Primary Forests News

Like virtually everything in 2020, COVID-19 defined the year for tropical rainforests. Conservation was particularly hard hit in tropical countries.

Under the thick blanket of smoke, relentless flames spread with dizzying speed over swaths of Pantanal Matogrossense National Park, its grasslands parched by months of drought. In a charred marshland,…

The mountainous forests of northern Madagascar are biodiverse beyond measure, containing plant and animal species found nowhere else on the planet. Other forests in Madagascar have been lost in recent…

Rising across remote stretches of southeast Cambodia, the Cardamom Mountains harbor dense tropical rainforest, much of it native growth carpeting the range’s wet slopes. Due to its remoteness, the vast…

A thin plume of smoke rises above the lush canopy of the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, deep in the Brazilian Amazon. A couple of men feed the flames engulfing a wooden…

Selective logging has long been touted as an environmentally and ecologically favorable way to harvest timber, yet a new study adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests this…

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…

In June, three environmental defenders from the remote island of Nende celebrated their acquittal from arson charges, along with the many supporters who had attended their trial. But the later…

Nestled in the far reaches of eastern Cambodia lies Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, one of the nation’s most vital areas of protected forest and a haven for rare wildlife. Yet…

The Cameroon prime minister’s office recently announced it was suspending plans to log Ebo Forest, a large intact forest system in southwestern Cameroon that spans 200,000 hectares (about 500,000 acres),…

PALAWAN, Philippines — Deep in the forests of Palawan, the biodiverse island in the western Philippines, a plethora of plant species thrive. Many are so rare and astonishingly beautiful that…

This story is a collaboration between La Nación and Mongabay Latam. It is the fifth installment of a five-part series on illegal deforestation for marijuana production in eastern Paraguay. Read…

JAKARTA — Lifting people out of poverty in Indonesia has also helped slow the country’s rate of deforestation, a new study finds. The study looked for links between deforestation data…

A group of researchers mapped the sounds of the hermit warbler and found that the diversity of sounds increased in areas that had been affected by forest fires.

This story is a collaboration between La Nación and Mongabay Latam. It is the fourth installment of a five-part series on illegal deforestation for marijuana production in eastern Paraguay. Read…

Fifteen years ago, Ekwoge Abwe was trekking through Ebo Forest in Cameroon when he heard something cracking in the distance. He scanned the forest, searching for the source of the…

This story is a collaboration between La Nación and Mongabay Latam. It is the third installment of a five-part series on illegal deforestation for marijuana production in eastern Paraguay. Read…

This story is a collaboration between La Nación and Mongabay Latam. It is the second installment of a five-part series on illegal deforestation for marijuana production in eastern Paraguay. Read…

This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Paskalina called to me by waving her hand and asked me to come to her house in a whisper. It was my…

This story is a collaboration between La Nación and Mongabay Latam. It is the first installment of a five-part series about illegal deforestation for marijuana production in eastern Paraguay. Read…

SAHN, Sierra Leone — The day they came, Margaret Fascia was in her forest garden of cocoa trees, pineapple plants, palms, ferns and cassavas. Like most days of the week,…

This article was co-published with The Gecko Project.  This post details the analysis we carried out to estimate the revenues generated by the Korindo Group from harvesting timber as it…

MBONJO, Cameroon — The first time Emmanuel Elong wrote a letter to Vincent Bolloré was in 2013. “The impact of the group that you are controlling on our lives is…

Between 1885 and 1908, Belgium’s King Leopold II exerted control over a vast area of Africa that would later become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His rule was characterized…

This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Part 1: ‘Maybe they didn’t expect us to find it’ In April 2019, an Indonesian delegate stepped onto the stage at a…

In a corner of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, a handful of clandestine roads neatly slice the dense jungle canopy into rectangles. From the sky, an entourage of bulldozers can be…

In September 2019, the noon sky over a part of Jambi province in Indonesian Sumatra turned crimson. Fires had been raging through Indonesia for the past few months, and certain…

Last year the world lost some 119,000 square kilometers (45,946 square miles) of tree cover – an area the size of Nicaragua – according to satellite data collated by the…

Between the cacao fields of northwest Madagascar and the vanilla of the northeast, a chain of rainforests bob along the highland interior. Tsaratanana Reserve, home to the country’s highest peak,…

On a wet August afternoon in 2015, Jorjo Tana Tara, 48, a member of the indigenous Nyishi community and an anti-logging activist, discovered illegal loggers and poachers at a large…