Habitat Destruction News

JAKARTA — Conservation groups are calling on the Asian Development Bank to tighten its scrutiny of a road project it plans to fund in Indonesian Borneo that may pose risks…

Before the clearing and excavators and bulldozers, before plans to build a gold mine and oil palm plantations, the Jemaluang and Tenggaroh forest reserves in Johor, Malaysia, were wildlife-rich jungles…

In August 2019, an unprecedented number of fires ripped through the Brazilian Amazon, sparking worldwide interest in reports of burning rainforest. In fact, the majority of blazes were on land…

Americans love their polar bears. The largest land carnivores in the world, these massive, powerful beasts are fierce, fearless and very much threatened. It’s the threatened aspect of their story…

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In July, conservationists in Cambodia sounded the alarm over a regulation that saw eight protected areas in Koh Kong province collectively lose territory twice the size…

On a cold and humid morning in March, two bird surveyors stood in the dim forests of Kenaboi State Park in Malaysia, straining their ears for birdsong. From where they…

The fires that tore through South America’s Pantanal region in 2020, destroying 30% of its area, are still scorched in memory. And now, the world’s largest wetland that fans out…

As demonstrations and deadly crackdowns continue to roil Myanmar following the military coup in February, land and environmental defenders are increasingly under threat. In the seven months since protests erupted,…

It’s easier to spot the bristly, gray-brown hide of a Bornean bearded pig (Sus barbatus) ambling through orderly rows of oil palm trees, than amid a dense tropical forest. But…

Nine months ago, Abdón was one of 40 Indigenous people from the Peruvian municipality of Flor de Ucayali who traveled, for the last time, to the border between his community…

The first signal of the day is the sun stretching steadily upward amid a gigantic sea of mountains. The mass of rock, forest and water is so huge that the…

Two years ago, fire ravaged the Tucavaca Valley Municipal Wildlife Reserve in the heart of Bolivia’s Chiquitania region, wiping out thousands of square kilometers of habitat. Now this threat has…

A group of Kichwa patrollers living in the Peruvian Indigenous communities of Santa Rosillo de Yanayaku and Anak Kurutuyaku made an unexpected discovery in 2018. On their land in the…

Every few years, stretches of Borneo’s towering dipterocarp trees fruit in a synchronized pulse. In those months, the air is rich with brown, winged fruit, which fall and spin to…

Carved out of the of the narrow isthmus that connects the Malay Peninsula to the rest of mainland Southeast Asia, Myanmar’s southern Tanintharyi region rises from the Andaman Sea in…

This story is a reporting partnership between Mongabay Latam and La Barra Espaciadora. Balsa wood is a hot commodity in Ecuador, with the country exporting $402 million worth of the timber in…

I’ve been writing about wild things for more than 10 years, and while there are many animals I don’t know, I thought I’d at least heard of most of the…

Rodents live among us, but we rarely see them. Nondescript, tiny, and often nocturnal, they slip through the cracks of society, largely unnoticed. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the…

Today we’re looking at Indigenous-led projects and the latest research informing conservation of elephants, the largest land animal in existence and one of the world’s most widely recognized and beloved…

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — In a far-flung slice of the Brazilian Amazon, a potholed highway cuts hundreds of miles through the heart of the rainforest. In its most rudimentary…

Hariyo "Beebach" Wibisono studies Javan leopards, the last remaining apex predator on Indonesia's island of Java, which, with a land area about the size of Alabama, is also home to…

As recently as 1980, hunters in the forests of the Torricelli Mountains of northwestern Papua New Guinea could count on bagging at least a couple of tree kangaroos in a…

A new regulation signed into law in March this year but only unveiled publicly in May will see almost 127,000 hectares (313,800 acres) of previously protected land in Cambodia made…

A gold mining impacts calculator launched this week is the first to offer Brazilian authorities and society a consistent science-based formula for calculating the social and economic costs of the industrial-scale illegal mining operations that have swept the Brazilian Amazon, experts say.

Situated deep in the middle of Brazil, Xingu Indigenous Park encompasses some of the most biodiverse rainforest in the country and is home to dozens of Indigenous communities and a…

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) contains the bulk of Africa’s humid rainforest. But forests that were once dense, impenetrable and continuous are increasingly fractured by deforestation. New satellite…

JAKARTA — An Indonesian company with ties to Japanese conglomerates has cleared large swaths of rainforests, including habitat for critically endangered orangutans, according to a report. The company, Alas Kusuma,…

PALAWAN, Philippines — Nicole Tayag, 30, learned to snorkel at 5 when her father took her to the teeming waters of Coron to scout for potential tourist destinations back in…

Covering a vast peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Thailand on Cambodia’s southern coast, Botum Sakor is one of the largest national parks in the country and known…

Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary sprawls across a vast expanse of Cambodia’s eastern reach. But much of what used to be covered in lush rainforest has been laid barren by deforestation.…