna. At 5, she walked through the grasslands and forests of the…
Restoring forests in areas where they once stood is an important step toward halting climate change. It helps to ensure a host of other environmental services, too, like provision of…
A recorder is fastened to a tree, its microphone pointed downward. It captures a fusion of sound: the high-pitched buzz of cicadas, bird calls, and also the rumbling of a…
The Netherlands has voted to stop issuing new subsidies for the burning of forests to generate heat. Though a small win for critics who say biomass is not carbon neutral, the vote could influence a June EU biomass review.
I think about that bat a lot. You know the bat I mean. I think about how it was likely captured from a forest in China— or perhaps somewhere further…
JAKARTA — Indonesia’s deforestation rate hit a historic low in 2020, with the government crediting its various policies prohibiting forest-clearing, and experts attributing the trend to more rains, falling oil…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the smallest members of the North American…
Deforestation is so rampant throughout Madagascar, an island far larger than California, that it’s easy to forget the impact of tree clearance in any one specific area of the country…
Dark, milk, or somewhere in between, chocolate is a favorite treat all over the world. The Theobroma tree, the genus responsible for our cravings, thrives in shady, tropical regions. But…
IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, has reversed itself, allowing Norte Energia, operator of the mega-dam, to divert water flow to turbines, potentially wrecking the river’s Big Bend Indigenous and traditional fishery.
JAKARTA — “Birds might fall as they’re not strong since there’s no more trees standing.” This is how Jemris Nikolas characterizes the response of many in Sorong, a district in…
Sonia Castro says her family stayed in self-isolation for two months in the Jambuaçu Territory in Brazil’s Pará state. She recounts how they eventually fell ill, their condition worsening bit…
“One of the good things about living here is that it is — or at least it was, before the pandemic — possible to coexist and share ideas, sips of…
It happened the way it so often does in Colombia: the government announced a new official appointment and outrage ensued. As the year 2020 drew to a close, the minister…
In another blow to the Liberia-based palm oil company Golden Veroleum, an investigation by an independent grievance panel has found that it bulldozed rainforests and ignored community rights as it…
World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch can now track deforestation shortly after it occurs despite being obscured by cloud cover. The functionality will greatly improve efforts to monitor tropical deforestation…
Impunity still reigns when it comes to the murders of human rights defenders around the world, according to the Front Line Defenders organization, in its global analysis of 2020. The…
JAKARTA — Palm oil giants Indonesia and Malaysia are teaming up to fight what they call a smear campaign targeted at the commodity. The move sets the stage for what…
JAKARTA — Forests in parts of Indonesia regions that have remained largely untouched are now fast disappearing as deforestation driven by agribusiness and infrastructure development moves east, according to a…
In 2019, XPRIZE Rainforest opened its doors and challenged the world to develop new biodiversity assessment technologies by offering a $10 million prize for the best one. The consequent mobilization will extend…
COLOMBO — As Sri Lanka’s Forest Department embarks on a reforestation campaign in an area previously cleared for new settlements, environmental activists and lawyers have hailed the unprecedented court ruling…
Over the past two decades, orangutan researcher Marc Ancrenaz watched as a tidal wave of oil palm has engulfed his once-forested research sites in northern Borneo. When he would find…
"If a tree lives 500 years, it carries the carbon assimilated and stocked for the last 500 years,” says Giuliano Locosselli, a researcher at the University of São Paulo (USP)…
The Kalunga — 39 quilombola communities, the descendants of runaway slaves — have united with international funders to use high-tech georeferencing to catalog their traditional lands and natural resources in Brazil.
“We consider the witches’ broom not a plague, but rather a ‘holy’ broom,” says Rubens de Jesus. “Thanks to it, we are on the land today.” That’s not a sentiment…
