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…
RIPÁ, Brazil — One muggy morning last December, eight women and their chief drove out of the Indigenous Xavante village of Ripá across a forested savanna in the Brazilian state…
Satellites have detected forest clearing within Triunfo do Xingu this year, an area that’s supposed to be a legally protected swath of Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s northern state of Pará.…
Protected areas and lands managed by Indigenous and traditional communities have been bulwarks of forest preservation and restoration in the Brazilian Amazon in recent years, a new study shows. It…
Based on the best scientific data available, the unprecedented Amazon Water Impact Index draws together monitoring and research data to identify the most vulnerable areas of the Brazilian rainforest. According to the index, 20% of the 11,216 Brazilian Amazon microbasins have an impact considered high, very high or extreme; half of these watersheds are affected by hydroelectric plants.
Ida Yellowman stood at the top of Muley Point, seeing memories in every cardinal direction. To the north was Bears Ears and the Abajo Mountains, rock-strewn landscape where she first…
Illegal miners operating insider the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon are coercing Indigenous girls as young as 11 into sex work, as well as inflicting violence and disease…
Before Jair Bolsonaro took office as Brazil’s president in 2019, Canadian investment bank Forbes & Manhattan was facing problems with its business activities in the Brazilian Amazon. The situation began…
Legal restrictions meant to protect Brazil’s Indigenous territories from outside threats are failing to deter illegal deforestation and cattle ranching, fueling fears for the safety of uncontacted and isolated Indigenous…
Brazil’s Amazon dam plans have been slowed down over the past decade due to realization by the country’s electrical authorities that obtaining environmental licenses would be difficult when Indigenous peoples…
“We are hopeful, we never gave up on our goal, to get our house back,” says Heber do Prado Carneiro. He and his wife, Vanessa Honorato, are Caiçaras, members of…
Organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah have filed a complaint with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples about a once-secretive deal aimed at locking up…
As thousands of people protested in Brazil’s capital against a “death package” of bills deemed anti-environmental and anti-Indigenous, the lower house of Congress agreed to fast-track one of those bills,…
Three young women from the Munduruku Indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon run an audiovisual collective that uses social media to raise awareness about illegal invasions of their territory. “Many people no longer believe what we say, they only believe what they see,” says Aldira Akai, who, at 30, is the oldest member of the collective.
Since 2013, the Ka'apor expelled the Federal Brazilian Indigenous Agency from their territory in the state of Maranhão, creating a new government council, adopting their own education system and establishing permanent settlements along their borders to contain the illegal advance of loggers, land grabbers and miners.