Pollution News

When over a million hectares of carbon-rich peatlands burned in Indonesia in 2019, a public health crisis followed – the haze that results causes serious respiratory issues for humans and…

A lone figure kneels at the high-tide line of Tregantle Beach. A 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) sweep of golden sands that hugs the coast of Cornwall in southwest England, Tregantle is bound…

Scientists implore US, EU, Japan, South Korea and UK to stop harvesting forests to turn into wood pellets to burn as fuel at converted coal-burning power plants; a policy the UN has erroneously condoned as “carbon neutral.”

Traditional wood stoves in developing countries are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and rely on a steady supply of wood, often causing habitat destruction. Around Kibale National Park,…

Michael Regan, President Biden’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2019 saw no climate benefit to the production of wood pellets in North Carolina to make energy abroad; what will he do at EPA?

BANTEN, Indonesia — Every day, Subur and his wife walk past giant chimneys, painted red and white at the crown, pouring smoke out of a cluster of coal plants. Subur,…

Plastic is everywhere — literally everywhere. A growing body of research shows that plastic is not only filling the world’s oceans and wilderness regions, it’s also invading our bodies through…

JAKARTA — U.S. agribusiness giants Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Bunge are buying palm oil from mills in Indonesia that have been publicly linked to land and human rights violations and…

Brazil’s Ferrovia Paraense (FEPASA) railroad will run from Pará state’s rainforest interior to the Amazon estuary; traditional communities say they haven’t yet been consulted as required by international law.

In September 2020, more than a million households in Malaysia's densely populated Klang Valley suffered extended water cuts after illegal chemical dumping debilitated the region's aging water purification systems. In…

Brazil has been mined for gold, bauxite, manganese and more. While companies, investors and nations benefit, the Amazon’s people often haven’t, as they’ve lost traditional cultures, livelihoods and health.

1. The ocean in a worldwide pandemic As the year that challenged the world with a widespread pandemic draws to a close, COVID-19 has affected almost every aspect of life…

Toxic legacy of mining firms — Norwegian-Japanese Albrás, Brazil’s Vale, Norway’s Norsk Hydro, and France’s Imerys Rio Capim Caulim — wreak havoc on livelihoods and health in Amazon communities: Critics.

COLOMBO — Sri Lanka has sent back the first batch of hundreds of containers of waste to the U.K., becoming the latest nation in the Global South to push back…

The Ocean Cleanup is a highly touted nonprofit with the ambitious goal of cleaning up 90 percent of the ocean’s plastic. In reality, the initiative’s impact on the world's floating…

Marine mammals stranded on beaches in the southeastern United States died with high levels of pollutants stored in their organs and blubber, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Marine Science.…

Along the banks of the Batanghari River on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, thick black coal dust billows from mountainous stockpiles belonging to the coal company PT Tegas Guna Mandari…

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…

Brazil’s mining authority is actively entertaining more than 3,000 requests to mine on Indigenous lands in the Amazon, despite such activity being prohibited under the country’s Constitution, an investigation by…

David Attenborough’s latest nature documentary on Netflix may be his greatest yet. Apparently stung by criticism about the false impressions his documentaries have provided on the state of our natural…

JAKARTA — When Indonesia’s parliament passed a new slate of deregulation that, among other things, drastically strips back environmental protections against coal mining, critics and protesters denounced it as catering…

For the first time, researchers have developed a model capable of anticipating drought periods in the Amazon up to 18 months in advance. The study was conducted by scientists from…

Mining, both legal and illegal, impinges on more than one-fifth of Indigenous territory in the Amazon, according to a new study from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Amazon…

Age-old Indigenous knowledge has guided the sustainable management of wilderness areas around the world: how to preserve the land, anticipating what will happen throughout the year, and adapting to how…

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…

Colombo — Authorities in Sri Lanka are seeking millions of dollars in damages after a weeklong firefighting operation to put out a blaze on board an oil tanker in its…

A unique rainforest island lying 270 kilometers (168 miles) off Papua New Guinea is once again at the center of a tug-of-war between multiple extractive industries vying for its rich…

SAMARINDA, Indonesia — On Sept. 6, five teenagers went together to a man-made lake in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province, carved out of a coal-mining pit that had been abandoned and…

A healthy coral reef system is like a well-managed city. Each resident fish has a job in maintaining the reef: some nibble away at seaweed threatening to smother the coral,…

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…