JAKARTA — A court in Indonesia has sentenced two indigenous farmers to eight and 10 months in prison respectively for stealing oil palm fruit from a plantation company that is…
The COVID-19 pandemic and the arrival of fire season in two of the world’s major rainforests are on a collision course, scientists and public health researchers say, and the results…
PALAWAN, Philippines — Lawyers have condemned police officers on the Philippine island of Palawan for holding at gunpoint and arresting environmental law enforcers who visited a coastal village on June…
As a young boy living on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wizipan Little Elk remembers the first time he saw a buffalo herd. The experience ignited a passion, and at…
TIKTIK KAANU, Nicaragua — Eduardo Solano did not say much on the way home. He bought some oranges from a fruit vendor at a makeshift dock in Bluefields, the capital…
Forest communities around the world struggling to achieve the legal recognition that would give them a greater say in how their natural resources are managed now have recourse to an…
Researchers have detected the "first major fire of 2020" in the Brazilian Amazon three months ahead of the fire season, while other scientists warn that there could be a “catastrophe”…
Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) arrived in Boa Vista on the Trombetas River in 1979. While the mining company made big profits, traditional people say it has given back little while doing great harm.
Ricardo Lopes Dias, an anthropologist and Christian Evangelical pastor, appointed to head Brazil’s isolated indigenous tribes department, has been removed due to a “conflict of interest”
A coalition of more than 5,000 villagers and a provincial government in Papua New Guinea has built a legal challenge against the world’s most productive battery nickel plant. The company,…
MANILA — The Philippines’ COVID-19 lockdown has exacerbated threats to activists fighting for their lands and their environment, with least 10 land defenders swept up in a series of arrests…
Boa Vista Quilombo — an Afro-Brazilian community of runaway slave descendants — lacks basic health services, but COVID-19 is now just a half mile away, infecting MRN mining company personnel.
JAKARTA — A broad coalition of civil society groups has called on investors and buyers to stop doing business with Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), one of the world’s biggest…
JAKARTA — Indonesia is considering a ban to prevent its citizens going abroad to work on foreign fishing vessels, after the latest report that one of them had died and…
JAKARTA — Conservationists are calling for an investigation into alleged illegal fishing by a Chinese tuna company that kept Indonesian seamen as virtual slaves, leading to the deaths of four…
BOGOTA, Colombia — Droughts are lasting longer because of climate change and human intervention, but where does climate change leave off and human exploitation of natural resources begin? The Wayuu…
I used my Brazilian name above, but in my community, I am known as Wino Këyashëni. I belong to the Marubo people, one of the seven ethnic groups that inhabit…
Applications to mine on indigenous lands in the Amazon have increased by 91% under the Bolsonaro administration. Among the applicants are mining giant Anglo American, small-scale cooperatives whose members are embroiled in a range of environmental violations, and even a São Paulo-based architect.
As COVID-19 continues to wrack our lives, the topic of the illegal wildlife trade and its connection to the coronavirus has garnered recent headlines. Many organizations, such as the Wildlife…
The Land Portal Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in the Netherlands, recently released what it’s calling “the largest global database of land and property rights projects.” In around a decade…
BINTUNI BAY, Indonesia — Residents of this part of the island of New Guinea have long known they live atop a coal deposit. Some local people recall hearing traditional stories…
On satellite images, the Panguna mine yawns amid the otherwise green mountain forests of central Bougainville Island in the South Pacific, a silty river valley tracing a jagged path from…
Illegal gold mining led to deforestation of thousands of hectares of forests inside indigenous reserves in the Brazilian Amazon, according to new satellite image analysis by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP). Mongabay had exclusive access to the report prior to its release.
As people around the globe stock their pantries for long stretches at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, sales of tinned tuna are going through the roof. In the U.S., consumption…
MANILA — Facing armed conflict in their hometowns in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, dozens of indigenous students moved to Manila to continue their education. But with the new…
Christian fundamentalist Andrew Tonkin is allegedly planning to contact and convert isolated Brazilian Amazon indigenous people, according to Marubo and Mayoruna indigenous leaders.
A supposed COVID-19 test for a possibly infected Marubo indigenous man in Atalaia do Norte — gateway to the vast Javari Valley Indigenous Territory — was never analyzed; so results remain unknown.
Ethnos360 missionaries have purchased a helicopter as part of a plan to contact and convert isolated Amazon indigenous groups, putting them at grave risk of deadly infectious disease.
LOMBOK, Indonesia — Environmental activists have called on authorities in Indonesia’s Lombok Island to drop plans for a cable car project serving a UNESCO-listed national park. The government of West…
In Peru, communities in the Andes and the Amazon have come together to defend the health of people and families affected by pollution from toxic metals. To achieve this, they…
