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…
Since October 2020, Thailand's national parks authority has demolished or ordered the demolition of more than 20 luxury mansions, resorts and tourist hotels illegally built in national parks throughout the…
An agreement for the rights to the natural capital covering 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) in Malaysian Borneo for the next 100 years “in its present form is legally…
This is the third article in a three-part series. Read Part One and Part Two. PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In March 2021, Cambodia signed into law Sub-decree No. 30, which…
This is the second article in a three-part series. Read Part One and Part Three. PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In 2017, an elephant in Cambodia’s Kirium National Park was electrocuted…
This is the first article in a three-part series. Read Part Two and Part Three. PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — “I was detained for a night, the authorities had come to…
Update Feb. 10, 2022: Sabah's attorney general says the consent of Indigenous communities is required for this agreement to move forward. Read the update here. Adrian Lasimbang, an Indigenous leader in…
Update Feb. 10, 2022: Sabah's attorney general says the consent of Indigenous communities is required for this agreement to move forward. Read the update here. Leaders in Sabah, a Malaysian state…
TRINCHEIRA INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil — Deep in the Trincheira reserve, our motor boat winds through a maze of streams, or igarapés, sliding past dense submerged rainforest. It halts on the…
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In July, conservationists in Cambodia sounded the alarm over a regulation that saw eight protected areas in Koh Kong province collectively lose territory twice the size…
Deep in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, the emerald canopy of the Campos Amazonicôs National Park sprawls across nearly a million hectares of land. Within it, dense forest hugs stretches of savanna…
Nearly half of Brazil’s savanna biome has already been lost to agriculture. Scientists say further deforestation may bring biodiversity collapse and disastrous drought, putting Brazil’s water supply and agricultural economy at grave risk.
Imagine you have invaded a public land in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, cut the forest down and, after all that, you get the papers that certify you as…
The illegal sale of protected land in the Brazilian Amazon has been going on for years, but a new BBC report got deeply inside the criminal network and found some land grabbers advertising on Facebook.
Georeferencing, a digital process for registering land ownership, is now widespread in South America, but it is high-tech that can be used by landgrabbers and companies to obtain deeds to collective ancestral lands.
A recent report shows that one of the world’s most highly regarded, and wealthiest, universities invested heavily in land in Brazil’s Cerrado grasslands, where land-grabbing and other environmental crimes are rife.
The historical record shows that Indigenous reserves are only safe from invasion by illegal deforesters once fully protected by government — protections rapidly eroding in Bolsonaro’s Brazil.
Companies and governments are pushing for the privatization of land around the world as a way to get at economically valuable resources, according to a recent report from the Oakland…
An exclusive study shows that 114 properties have been certified inside indigenous territories awaiting demarcation in the Brazilian Amazon, spurred in large part by a recent statute that leaves these reserves unprotected from such illegal land grabs.
Land grabbers, landed estate owners and even oil companies stand to benefit from a new guideline released by FUNAI, the federal indigenous affairs agency, which opens up 237 indigenous territories in Brazil for sale, subdivision and speculation.
IBAMA officials, while trying to halt deforestation in Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Reserve, were threatened and assaulted by illegal loggers. The Bolsonaro administration is largely unresponsive.
A sweeping policy change by the Bolsonaro government opens unregistered ancestral indigenous lands to landgrabbers, loggers, ranchers, and soy growers, with huge risk for the Amazon.
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…
At a UN event, Brazil was accused of Amazon deforestation policies leading toward “ethnocide” against indigenous peoples, and “genocide” against uncontacted indigenous groups.
The murder of Sister Dorothy in 2005, and resulting international outrage, helped curb violence in Brazil for a time, but crimes against landless peasants and activists are on the rise.
The Estrondo mega-farm exports soy to the EU and China, but it is accused in a mega-land grab; it also has a long record of threatening traditional people.
Scientists call it flood-retreat agriculture. As a swollen river blankets a dry plain and then recedes, it replenishes the thin soil with enough nutrients to sprout grass for cattle and…
Ecologists know that when we humans start tugging at the threads of a food web, the unraveling that results is often catastrophic to the connected species, paving the way for…
Federal litigators warn of “imminent genocide” for the Karipuna people, while at least 14 indigenous reserves have been threatened or invaded. Bolsonaro government slow to act, say critics.
Some people say that the best way to forget something is through distance, and that is one of the arguments being repeated by the experts consulted for this story. It…
