Artisanal gold mining is driving the global demand for mercury, with 2,058 metric tons of the toxic metal contaminating water, land and air every year, according to a recent report…
When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva takes office at the start of 2023 as president of Brazil, his third term in the post, he faces the difficult task of making…
AMAMBAI, Brazil — About a dozen Guarani-Kaiowá Indigenous people danced around a grave, freshly filled in, chanting a prayer as they swayed to the rhythm of a rattle. Around them,…
A radical change to how Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency functions has prompted alarm among activists, who say it effectively threatens to end the demarcation of Indigenous territories and set back…
This report is part of a journalistic collaboration between Mongabay Latam, La Región and Red Ambiental de Información. ROBORÉ, Bolivia—The Ñembi Guasu region is referred to as the “great refuge”…
After a 19-year process, uncontacted and recently contacted Indigenous peoples living in the Napo-Tigre region of the Peruvian Amazon have had their existence officially recognized. With an extensive anthropological study…
As the clamor to protect vast portions of Earth’s lands and waters grows louder to meet upcoming international goals, a newly translated book critically examines the first principles of global…
TAMPAKAN, Philippines — In a move celebrated by anti-mining activists, local officials in the southern Philippine municipality of Tampakan have canceled the business permit for a controversial copper and gold…
The European Parliament has approved a bill blocking the import of "dirty commodities" by members of the European Union, in an effort to combat global deforestation. Under the new bill,…
Men on horseback enter a protected Indigenous area, bringing along 100 head of cattle. Next to a village with no road access, inhabited by the Parakanã people, the men find…
Crimes associated with illegal logging, mining and other illicit activities in the Brazilian Amazon are being felt in 24 of Brazil’s 27 states, a new report shows.
A Brazilian company stands poised to start mining inside an Indigenous territory in the Amazon as soon as October, highlighting the precarious nature of the protections afforded to Indigenous lands…
Coordinated raids by police in Brazil have shed new light on the workings of the illegal mining industry in the Amazon. Federal police carried out three simultaneous raids against the…
The declining population of non-human primates, like monkeys, apes, tarsiers or prosimians, mainly due to deforestation and habitat loss, has long been a concern for researchers. At least 68% of…
Just weeks after visiting a patch of Malaysian rainforest, Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler learned it had been logged for wood chips to supply a paper plant. A teenager at…
Less than two months since the killing of British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira in early June, armed illegal gold miners reportedly intimidated government rangers near…
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…
When Milka Chepkorir Kuto took the stage on July 18 at the opening ceremony of the Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC) in Kigali, Rwanda, she came with a sobering message…
Frustrated with watching agribusiness and eucalyptus plantations destroy their territory, members of several Indigenous Pataxó communities in the Brazilian state of Bahia took over a plantation, set fire to it,…
Since March 22 this year, Brazil’s federal agency for land reform, known as Incra, has been looking into the registration of a sprawling ranch in the municipality of Fernando Falcão,…
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)
Tangãi Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau recalls the evening of April 17, 2020, when his brother left their village deep in the Amazon rainforest to go out for a routine motorbike ride. It was…
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…
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…
For more than a decade, Canadian oil company Gran Tierra Energy has been attempting to boost its presence in Colombia’s Putumayo department, where it operates its La Cabaña exploratory drilling…
Packed into a thatched-roof meeting hall in the village of Urucurituba, deep in the Brazilian Amazon, hundreds of Mura Indigenous people mulled over whether to allow a massive potash mine…
On some days, a strong smell of oil wafts through the Indigenous Kichwa community of October 12, located in Peru’s Amazonian region of Loreto. Residents going outside to see what…
AGUA BONITA CAMP, Colombia – Walking all day through the jungle to visit the encampments of friends and relatives is what Tumni Abtukaru misses the most about life before his…
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…
