Campaigners in the Tanintharyi region of southern Myanmar have urged international donors to support community conservation efforts, rather than what they see as a top-down approach that excludes indigenous groups.…
The Bukit Tigapuluh landscape in Indonesia has been sliced and diced by roads, opening its forests to threats from the outside. As forest vanishes in the region, so too does…
The Naga tribes inhabit the hills in the northwestern corner of Myanmar and northeast India. They had long been isolated from outside culture, dwelling in independent village republics. This protected…
The world has lost 178 million hectares (439 million acres) of forest cover over the past 20 years, which the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) equated to as “about…
Earlier this month, Myanmar’s Information Ministry announced that the country’s Forest Department had seized nearly 850 tons of illegal timber between March 30 and April 5. Teak and other hardwoods…
PUTA-O, Myanmar — In late 2018, following a series of demonstrations and confrontations, indigenous communities primarily from the Rawang ethnic minority expelled the Myanmar Forest Department and its international partner,…
Gurney’s pitta may be running out of time. The tiny, vibrantly colored bird, first described from the Tanintharyi region of Myanmar in 1875, was thought to have gone extinct when…
Dutch authorities carried out raids in six locations in the Netherlands seizing teak, widely used in luxury yachts, this month. The wood, originating from Myanmar, arrived in the Czech Republic…
The 2010s opened as a moment of optimism for tropical forests. Widely available satellite imagery via platforms like Google Earth brought new levels of accountability which, for the first time,…
On Nov. 23, the last Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) in Malaysia died. Named Iman, she’d lived in captivity in the Malaysian state of Sabah in Borneo for just over five…
For two decades or more, alarms have been sounding for the Mekong Delta. It's being hammered by climate change, by a proliferation of upstream dams, by unsustainable and inappropriate farming…
Indonesia and Malaysia have long occupied the spotlight for oil palm plantations and their adverse consequences, including deforestation, habitat loss, climate change, and struggles with indigenous and local people. But…
In Asian society, where young people are expected to be submissive to elders, a vocal youth movement demanding climate justice from their governments is rising.
Sanu Kaji Shrestha was wandering along a Cypriot coastline 10 years ago, enjoying some downtime from a workshop he was leading on green energy technology, when he decided to collect…
While wandering through northwestern Myanmar in 2016, a group of scientists stumbled on hundreds of huge tracks in the ground. According to a new paper in the journal Mammalia, these…
Slowly but surely, thinking and talking about gender equality has become normal in much of modern life, from the actor Benedict Cumberbatch demanding equal pay for his female co-stars, to…
KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh — Where a year ago there were only the desolate remains of a forest scythed from hills to house hundreds of thousands in the world's largest refugee camp,…
TANINTHARYI, Myanmar — Most of the waterways surrounding the islands of the Mergui archipelago in the Andaman Sea are lined with mangroves, and the one leading into the island of…
IRRAWADDY DELTA, Myanmar — Just as dawn was breaking on a balmy morning this past January, U Khin Win left his home with a pair of black rubber boots and…
IRRAWADDY DELTA, Myanmar — For many in Myanmar, Cyclone Nargis was a wake-up call. When it made landfall in May 2008, it devastated the Irrawaddy Delta, a rural and low-lying…
RANONG, Thailand — Beyond a metal gate in Ranong, a port town in southern Thailand, a warehouse is filled nearly wall to wall and floor to ceiling with bags of…
A secretive timber kingpin who died last year has been unmasked as the shadowy figure at the center of a vast network that illegally sources teak, deliberately misgrades it to…
Last month, indigenous Karen communities, the Salween Peace Park Committee, and the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) officially launched the Salween Peace Park in the Mutraw District of…
2018 was a difficult year for the world's tropical rainforests. Below are of some of the biggest rainforest storylines for the year, but we couldn't cover everything, so if there…
KATOWICE, Poland — The world has just 12 years left to halve greenhouse gas emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change, but hopes that a solution will come from saving the…
The Myanmar government has expanded a protected stretch of the Irrawaddy River as part of efforts to save the critically endangered dolphin species of the same name. The Irrawaddy Dolphin…
The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) is sounding the alarm over what it calls a “shadowy agreement” made by the Myanmar government to allow the logging and export of 5,000…
In Myanmar, more than 5,000 elephants have been put to work in the logging industry over the past century, accounting for one of the world’s largest captive elephant populations. They…
Myanmar’s Timber Merchants Association is crying foul over what they say are the devastating impacts from a one-year logging ban and new, restrictive government policies. Soe Win, secretary of the…
As Myanmar works to restructure its national timber authority and adopt a new fiscal calendar, the Southeast Asian country continues to struggle to control illegal logging. The country’s forestry management…