Rainforest Deforestation News

RIO DE JANEIRO – Horto, a secluded neighborhood in the south of Rio de Janeiro with a view of the famed Christ the Redeemer statue, is enveloped by forest. Tropical…

Indigenous Penan tribespeople have set up road blocks to stop a timber company from logging on land in Malaysian Borneo that they consider part of their ancestral heritage. The Penan…

There is a sacred hill in Nicaragua known as Kiwakumbaih, where the ancestors of the Indigenous Mayangna people would go to hold important annual events. To this day, it continues…

In August 2019, an unprecedented number of fires ripped through the Brazilian Amazon, sparking worldwide interest in reports of burning rainforest. In fact, the majority of blazes were on land…

A first look at this year’s deforestation hotspots across the Amazon shows that Brazil, once again, has the grim distinction of being a leader in destruction. Massive areas of forest…

MEDAN, Indonesia — Conservation authorities in Indonesia have launched an investigation into alleged animal abuse by a public zoo where Sumatran tigers have been found emaciated and apparently eating grass.…

Biologists often refer to the Wallacea region of Indonesia as a “living laboratory” for the study of evolution. Spanning 1,680 of Indonesia’s central islands, including the Malukus, Nusa Tenggara and…

JAKARTA — For decades, illegal logging and timber trafficking have destroyed forests across Indonesia, and with them the source of livelihoods of millions of Indigenous peoples. Now, Indigenous peoples and…

JAKARTA — A new study strengthens the case for redirecting a planned mining road around the largest surviving tract of lowland tropical rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, but the…

An increase in the number of licenses for Brazilian beef exporters is a worrying sign that illegal deforestation could rise in some of the most vulnerable parts of the Amazon,…

One of the main fears about the Brazilian Amazon is beginning to materialize: logging is starting to move from the periphery of the rainforest toward the core of the biome,…

When the COVID-19 pandemic first struck, and national governments responded with lockdowns of varying degrees, conservationists warned it would lead to a surge in illegal logging in tropical countries. They…

JAKARTA — Indonesia has terminated a long-standing agreement with Norway, in which the latter agreed to pay US$1 billion if the forest-rich tropical country is able to slow its emissions…

On the western fringe of the Brazilian Amazon, lush forest stretches for miles across a protected reserve that is home to the Ashaninka Indigenous people. Just a few miles away,…

JAKARTA — Clearing of natural forests has been detected on land licensed to a subsidiary of South Korean paper company Moorim in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua, indicating an increase…

JAKARTA — Three palm oil companies have sued the local government in Indonesia’s West Papua province after their plantation licenses were revoked following a recent audit. This has prompted concerns…

The Brazilian Amazon has been transformed by fires and deforestation into a net emitter of carbon dioxide, rather than a sink absorbing the greenhouse gas, with dangerous implications for global…

JAKARTA — The planned expansion of one of the largest pulp and paper producers in North America will threaten Canada’s boreal forest, the most carbon dense woodland in the world,…

Recent scientific studies confirm what Brazilian farmers already feel in practice: the uncontrolled production of agricultural commodities is destroying the productivity and profits of agribusiness itself, a cycle researchers are calling “agro-suicide.”

JAKARTA — Experts say that since there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to achieve effective zero deforestation commitment (ZDC) mapping and monitoring, they have created an attribute framework to guide the development…

In the wake of the Feb. 1 military coup, Myanmar’s new regime leaders escalated their forceful crackdown on nationwide protests with sweeping restrictions on the media, severely curtailing independent journalism…

JAKARTA — Officials and activists in Indonesia are calling for the renewal of a ban on issuing new licenses for oil palm plantations, with the moratorium set to expire in…

JAKARTA — Pulpwood companies obliged to restore the degraded peatlands inside their concessions in Indonesia are instead continuing to cultivate the land, a new investigative report says. The report by…

In 2017, the name “La Merced de Buenos Aires,” or simply “Buenos Aires,” became famous throughout Ecuador. This small parish located high in the Andean province of Imbabura was invaded…

The spread of fires in a Brazilian state that’s still mostly swathed in Amazon rainforest is raising alarms about risks to public health, compounding what’s already one of the worst…

The Brazilian state of Acre, nestled along the border with Peru and Bolivia in the Amazon, has been called “the place where the wind makes the curve,” a saying that,…

JAKARTA — An area of rainforest nearly five times the size of London has been destroyed in the past two decades in Indonesian New Guinea, home to Asia Pacific’s largest…

The great drought and megafires that the Amazon experienced in recent years caused the death of 2.5 billion trees and vines in the Lower Tapajós River Basin, one of the…

Since 2002, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has had a moratorium on the issuance of new logging concessions in its vast portion of the Congo Basin rainforest. If the…

JAKARTA — UNESCO has urged the Indonesian government to close a stretch of road that runs through the largest protected area in Southeast Asia, citing its negative environmental impact. In…