Happy-upbeat Environmental News

KATHMANDU — They have a bare yellow neck and a head connected to a long pointed beak, and they can be easily spotted in Nepal’s agriculture fields when the rice…

Hollow eye sockets glared at me from the dark tropical leaf litter. Not expecting to be watched from below, I rested on my haunches, searching with the image recognition software…

An Australian court has set aside the federal government’s approval for  major gas company Santos Limited’s drilling plans in the Timor Sea, north of the island nation, ruling in favor…

JEMBER, Indonesia — Earlier this month, Siti Aisyah Amini, a fourth-year law student, took a break from campus life in Semarang, Indonesia, to attend the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee…

Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett Ayers Butler has won the 2022 Heinz Award for the Environment for his efforts to advance environmental journalism worldwide. Butler started Mongabay in 1999 and…

BRUSSELS — On Sept. 15, the European Commission made a historic announcement: it will prohibit bottom fishing across 16,000 square kilometers, or 6,200 square miles — an area about half…

GORONTALO, Indonesia — In a Chanel-print dress and wielding a machete, Ermi Mauke means business as she hikes past cashew and coffee seedlings she planted on the approach to Indonesia’s…

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia — For 20 years, Redansyah has awakened every day at 5 a.m. to plant trees here in the Pesalat forest area of Central Kalimantan province. The Indigenous…

The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (or MST, its acronym in Portuguese) is one of the largest social movements in the world. Born in the early 1980s at the end…

Nestled in a valley between two volcanoes, Donald Varela-Soto heard something unfamiliar. For six months, he searched for the source of a shrill frog call along the edge of a…

MAKASSAR, Indonesia — Andi Fadly Arifuddin is known to millions of Indonesians simply as Fadly, the vocalist for the alt-rock band Padi that shot to fame in the early 2000s.…

The biodiversity crisis is driving the disappearance of birds from the wild, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Indonesia, a global hotspot of avian life. That’s why Swiss…

SORONG, Indonesia — Thriving across half a hectare in the hills of West Papua’s Mariat district are mustard greens, long beans, spinach, chilies and tomatoes. There’s also fruit such as…

MEDAN, Indonesia — Food plants intermingle on the second-floor rooftop of a house in Medan, the biggest city on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. They were planted by Sakiah Nasution,…

Raptors are famous for their ability to home in on prey and attack with precision. But how does this work when they hunt animals that flock, school or swarm, forming…

NUEVO MEXICO, Mexico — Standing in her cornfield in Chiapas state, surrounded by mountains and dry tropical forests, Maria Luisa Gordillo Mendoza looks concerned. “They said we were pigs for…

Tony Rinaudo is an Australian agronomist who was given the Right Livelihood Award in 2018 for demonstrating how drylands can be re-greened on a large scale at minimal cost, making…

In the mountains of Colombia, an experienced bird-watcher saw an iridescent flash of blue and green. “A hummingbird caught my attention. I got out my binoculars and was shocked to…

In Bolivia, the infamous “Death Road” has become a haven for life. Once the only route north from La Paz, the narrow and treacherous old road to the Yungas claimed…

JAKARTA — Seagrass meadows are the fishing grounds of choice for many households in four Indo-Pacific countries, according to a new study that calls for better-informed management of these often-overlooked…

In deep waters off the coast of Japan, a hermit crab is wearing haute couture. On its shell is the new-to-science anemone species Stylobates calcifer, named after the fire demon…

This week, member states of the U.N. General Assembly — the highest UN body that wields considerable influence over its member states — adopted a historic resolution: the recognition that…

An Indigenous community in Ecuador has finally obtained national protections for part of its territory after decades of fighting off deforestation and pollution in its mega-diverse rainforests. Ecuador’s National System…

Four species of critically endangered vulture have returned to a park in southern Malawi from which they disappeared more than 20 years ago, and their comeback is credited to the…

In 2018, marine scientist Joni Pini-Fitzsimmons received an unusual stingray video from a colleague. It showed a mangrove whipray (Urogymnus granulatus) gliding over a reef in the Gili Islands of…

Researchers have described six species of ferns new to science from the tropical forests of Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, all in the genus Danaea. “The described species are no tiny…

Driving down a quiet street in Idaho Falls in the spring of 2021, I hadn’t yet noticed the wide gap between wildlife’s various needs and the slim ranks of wildlife…

MARAMCHE, NEPAL— The monsoon clouds that arrive in Nepal in the first week of June herald the start of the rice-planting season. The country's hills, valleys and plains turn green…

In the 1970s, there were around 20,000 critically endangered western chimpanzees in Sierra Leone. But by 2008, when the most recent census was carried out, there were only around 5,500…

KAVRE, Nepal – Srijana Karki still remembers her childhood when she visited her grandfather's farm. "The green fields were dotted with various fruit trees and we would get to eat…