On December 21, Reconnaissance Energy Africa (Recon Africa) announced that it had begun exploratory drilling for oil and gas in the Namibian portion of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA).…
JAKARTA — An Indonesian government program to phase out diesel for an alternative made from palm oil could spur massive deforestation for palm plantations spanning an area a fifth the…
Flor de María Paraná, 47, describes the bleakest moment of her life as the one that made her the leader she is today. "It was the day that everything changed,"…
The entry of STENA ICEMAX, a hulking 750-foot drilling vessel, into Bahamian this week signaled that a months-long battle over the blue waters of the Caribbean nation had come to…
Five years ago – where the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea meet is the small South American country of Guyana – an offshore oil exploration struck black gold. At…
In the Peruvian Amazon, two Indigenous groups have been battling the government and oil companies for decades to prevent an incursion they believe would forever alter their homeland. An immense…
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…
Appreciation of the outsized role that Indigenous people play in helping to protect the planet’s biodiversity, intact ecosystems, and global carbon stocks is growing around the world. On Wednesday, the United…
QUITO, Ecuador — It was a historic moment in April of 2019. Dozens of Indigenous Waorani plaintiffs filled a small courtroom in Ecuador’s Amazon city of Puyo, many of them…
The first oil well in South America was built more than a century and a half ago, in the district of Zorritos, in northern Peru. Fishermen still tell the story…
A Japanese ship that wrecked off the coast of Mauritius in July and sparked one of the worst environmental disasters in the country’s history may have run aground because of…
Thousands of people demonstrated in Mauritius on Aug. 29 over the government's handling of a recent ship grounding that spilled 1,000 tons oil in the seas around the island nation.…
On the morning of Aug.15, a wrecked ship, longer than the Titanic, broke in two in Mauritian waters. The Japanese-owned bulk carrier, M.V. Wakashio, had rammed into the island nation's…
As sick patients flood hospitals throughout the Sunbelt and healthcare providers step up selflessly to meet the challenge, I think about my friend Rosa Moreno, the most courageous nurse I…
AKLAN, Philippines — An oil spill on July 3 threatens a mangrove forest on the Philippine island of Guimaras, an area only just recovering from the country’s largest spill in…
In 2006, when the first large environmental monitoring project began in the Peruvian Amazon, its objective was not to uncover new environmental crimes in the forest. Instead, the project was…
In recent years, five of the most powerful international banks and investment funds have financed oil exploration in the region where the Amazon River begins. These business ventures are impacting indigenous communities and countless species of fauna and flora.
In the rural Indonesian village of Hongoi*, indigenous Dayak Modang women like Lina* have had to come up with creative ways to continue their long-held tradition of weaving. Some Dayak…
*This article is a collaboration between Semana Sostenible of Colombia and Mongabay Latam. Sofía and Nicole, two young girls from the Colombian village of Terraplén, sing at the top of…
Companies, with the support of governments, are using the coronavirus pandemic as a chance to secure less stringent regulations governing their impacts on forests and the environment, according to the…
It was one of the worst environmental disasters the world has witnessed. Ten years ago, on April 20, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon exploratory rig exploded, killing 11 people and…
This story is a journalistic collaboration between Semana Sostenible of Colombia and Mongabay Latam. Eugenio Chacón scans the colorful branches of the trees with his strong, sharp gaze. The 58-year-old…
On 9 March 2020, Mongabay published a commentary written by Philip M. Fearnside on the “Solimões Sedimentary Area”, an oil and gas project that would implant thousands of wells spread over the western portion of the Brazilian Amazon. EPE, the Brazilian Energy Research Office, sent a response to Mongabay claiming “conceptual mistakes.” Fearnside, now, comments on these claims.
In the few years I’ve worked as a freelance journalist in Guyana I’ve been told by editors, “There’s not much interest in Guyana”; that two reports from the Caribbean in…
APOI, Nigeria — It’s sunset in the small Niger Delta village of Apoi. The town crier's bell rings out over tilted electricity poles and small bungalows. “The epiene people are…
Colombia is the world’s second-most biodiverse country after Brazil. Central Colombia’s Macarena region, in particular, is important for biodiversity as it serves as a transition zone between three major biomes:…
The peatlands of the Congo Basin are home to more than just massive carbon stocks and some of our closest — and most threatened — relatives in the animal kingdom,…
Air pollution has significantly decreased over China amid the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, signaling unanticipated implications for human health. “Given the huge amount of evidence that breathing…
In Peru, communities in the Andes and the Amazon have come together to defend the health of people and families affected by pollution from toxic metals. To achieve this, they…
Leaders of several indigenous communities have lodged a complaint with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, that a Netherlands-based oil company fouled the environment in Peru's slice…
