GORO, New Caledonia – Known widely as the “Madagascar of the Pacific,” New Caledonia is coated in remnant Gondwana rainforest and surrounded by reefs rich in marine life that constitute one…
GORO, New Caledonia — On the south side of Grand Terre, the largest and principal island of New Caledonia in the south Pacific, mountains rise like a spine out of a…
JAKARTA — Residents of a remote island in eastern Indonesia have won a lawsuit against a company planning to mine gold on their island, after having an earlier legal challenge…
Alexandra Narváez and Alex Lucitante, two young Indigenous leaders from the A’i Cofán community of Sinangoe, located in the Ecuadoran Amazon, have been awarded the 2022 Goldman Environmental Prize for their…
The Sepik River takes an unhurried 1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles, to snake from the lush highland rainforests of western Papua New Guinea, swerving momentarily across the border into Indonesia’s…
The route connecting the provinces of Loja and Zamora Chinchipe in Ecuador is a series of roads surrounded by green, leafy and picturesque mountains. Near the city of Zamora, signs…
Thirty years ago, Brazil issued a decree officially recognizing the ancestral land of the Yanomami people as an Indigenous territory. The new designation made the area, located deep in the…
A new book by Wake Smith, “Pandora’s Toolbox,” explores controversial ideas for artificially cooling the planet. Smith discusses the hopes and hazards of geoengineering in an exclusive Mongabay interview.
It might be surprising to learn that, in a lake as large as Victoria, a single fish could shape so much of East Africa’s history, culture and, now, an uncertain…
Primates and other tropical wildlife are increasingly being exposed to pesticides pharmaceuticals, plastics, nanoparticles and other synthetic materials, but adverse impacts on these animals have been little studied.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has announced that his department will be undertaking a first-of-its-kind investigation to determine the role that the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries have played in…
PASURUAN, Indonesia — Farming and other water-based industries thrive in Pasuruan, a fertile rice-growing district in Indonesia’s East Java province that’s home to active volcanoes and rich aquifers. Thanks to…
VICHADA, Colombia — Nearly 13 years have passed since the Guahibo Indigenous community El Trompillo was allegedly forcibly relocated from their territory. Members report persistent hunger and overcrowding in makeshift…
SUMENEP, Indonesia — A coal barge that ran aground in the sea off the Indonesian island of Java remains stuck there, having already spilled much of its cargo and disrupting…
“It still rains here,” says Emeterio Hernández Cano, the San Francisco communal land commissioner, at the start of a tour of La Fabriquita, a pine and oak forest of just…
The planetwide cocaine supply chain — its production, trafficking and consumption — causes deforestation and pollution, and impacts biodiversity, as do other criminal activities associated with illegal drugs.
At seven in the morning, the sun rises over Sandy Bay on the Caribbean island of Roatán, Honduras. The soft light seeps through the mangroves and draws golden lines on…
A recently published investigation finds U.S. chemical recycling facilities are making fuel and chemicals, but not new plastics, while generating air pollution and toxic waste. That ‘green tech’ could soon go global.
Amazon Basin urban centers are contaminating the Amazon, Negro, Tapajós and Tocantins rivers with pharmaceuticals and wastewater, with still largely unknown impacts on aquatic ecosystems.
QUITO, Ecuador — On Jan. 28, 2022, Ecuador’s Heavy Crude Oil Pipeline (known by its Spanish acronym OCP), ruptured, contaminating more than 20,000 square meters of the Cayambe Coca National…
Technology-critical elements (TCEs) — vital for wind and solar power and electric cars — are contaminating land and water, impacting biodiversity and health. A circular economy may be the solution.
175 nations have unanimously agreed to a landmark UN framework to fight global plastic pollution. Though this is a huge environmental win, the devil is in the details to be hammered out over the next two years.
A tiny, poppy seed-sized particle of plastic might seem innocuous on its own. But when a speck of plastic is coupled with organic pollutants, the chemical makeup of that plastic…
Coral reefs are a unique and biodiverse natural ecosystem and economic keystones for many communities and nations. They only cover about 0.2% of the ocean floor but support 25% of…
Of the nine critical planetary boundaries that humanity is transgressing, climate change is the best known and understood, while atmospheric aerosol pollution may be the least, but aerosols are already having climate impacts and polluting Earth’s skies, killing millions.
In June 2016, Corporación Autónoma de Santander (CAS), one of the environmental authorities in the northeastern Colombian department of Santander, found toxic waste was flowing from a palm oil mill…
Years of artisanal mining along the Madre de Dios River and its tributaries have left their marks, both seen and unseen. Miners, swarming to the region in a modern-day goldrush,…
BANGKA BELITUNG, Indonesia — A conflict that flared up at the start of the year between traditional fishers and illegal miners in Indonesia’s Bangka-Belitung Islands has once again highlighted the…
Caffeine isn’t only the most consumed psychostimulant in the world, it’s also one of the most ubiquitous of pollutants in the world’s rivers, says a new global study of pharmaceutical waste. It’s also impacting marine ecosystems, says another new study.
Very reclusive and hard to research, the world’s 33 species of small cats are already under pressure due to habitat loss and human-wildlife conflicts, while being increasingly threatened by climate change and pollution.
