A staggering 3 billion birds, including 700 million grassland birds, have been lost in the last 50 years. Without question, one of the leading causes of those catastrophic losses has…
The COVID-19 pandemic and the arrival of fire season in two of the world’s major rainforests are on a collision course, scientists and public health researchers say, and the results…
Researchers have detected the "first major fire of 2020" in the Brazilian Amazon three months ahead of the fire season, while other scientists warn that there could be a “catastrophe”…
The damage only became clear once the rain stopped and the clouds parted over Altamira National Forest in northern Brazil. Instead of dense jungle, large patches of bare land now…
The Mexican state of Campeche sits on the Yucatan Peninsula, a region renowned for its lush jungles and high biodiversity. But the state’s forests are being wiped out by agriculture…
All that is left of the lush forest that once covered this patch of land in the Terra Indígena Ituna/Itatá in northern Brazil are a few dried branches and the…
This week’s Climate Strike mobilized and inspired millions of people around the world, including us. On Friday, we stood with young protesters in New York’s Battery Park, listening to Greta…
Colombia has registered its first drop in deforestation since the country’s historic 2016 peace deal with former FARC guerrillas closed a chapter on a half-century of armed conflict but also…
South America’s Gran Chaco is a hot, semi-arid biome that stretches from eastern Bolivia down through western Paraguay into Argentina, barely touching Brazil on its way. It’s characterized by sparse…
The white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), a hairy, pig-like mammal that once lived throughout the forests of Central and South America, now only skitters around in 13 percent of its former…
New research suggests that mountain lions in the western United States play an outsize role in changing their surroundings, leading the authors of the study to suggest that the big…
Honduras has committed to protecting part of the tropical rainforests found in the Moskitia region, a move that conservation groups say will protect the region’s rich wildlife, carbon stocks and…
Mother Nature is the ultimate boss on the prairie — and the boss seems pretty agitated these days. Weather events are more frequent, more extreme, and harder to predict than…
At 1,200 to 3,200 meters above sea level, the montane cloud forests on the eastern Andean flank in Ecuador lie between the Andes’ high-elevation grasslands (known as páramo) and the…
A recent article in Science reports that, while the portion of the world’s terrestrial surface allocated to protected areas has grown to around one-sixth of the area available, a significant…
Carving up rainforests to make room for farming, ranching and other uses induces a host of changes into the ecosystem, many of which scientists are only just beginning to understand.…
Conservationists recently awoke to the extraordinary value of the Cerrado - a biodiverse biome long outshone by the Amazon and a key carbon sink; but agribusiness is fast destroying it.
Most environmentalists expect more deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere due to last week’s high court ruling upholding the constitutionality of much of the 2012 New Forest Code.
A 2007 study estimated that with 40% Amazon deforestation a tipping point could be reached, converting forest to savannah. New factors put that tipping point at 20-25%. Deforestation is now at 17%.
Forest fires are no longer driven mainly by deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, with climate change induced drought now taking a major role.
Experts say 2017 Brazilian wildfires were caused not principally by drought, but mostly set by people, and worsened by human-caused forest degradation. Agency budget cuts worsened the crisis.
In 2018, expect more Amazon assaults by the Temer administration, as indigenous and environmental resistance builds, with court rulings and October elections adding uncertainty.
Mongabay published hundreds of stories on forests in 2017. Here are some of our favorites. 1. Rebel road expansion brings deforestation to remote Colombian Amazon With the demobilization of Colombia’s…
President Temer, pressed by the ruralist lobby, attacked indigenous and traditional land rights, conserved lands, and Amazon forests this year, and retreated from Brazil's Paris climate goal – analysis.
Parts of the EU-Mercosur trade deal, leaked by Greenpeace, reveal incentives to radically push Latin American soy and beef production and exports, putting rainforests and global climate at risk.
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…
A soon to be finalized Mercosur / European Union trade deal will contain indigenous human rights clauses that may be a last hope for indigenous groups under attack in Brazil.
Brazil is fast-tracking the Ferrogrão grain railway planned for the Tapajós Basin without prior environmental review, and despite protests from indigenous groups.
Cattle ranching can be a scourge to forests, requiring vast tracts of cleared land to produce relatively small amounts of food. It is also the primary cause of deforestation in…
With COP23 well underway, scientists warn that President Temer’s policies could doom the Amazon and Brazil’s Paris goals, while destabilizing the global climate.
