The Ambatovy nickel mine located in a biodiversity-rich Madagascar rainforest made up for the forest lost due to its operation, a recent study in Nature Sustainability concluded. The mine operators…
Based on the best scientific data available, the unprecedented Amazon Water Impact Index draws together monitoring and research data to identify the most vulnerable areas of the Brazilian rainforest. According to the index, 20% of the 11,216 Brazilian Amazon microbasins have an impact considered high, very high or extreme; half of these watersheds are affected by hydroelectric plants.
JAKARTA — Tropical forest loss remained consistently high in 2021 with no sign of slowing down, despite commitments by companies and governments to curb deforestation, according to new data from…
How do you justify tearing down the world’s greatest rainforest for agribusiness? Pretend it’s not a rainforest. That appears to be the thinking behind a bill introduced into Brazil’s lower…
Before Jair Bolsonaro took office as Brazil’s president in 2019, Canadian investment bank Forbes & Manhattan was facing problems with its business activities in the Brazilian Amazon. The situation began…
While trying to put together a review of what happened to Venezuela’s environment in 2021, conservationists ran into a problem. The government publishes virtually no statistics on things like deforestation,…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government’s plan to administratively split the country’s easternmost region of Papua into five provinces, from the current two, has raised concerns that its forests and natural…
Activists and an opposition lawmaker in the Malaysian state of Pahang have demanded government accountability after reports that just 5% of forest reserves cleared to make way for plantations have…
MAKOKOU, Gabon — In August 2020, the Massaha community in northeastern Gabon made a formal request to the government to declassify a logging concession allocated to a Chinese company, Transport…
JAKARTA — A palm oil company whose permit was revoked at the start of the year and which was ordered to halt operations is allegedly continuing to clear forests in…
The planetwide cocaine supply chain — its production, trafficking and consumption — causes deforestation and pollution, and impacts biodiversity, as do other criminal activities associated with illegal drugs.
Indonesia is the biggest palm oil producer in the world. Alongside Malaysia, both countries dominate 85% of the global market. Palm oil is considered one of the strategic commodities in…
JAKARTA — An area of natural forest a tenth the size of Seoul has been cleared by a subsidiary of South Korean paper giant Moorim in Indonesia’s Papua region, a…
JAKARTA — Deforestation associated with palm oil in the region covering Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea has declined for the second straight year, a new analysis shows, dropping to…
JAKARTA — A palm oil company responsible for clear-cutting forests in an Indonesian ecosystem that’s the only place on Earth where tigers, orangutans and rhinos roam appears to be doing…
Organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah have filed a complaint with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples about a once-secretive deal aimed at locking up…
JAKARTA — An eight-year effort by Indonesia to protect its remaining forests contributed just 4% of its emissions reduction target, yet still yielded carbon savings worth far more than it…
Three young women from the Munduruku Indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon run an audiovisual collective that uses social media to raise awareness about illegal invasions of their territory. “Many people no longer believe what we say, they only believe what they see,” says Aldira Akai, who, at 30, is the oldest member of the collective.
Lazarus Nwobegai, who holds a government permit to harvest timber around Mount Cameroon National Park, knows perfectly well it's illegal to hunt the chimpanzees and other threatened primates that live…
Since 2013, the Ka'apor expelled the Federal Brazilian Indigenous Agency from their territory in the state of Maranhão, creating a new government council, adopting their own education system and establishing permanent settlements along their borders to contain the illegal advance of loggers, land grabbers and miners.
Whether walking along a beach boardwalk, installing new hardwood floors or sitting out on a friend’s deck, there’s a good chance you’ve already come across the wood of the rare…
During the pandemic, as researchers looked to wet markets and the animal trade in search of the source of COVID-19, there was a renewed concern for how the natural world…
When commodity prices spiked in the late 2000s, multinational agribusiness giants smelled profits. Eager to branch out of crowded Southeast Asian rainforests, some palm oil companies set their sights on…
The transition zone between the Amazon and the Cerrado, where the world’s greatest rainforest melds into its largest tropical savanna, is heating up, posing severe threats to both biomes, a…
JAKARTA — Pulpwood and palm oil companies were among the biggest contributors to the loss of a Manhattan-size area of forest in Indonesia’s Papua region in 2021, a new report…
KISANGANI, Congo — A major European logging firm may have illegally converted more than a dozen of its timber concessions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo into so-called conservation…
Autazes in the heart of Brazil’s Amazonas state is a municipality that’s six times the size of Rio de Janeiro. This corner of the rainforest is so remote that the…
JAKARTA — A plan to clear forests in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua for food crops will release as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as Australia emits in an…
Years of artisanal mining along the Madre de Dios River and its tributaries have left their marks, both seen and unseen. Miners, swarming to the region in a modern-day goldrush,…
Major investment managers including BlackRock and Capital Group are among more than a dozen U.S. and Brazilian institutions heavily financing mining companies that are destroying Indigenous reserves and their inhabitants’…
