Habitat Destruction News

DIANA REGION, Madagascar — With the sun still low in the sky, my taxi boat pulled up to a floating wooden pontoon in the bustling port of Ankify in northwestern…

JAKARTA — An upgrade to a road that cuts through one of Southeast Asia’s last great swaths of intact rainforest is driving deeper encroachment by humans into blocks of forest…

JAKARTA — Onrizal Onrizal remembers hearing stories of human-like creatures living in the forest when he was growing up in Sungai Dareh, a town in western Sumatra, Indonesia. Legend had…

“Unless urgent and effective conservation action is taken, these magnificent animals are likely to go extinct within our lifetime.”- Dr. Carlos Drews, Director of WWF’s Global Species Program In 2011,…

Under the thick blanket of smoke, relentless flames spread with dizzying speed over swaths of Pantanal Matogrossense National Park, its grasslands parched by months of drought. In a charred marshland,…

The mountainous forests of northern Madagascar are biodiverse beyond measure, containing plant and animal species found nowhere else on the planet. Other forests in Madagascar have been lost in recent…

The four-wheel-drive bumped over a rutted road. Rain that began as soon as they left the pavement was so thick that the road, compacted by traffic, became slippery, and the…

Europe is failing to protect its oceans, despite having policies in place to safeguard its marine environment, according to a report published by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) on…

Rising across remote stretches of southeast Cambodia, the Cardamom Mountains harbor dense tropical rainforest, much of it native growth carpeting the range’s wet slopes. Due to its remoteness, the vast…

Tim Beatley will humbly tell you that he’s not a birder. But in his new book, there are enough appearances by obscure members of the class Aves to suggest that…

A thin plume of smoke rises above the lush canopy of the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, deep in the Brazilian Amazon. A couple of men feed the flames engulfing a wooden…

The illegal wildlife trade is out of control in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, says the award-winning NGO known as RENCTAS, which tracked 3.5 million wildlife trafficking ads on social networks last year.

This article is a one year follow up to the award-winning series, The Great Insect Dying published in June, 2019 on Mongabay. The original series documents insect losses in Europe, the U.S. and the tropics — here’s what we know today.

“In the years when logging was not happening, sometimes you did not see the sunlight in the bush because of the tree cover,” said Musa Mballo, a forest protection activist…

The vast tangled mangrove forests that sweep along so many tropical coasts are one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems. They also play crucial roles in protecting coastlines from erosion…

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — Conservationists are calling for a Sumatran rhino habitat at the northern tip of the Indonesian island to be fully protected from planned road-construction projects. Officials in…

Maned wolves, pumas, giant anteaters, tapirs and other Neotropical mammals are threatened with local extinctions unless more conserved areas are established in Brazil’s savanna biome, say scientists.

Selective logging has long been touted as an environmentally and ecologically favorable way to harvest timber, yet a new study adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests this…

SINGAPORE — Languishing in the soft, silty mud, the living fossil looked as if it didn’t have a care in the world as it feasted on the fish left stranded…

OGAN KOMERING ILIR, Indonesia — Officials in Sumatra plan to build a billion-dollar bridge to the Bangka-Belitung archipelago off the island’s east coast, but conservationists warn it threatens a key…

The area surrounding the town of Nuquí and its neighboring bay of Tribugá on Colombia’s northern Pacific coast has some of highest levels of rainfall in the world, a unique…

A unique rainforest island lying 270 kilometers (168 miles) off Papua New Guinea is once again at the center of a tug-of-war between multiple extractive industries vying for its rich…

Humans have not treaded lightly on the Earth. Over the centuries, we have left our mark on almost every ecosystem, contributing to a steady, and increasingly rapid, decline in the…

OGAN KOMERING ILIR, Indonesia — Over the past two decades, much of the forests in Ogan Komering Ilir district in southern Sumatra, Indonesia, have been cleared to make way for…

In June, three environmental defenders from the remote island of Nende celebrated their acquittal from arson charges, along with the many supporters who had attended their trial. But the later…

Like the rainforest which takes its name, the Amazon is the largest and most biodiverse river on the planet: the Amazon carries more than five times the volume of world's…

Nestled in the far reaches of eastern Cambodia lies Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, one of the nation’s most vital areas of protected forest and a haven for rare wildlife. Yet…

To some humans, the idea of treating an orangutan as a person is absurd. For Leif Cocks, spending billions of dollars to find life on Mars while living beings are…

PALAWAN, Philippines — Deep in the forests of Palawan, the biodiverse island in the western Philippines, a plethora of plant species thrive. Many are so rare and astonishingly beautiful that…

A dramatic surge in jaguar poaching and confiscations could be linked to Chinese-led investment in Latin America, poverty and corruption, according to a new study.