CHINESE LANDING, Guyana — When first entering the territory of the Carib Indigenous community in Chinese Landing, northwest Guyana, there are no signs of environmental destruction. At first glance, it…
The deaths of journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous rights defender Bruno Pereira in June this year exposed an interlocking web of crime involving drug trafficking, money laundering, and illegal fishing…
From the Scarlet Macaw to the glass frog, Peru is a land of tropical splendors. At least half the country is blanketed by Amazon rainforest. It is one of the…
In-person Indigenous plea leads to key Swiss gold refiners promising to stop import of gold illegally mined inside Brazilian Amazon Indigenous reserves — a pledge, if fulfilled, that may be a game changer. (Video)
When workers dig through the earth at the San Andres mine in western Honduras, one of the country’s largest mining operations, they sometimes find something mixed in that wasn’t there…
JAKARTA — Residents of a remote island in eastern Indonesia have won a lawsuit against a company planning to mine gold on their island, after having an earlier legal challenge…
News articles and opinion pieces have popped up in the pages of different Costa Rican newspapers over the past several years, warning of the imminent collapse of Corcovado National Park,…
Alexandra Narváez and Alex Lucitante, two young Indigenous leaders from the A’i Cofán community of Sinangoe, located in the Ecuadoran Amazon, have been awarded the 2022 Goldman Environmental Prize for their…
The Sepik River takes an unhurried 1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles, to snake from the lush highland rainforests of western Papua New Guinea, swerving momentarily across the border into Indonesia’s…
The route connecting the provinces of Loja and Zamora Chinchipe in Ecuador is a series of roads surrounded by green, leafy and picturesque mountains. Near the city of Zamora, signs…
Thirty years ago, Brazil issued a decree officially recognizing the ancestral land of the Yanomami people as an Indigenous territory. The new designation made the area, located deep in the…
In August 2021, local communities accused a Chinese gold-mining company of polluting a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeastern province of Tshopo. Residents living near the town of…
MINDANAO, Philippines – Legislators in the southern Philippine province of South Cotabato moved this week to overturn a 12-year-old provincial ban on open-pit mining that has for years stalled the…
Illegal miners expanded their footprint in Indigenous territories in Brazil by nearly 500% between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent report from the research collective MapBiomas. It also shows…
Ban Khao Mo, THAILAND — Standing in the house where she has lived since she was born 45 years ago, Premsinee Suntornthammathat points to the temple where her grandparents took…
JAKARTA — A court in Jakarta has rejected a lawsuit by a remote island community against a gold-mining operation that overlaps onto their villages, in a ruling deemed “problematic” by…
While trying to put together a review of what happened to Venezuela’s environment in 2021, conservationists ran into a problem. The government publishes virtually no statistics on things like deforestation,…
It’s a long way from Kyiv to Itaituba, but Brazil’s busy wildcat gold prospectors don’t need a map. The war on Ukraine has sent international gold prices soaring and word…
Officials in Honduras say they are cracking down on open-pit mining, an activity that has plagued the country with deforestation, pollution and loss of biodiversity, among other environmental hazards. The…
TAMPAKAN, Philippines — For nearly a decade, Nora Sukal was the public face of Indigenous opposition to the Tampakan project, a planned gold and copper mine on Blaan tribal land…
Years of artisanal mining along the Madre de Dios River and its tributaries have left their marks, both seen and unseen. Miners, swarming to the region in a modern-day goldrush,…
Perched in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) near the borders of Uganda and South Sudan, Okapi Wildlife Reserve quietly encompasses some 14,000 square kilometers (5,405 square miles) of rainforest…
LINGE, Indonesia — Indonesian coffee farmers on the island of Sumatra have spoken out against a plan to mine for gold in an area that overlaps with one of the…
On February 11, 2022, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro published a decree establishing the Program for Supporting the Development of Artisanal Mining (Pró-Mape), which aims to “stimulate” this type of mining…
A ruling by Mexico’s Supreme Court this month canceled two controversial mining concessions in Indigenous communities, which have been fighting to stop the projects for nearly two decades. The Nahua…
Illegal mining in protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon saw as much as a fivefold increase since 2010, a gold rush driven largely by surging prices in international markets. Over…
Once the epicenter of the global trade in gold, illegal mining is once again surging across the Amazon. Its extraction and trade is not only fueling corruption, money laundering and…
MINDANAO, Philippines — For environmental groups in the Philippines, 2021 went out with a big blow: on Dec. 23, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) reversed a 4-year-old…
SOUTH RUPUNUNI, Guyana — In a Facebook post this past November, Guyana’s Ministry of Natural Resources announced that it had issued a special mining permit to a group of small-scale…
BALI, Indonesia — Satellite imagery has detected deforestation in a gold mining concession in Indonesia that overlaps with the habitat of the most threatened great ape in the world. U.S.-based…
