Pollution News

Little by little, the ocean floor of Chapaco Bay is being blanketed in sludge. Héctor Zuleta is no longer able to harvest shellfish from among the caves, ridges and woodlands…

NUSA DUA, Indonesia — The Indonesian government is set to make consumer goods manufacturers more responsible for managing the waste from their product packaging, in a bid to tackle one…

A study conducted with participants from across the globe found that every single stool sample collected tested positive for the presence of microplastics. Researchers from the Medical University of Vienna…

Winter in north India is almost here, and social media is already buzzing with pictures of crop residue burning in the country’s northern states. Over the last few years, the…

JAKARTA — Three executives from one of Indonesia’s biggest palm oil firms were arrested over the weekend by the nation’s anti-graft agency after an employee was caught bribing politicians to…

MANILA, Philippines — Freedom Island is drowning in garbage. The last coastal frontier in the Philippine capital provides refuge to migratory birds and a thick mangrove forest there serves as…

A few decades ago, most countries phased out the manufacture and use of a highly toxic group of industrial chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. But the dangers of these…

Recent top stories from our Spanish-language service, Mongabay-Latam, revealed Peruvians’ hidden shark diet, new species in Colombia’s Chiribiquete National Park, dire predictions from Mexico’s “Batman,” and more. Peruvians are eating…

Scientists have observed the tropics expanding toward Earth’s poles in recent decades, which was projected to happen as increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to heat up…

JAKARTA — Officials in Indonesia have released a predictive calendar they hope will give fish farmers in the country’s largest lake a heads-up on water conditions that have previously killed…

The most popular stories from our Spanish-language service, Mongabay-Latam, followed trafficking of jaguar parts in Peru and Bolivia, a strategy to limit cattle ranches in Colombia, and liberated macaws in…

JAKARTA — Organizers of the recently concluded Asian Games in Indonesia had been braced for the worst-case scenario: forest fires flaring up and shrouding Palembang, one of the host cities,…

Protecting tropical forests is key to mitigating climate change. When California Governor Jerry Brown convenes the Global Climate Action Summit next week, he should seize the opportunity to make an…

YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia — Dressed in a hazmat suit with boots, gloves and a mask, Prigi Arisandi waded into a river north of Yogyakarta, a city in the center of the…

"We need to keep this river clean,” says Muhammad Yusuf, a fisheries official from Padang, the capital of the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. “We’ve got to keep people from…

The most popular stories from our Spanish-language service, Mongabay-Latam, this past week followed high-volume fishing in the Galapagos, oil drilling in Colombian cloud forests, mercury levels in the Peruvian Amazon,…

JAKARTA/PONTIANAK/PEKANBARU — Like their compatriots across Indonesia, a group of residents in the Bornean city of Pontianak celebrated the country’s Independence Day on Aug. 17 with a flag-raising ceremony. But…

JAKARTA — A far-reaching corruption scandal centered on a proposed power plant in Indonesia has cast a shadow over the country’s risky reliance on coal as a supposedly cheap source…

Millions of fish in floating cages died suddenly this week in Lake Toba, the biggest lake in Indonesia. E. Naibaho, a local aquafarmer, noticed the fish in his floating pens…

KUALA LUMPUR — By 2012, when then-prime minister Najib Razak formally launched the River of Life project to improve water quality and restore the aesthetic virtue of the Klang River,…