As one of the world’s most widely traded food and beverage commodities, palm oil is used in everything from baked goods to biofuels. It is produced in Southeast Asia, Africa,…
Southeast Asia is a global biodiversity hotspot, and Indonesia and Malaysia are no exception, harboring some of the highest levels of species diversity in the world. Yet those two countries…
Rising human populations and widespread industrial agriculture have hemmed one of the least-understood cats on the planet into ever-smaller patches of forest on the island of Borneo, a recent study…
Conservation-minded planners often pick places with the fewest signs of human impact for protection, and, across the tropics, pristine rainforests with the tallest trees often rise to the top of…
Frogs can survive in oil palm plantations, but at the cost of diversity of species — and the impact can radiate out deep into neighboring forest ecosystems, according to a…
Bearded pigs in Malaysian Borneo appear to have adapted to oil palm plantations, a key driver of deforestation in the region, but still depend heavily on adjacent forests as their…
JAKARTA — The world lost nearly 150,000 orangutans from the island of Borneo in the past 16 years due to habitat loss and killing, and is on track to lose…
The backstory behind the world’s smallest elephants has always been something of a mystery. For one thing, scientists aren’t sure exactly when — and how — Bornean pygmy elephants got…
For more than a century, agroforests in the Sumatran port town of Krui used to be a prime example of how interspersing native tree species among crops could give locals…
Oil palm plantation companies are still eating away at the Leuser Ecosystem, one of Indonesia’s last best rainforests, despite a provincial ban on forest clearance to make way for the…
Logged tropical forests have a bit of a bad reputation in the conservation community. They’re often seen as sub-standard habitats for animals, especially when compared with the robust and varied…
Scientists and conservationists have long believed that the rapid loss of Southeast Asia’s old-growth, “primary” rainforests in recent decades would leave one of its most iconic inhabitants, the orangutan, with…
MONROVIA, Liberia - When Liberia signed a series of contracts with international palm oil producers in the years after its protracted civil war, the news was greeted by some as…
SUKAU, Malaysia – At first blush, the muddy waters of the Kinabatangan River in northern Borneo seem to laze through a hodge-podge of sleepy fishing and farming villages. The river…
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we welcome Mongabay contributing editor Glenn Scherer to the program. Glenn is responsible for Mongabay’s “Almost Famous Animals” series, which just wrapped up…
On the surface, the Republic of Congo appears to be making strides toward both conservation and economic development. But the process of becoming an emerging economy is not without its…
Sometimes for a scientist, the disconnected pieces of years of research come together in a single, “really awesome” point in time. For ecologist Greg Asner, where it happened was about…
Gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans -- our great ape cousins teeter on the precipice of extinction. And it’s not much of a secret that we humans have had a lot to do…
Southeast Asia is a global biodiversity hotspot — but with about four billion people living in the region, the pressures on that biodiversity are severe. Deforestation rates in Southeast Asia…
As palm oil has become one of the most in-demand global commodities over the past several years, oil palm plantations have proliferated quickly throughout the tropics. Oil palm is currently…
Most of the attention paid to oil palm in Southeast Asia centers on big plantations set up by big companies, and it’s almost uniformly bad for the environment. But less…
Mongabay’s India-based staff writer Shreya Dasgupta appears on this episode of the Newscast to discuss key votes held at the seventeenth congress of the parties to the Convention on International…
2015 was supposed to be a big year for the palm oil industry — the year it proposed to reach a “tipping point” and begin predominantly producing and trading palm…
Junk food consumption is on the rise around the world, even though processed foods that are low in essential nutrients and high in salt, refined carbohydrates, and fat aren’t necessarily…
Most oil palm is grown in areas that were once species-rich and carbon-rich tropical forests, thanks to the fact that the crop’s natural range is limited to the humid tropics.…
Agricultural expansion into tropical forests is an important driver of biodiversity loss — which scientists say has already become so severe across 60 percent of the Earth’s land surface that…
It’s well known that when forests are converted to palm oil plantations, biodiversity suffers. But oil palm trees only last for about 25 to 30 years, at which point they…
n the library shelves of its Nyaru Menteng rehabilitation center in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOSF) has row upon row of bound volumes, each bearing the…
France has imposed a new levy on palm oil imports, amid protests from the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia, the two largest palm oil producers. The tax, part of a wider biodiversity…
Gorillas have been caught on camera in the Ebo Forest of Cameroon for the first time ever. Ebo Forest is comprised of nearly 2,000 square kilometers (about 770 square miles)…
