Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos declared earlier this month that a controversial highway project that would cut through the Amazon will not be completed. Santos pointed at rampant deforestation and…
UCAYALI REGION, Peru — Peru has passed a controversial law that makes highway construction in border areas and maintaining trucking roads in the Ucayali Region a national priority. On January…
When it comes to habitat quality and ecosystem services, research has shown that natural landscapes do it best. A new study, published today in Nature, adds fodder to this argument,…
Ahead of a housing development in Panama, an assessor tasked with figuring out how the plans might affect local forests reported that about a dozen species of birds lived in…
India’s growing network of roads and railway lines, often crisscrossing forests and wild lands, has turned deadly for wildlife. In December last year, for example, an 8-year-old male tiger died…
Late last year, the Peruvian government gave the go-ahead for the construction of new roads along its border with Brazil in the Ucayali and Madre de Dios regions. The main…
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…
Around the world, there’s a push for rapid infrastructure development, and nowhere is that truer than in Southeast Asia. Roads, seen by the World Bank as a “blunt instrument” for…
Brazil is fast-tracking the Ferrogrão grain railway planned for the Tapajós Basin without prior environmental review, and despite protests from indigenous groups.
On the afternoon of November 6, while traveling through Deramakot Forest Reserve in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo, photographer Michael Gordon came across a sight…
Lokolama barely registers on atlases and maps. The small Pygmy village, home to a few hundred people, lies deep in the Congo Basin rainforest 48 kilometers (30 miles) south of…
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.
The Indonesian government is rushing to protect the newly described Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis), a species already regarded as the most endangered great ape on the planet. The discovery that…
A new study found that mining caused nearly 10 percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 2005 and 2015, not the 1-2 percent assumed by past assessments.
Yesterday, there were seven recognized great ape species in the world. Today there is an eighth, with the release of a study describing a new species of orangutan in Sumatra,…
IBERIA, Peru — Saturnino Cuchama is proud of the business he runs in the middle of a lush tropical rainforest. Every day at 4 a.m., the 42-year-old rubber gatherer walks…
Brazil’s Temer has forgiven 6o percent of $3.5 billion in fines for environmental crimes, so long as perpetrators pay other 40 percent. No new means of enforcement was announced.
When Indonesian President Joko Widodo took office in October 2014, he made it clear that one of his key domestic policies was to develop and upgrade infrastructure across the archipelago.…
Federal police arrest a gang of timber thieves who cut rare ipê trees on an Amazon indigenous reserve and used falsified records for export to U.S., Europe and Asia.
Roads can be arteries that ferry goods and people, connect communities and markets and bolster economic development. But if they’re not well-planned, they can instigate conflict, saddle countries with debt…
AMPANG, Malaysia – Taman Rimba Ampang was once a peaceful retreat from the bustle of Malaysia’s capital, a place where Kuala Lumpur’s residents could paddle in the shallow waters of…
Experts gathered last week in Malaysia’s capital to explore ways to maximize the benefits of road projects without severely impacting the environment.
Violent contact is alleged between Illegal miners / farmers in Amazonas state and two uncontacted indigenous groups; up to 10 deaths reported.
Transport infrastructure is a key part of Kalimantan's development plans, but conservationists fear a planned bridge in Balikpapan will have devastating environmental impacts.
Brazilian president’s order to open 17,800 square miles of Amazon rainforest to mining met by crushing opposition; voided by judge (this story has been updated).
A burned-out stump was all that remained by the time a team of virologists arrived in Méliandou in 2014. They had been hunting for the source of the deadly outbreak…
The president opens vast Amazon lands to mining; decrees new mining code that guts environmental monitoring, puts mining companies in charge of enforcement, opponents say.
After laying a 700-meter plastic-tar road at a university campus in Bali, Indonesian officials announced plans to use the material on roads in Jakarta and other cities.
One of the last and largest remnants of tropical rainforest in Asia is under threat from multiple road development plans. This forest complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site known as…
