Major roadbuilding, including the “reconstruction” of the BR-319 highway, now threatens the Brazilian Amazon’s last, vast intact rainforest, vital to Brazilian ecosystem services.
Almost a fifth of Brazil’s soy and grains already flow down Amazonia’s rivers. Now a boom in private river port construction, with little government oversight, further threatens the region’s waterways.
On November 5, 2015 an iron ore mine tailings dam owned by Samarco, a joint venture of Vale and BHP Billiton, two of the world’s largest mining firms, collapsed in Mariana, Brazil. Life along Rio Doce has not been the same since.
The planned 650 MW dam on the Rio Branco in Brazil’s Roraima state is scheduled to become operational in 2028; it could do extraordinary socio-environmental harm.
JAKARTA — Already facing a pandemic, a corruption scandal, and the revocation of its environmental permit, an embattled coal-fired power plant on the Indonesian island of Java faces a new…
Noormala Anwar’s frustration comes through in an Aug. 4 video she posted on Facebook. She swings her phone’s camera back and forth, revealing a bulldozer sitting right next to her…
JAYAPURA, Indonesia — Paving of a dirt road linking two cities in Indonesia’s easternmost Papua region could spark the destruction of a wildlife reserve whose isolation has made it a…
The reconstruction of the BR-319 highway — a north-south cut through what remains of Brazil’s Amazon forest — is being fast tracked by Pres. Bolsonaro, but the project risks huge socio-environmental impacts.
Jair Bolsonaro and 6,000 of his appointees come from Brazil’s military, which historically sees Amazon infrastructure and development as vital to national security and to averting foreign invasion: Analysis.
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…
Brazil’s current 10-year Energy Expansion Plan calls for three more large dams in Amazonia by 2029, and the country’s 2050 National Energy Plan lists many more — putting the environment at risk.
JAKARTA — An evolutionary crucible in Indonesia that’s given rise to a unique array of primates found nowhere else on Earth is at risk of disappearing due to rapid deforestation,…
A year ago, Bali’s environmentalist community was cautiously celebrating the cancellation of a massive land reclamation project planned for Benoa Bay. The permit for the 30 trillion rupiah ($2 billion)…
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…
Wadson Trujillo is an environmental monitor in Cuninico, an Indigenous community in northern Peru. In 2014, he was a witness to an oil spill in which thousands of barrels of…
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…
When rain falls on Bantayan Island, the supply of fresh water rises. If the rains fail, it becomes scarcer. The more than 120,000 residents of Bantayan and 22 nearby islets…
On the Åland Islands, a small, sparsely populated archipelago in southern Finland, a team of ecologists spend two weeks each autumn surveying the habitat of a particular butterfly species. 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…
MANILA — On July 29, the San Miguel Corporation, the Philippines’ largest company by revenue, started planting 25,000 mangrove trees in a coastal area just north of the capital, Manila.…
For the past four years Marie-Cresence Ngobo has travelled between the scattered villages bordering the giant oil palm plantations run by Socapalm (Société Camerounaise des Palmeraies), which are located in Cameroon’s rural coastal…
A new study finds that the four fish species most commonly consumed by Indigenous and riverine communities in northern Brazil contain the highest concentrations of mercury, up to four times in excess of WHO recommendations.
A wave of planned “mega” infrastructure projects across the tropics of Latin America threatens the region’s forests and the biodiversity and carbon they contain, a group of scientists warned Aug.…
JAKARTA/MAKASSAR — Activists in Indonesia have slammed what they call the authorities’ campaign of criminalization against a fishing community protesting against the development of a port on their coast. Police…
Low carbon investment in agriculture, industry and energy shows better economic prospects than business-as-usual scenario, raising hopes Brazil will add environmental priorities to COVID-19 economic recovery plan.
New Guinea's diversity of life, cultures and landscapes has long inspired prominent scientists, from Alfred Russel Wallace to Jared Diamond. Sitting just below the equator at the nexus of Asia…
Last week a new film was released that documents the building of a road into the Manu Biosphere Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon. It's a story of conflict, community development,…
JAKARTA — A corruption scandal now unfurling in Indonesian Borneo is shedding light on how high-level bribery in infrastructure projects poses long-term threats to the community and the environment. The…
For two years, regions of Brazil that depend on precipitation fed by Amazonian vegetation have seen rainfall below historical averages, impacting crops and harvests. A recent bulletin from a federal agency points to agribusiness itself as one of the drivers of this pattern.
