Tropical Deforestation News

27 percent of Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park in Goiás state has burned; flames blazed for 12 days. Arson is suspected, with recent park enlargement a possible motive.

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.

YANGON, Myanmar – It has been a good year for U Tint Khaing, the assistant director of the Forest Department overseeing action in Yangon. His team seized an estimated 1,500…

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.

Setting forests aside in the tropics is helping to stanch the upward creep of global temperatures, according to new research, in addition to the benefits that parks and other protected areas…

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.

Starting around 2004, the deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon began a precipitous decline. By 2012, the rate had dropped about 80 percent, reaching the lowest levels recorded since annual…

The president has undermined Brazil’s slavery law, making it very difficult to prosecute the wealthy elites enslaving roughly 155,000 Brazilians, critics say.

During the wet season, manatees swim Amazon basin floodplains; in dry times they migrate to lakes. Hundreds of planned dams could disrupt that cycle.

The sustainability and legality claims of the largest plywood importer in the US have come under question after it was found to have received shipments of Malaysian plywood worth more…

Last Friday, eighty Munduruku warriors — demanding an apology for destruction of two sacred sites — tried to occupy an Amazon dam; they were met by armed police.

As far as conservation strategies go, payments for ecosystem services (PES) are based on a relatively simple concept — perhaps deceptively simple. The idea behind PES is, essentially, to pay…

As Trump firms build golf courses in Southeast Asia, imitating the Scottish landscape where the game was born, tropical habitat and aquifers are put at risk, according to environmentalists.

In an exclusive Mongabay interview, Luis Gilberto Murillo, Colombia’s minister of the environment, tells how his nation has become a global leader in forest conservation.

14 million Amazon animals and plants — caiman skins, turtles, parrots, orchids and more — are legally exported annually. Illegal trafficking levels are unknown.

Soy-fed chicken sold in British supermarkets and fast food chains — including Tesco, Morrisons and McDonald’s — appear to be driving deforestation in the Bolivian Amazon and Brazilian Cerrado.

100 families, given legal title to their land by the Brazilian government, are being threatened by illegal miners. The Temer government has yet to respond.

Brazilian politicians and economically dominant social classes have for centuries exploited nature as if it was infinite. It is not. The consequences are more than evident.

Earth’s tropical forests store an incredible amount of carbon, and as they grow they are continually absorbing even more of the carbon in the atmosphere, which is why forest protection…

Public protest and congressional action have forced Brazil’s politically embattled president to reverse his decree allowing mining in vast RENCA Reserve.