NOANAMÁ, Colombia – One wet November morning deep within Colombia's western rainforest of Chocó, rebel fighters of the National Liberation Army (ELN) scattered across a muddy football pitch in groups of eight to practice their daily drills.…
Colombian community leader Hernan Bedoya, who defended collective land rights for Afro-Colombian farmers as well as local biodiversity in the face of palm oil and industrial agriculture expansion, was allegedly…
BOGOTA, Colombia - In March 2000, two Englishmen in their early twenties, Tom Hart Dyke and his friend Paul Winder, decided to trek through the Darién Gap in the war-torn…
MAGDALENA MEDIO, Colombia – It is a usual hot and humid day at one of the oil palm plantations in Magdalena Medio, Colombia. Beneath the two-story canopy of the plantation,…
14 million Amazon animals and plants — caiman skins, turtles, parrots, orchids and more — are legally exported annually. Illegal trafficking levels are unknown.
The “jaguar corridor” is a historic link that runs from Mexico all the way down the spine of Central America, crossing the inhospitable wilderness of the Darian Gap, through Colombia…
SASAIMA, Colombia – On April 1, floods devastated the Colombian town of Mocoa, situated in a rural southwestern corner of the country between the Amazon jungle and the Andean foothills. That…
PUERTO GARZA, Colombia – A Colombian conglomerate is moving ahead to build a nearly 400-foot-tall hydroelectric dam along the Samaná Norte River in northwestern Colombia, which threatens to extinguish critically…
The Colombian government announced yesterday the expansion of two indigenous reserves in the buffer zone of Serrania de Chiribiquete, the South American country’s largest national park. The Puerto Sabalo -…
Planned since the 1950s, the Marginal de la Selva is a $1 billion highway project that would create a paved land passage through the Andean foothills in Colombia’s Amazon region.…
The Amazon basin faces irreversible environmental disturbance on an enormous scale due to hydroelectric dam development. Hundreds of existing and planned dams in both the Amazonian lowlands and the Andean…
(This article is a collaboration between Mongabay-Latam and Colombia’s Semana Sostenible) One cow per hectare. This equivalence summarizes Caquetá’s cattle ranching model, but at the same time defines the dynamics…
MIRAFLORES, Colombia – “We can’t move like we used to,” said Joaquin Dajada, a twenty-something displaced member of the Nukak indigenous community, the last contacted nomadic group in Colombia. “The…
Scientists have uncovered a new species of bat in the mountains of Venezuela and Colombia. But its forest habitat is under big threat from slash-and-burn agriculture, and its discoverers are…
Ferney Caicedo, a trained forest ranger, is slipping and sliding over the forest path while he leads a horse and a group of four other people up a hill. Rain…
Elizabeth Apolinar enjoys her job as a lawyer in the bustling center of Bogotá these days. But now and then she misses the traditional life she used to lead deep…
Some indigenous communities in South America have been working on a way to participate in REDD+ (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) on their own terms. In 2009, Colombia…
Massive forest fires in the Congo and Amazon, surging deforestation in Brazil, and tentative steps toward reform in Indonesia and Myanmar: there were no shortage of major happenings in tropical…
The Mongabay-Latam team spent weeks investigating the illicit world of wildlife trafficking. Officials, specialists and lawyers helped this group of journalists reveal how this illegal market works, which species have…
Cultivation of coca, the plant from which the drug cocaine is extracted, has long been considered a “deforestation multiplier” in the Andean Amazon rainforests of Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. For…
Indigenous leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America attended the UN climate talks in Paris last December to present research showing that traditional indigenous territories in the Amazon Basin, the…
Driving towards Wiwa territory, the dusty roads of Colombia’s desert region start to change. The view outside goes from dust bowl to tropical grassland to forest. The trees get taller…
The illicit cultivation of coca leaf in Colombia grew by 39 percent between 2014 and 2015, from 69,000 to 96,000 hectares. That’s according to the country’s National Forest and Carbon…
This week the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a report — “Cattle, Cleared Forests, and Climate Change: Scoring America's Top Brands on their Deforestation-Free Beef Commitments and Practices” —…
In May 2011, two volunteer researchers had an unexpected visitor at the El Dorado Nature Reserve Ecotourism lodge in northwestern Colombia. A rare, tiny rodent called the Santa Marta Toro or the Santa Marta…
Author's note: The data that underpins this post is updated on a regular basis on Mongabay's rainforest site: Amphibians, Birds, Fish, Mammals, Reptiles, Vascular Plants. September 26, 2021 update: this…
An international delegation of leaders from indigenous and forest communities in Colombia, Indonesia, Liberia, and Peru are in London to call for action on human rights violations and land grabbing…
Between the landmark climate agreement signed in Paris in December 2015, Indonesia's fire and haze crisis of the late summer and early fall, and continuing adoption of zero deforestation policies…
It’s shift change time on the monitoring raft on Lake Tarapoto, deep in the Colombian Amazon. Lisette Johanna Escobar, an undergraduate student researcher at the Universidad Nacional in Leticia, climbs…
The Norwegian government has extended its multi-billion dollar forest protection initiative. At the Paris climate convention on Friday, Norwegian Minister of Environment and Climate Tine Sundtoft said the country would…
