Brazil has managed to bring down spiraling rates of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest in the first half of this year, but the neighboring Cerrado savanna has seen a wave of environmental destruction during the same period.
TRA VINH, Vietnam — In the heat of Tra Vinh's dry season, rice farmer Thach Ren stands on a recently harvested field holding a smartphone. The once lush and green…
From high up in the Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve in Brazil’s Ceará state, the forest spreads out beyond the horizon. It’s April here in the municipality of…
Macarena Martinic wasn’t surprised earlier this year when the Chilean government said yes to extending the life of Los Bronces, a large, centuries-old open-pit copper mine in the Andes, an…
JAMBI — A quintet of Jambi residents gathered one morning in May at the home of Leni Haini, an Indonesian environmental activist who last year received a prestigious award from…
On April 4, a large fire gutted thousands of shops at a popular clothing market named Banga Bazar in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka. Firefighters complained of water scarcity as a…
DARAITAN, Philippines — Members of the Indigenous Dumagat-Remontado, young and old alike, stood out against the greenery in their traditional red loincloth and tapis. On a scorching Good Friday morning,…
In 1997, people in Asunción Mita, a municipality in eastern Guatemala, weren’t really thinking that mining could arrive close to home. But that same year, the country’s Ministry of Energy…
The town of San José del Fragua is just over an hour's drive from Florencia, the capital of the department of Caquetá, in southern Colombia. On one side of the…
LIMURU, Kenya — Kiambu County in Kenya is facing a major water scarcity crisis that is threatening not only people’s livelihoods but also biodiversity. Rivers and wetlands that were once…
In the middle of an increasingly arid landscape, where Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest in the world, keeps expanding southward, a small forest less than a third the size of…
The vulnerabilities in our global food system have never been more apparent than they are right now, during a moment some have described as a “poly-crisis.” Between international conflict in…
This interview was produced with the funding support of the Pulitzer Center. WESTERN TURKANA, Kenya—Driving across Northern Kenya’s Turkana County, the seemingly boundless terrain of sand dunes, dusty brushes and…
This story was produced with the funding support of the Pulitzer Center. WEST TURKANA, KENYA—By late morning along Kaito beach on the western banks of Lake Turkana, the heat beating…
More than a decade ago, Bolivia pioneered an innovative conservation project. For the very first time, inhabitants of the same watershed, both those living in rural areas and in cities,…
When Nelly Flores looks out over the Urao Lagoon, she smiles and asks me: “Do you know what those dots moving in the water are?” Mosquitoes, I guess. Nelly shakes…
The tiny droplets of condensation in the canopies of the world’s cloud forests are just the first link in a life-giving chain. That water replenishes rivers, streams and reservoirs, filters…
COLCHANI, Bolivia — Bolivia is taking another shot at lithium investment. After decades of stalled projects and soured relationships with international investors, the central government, under left-wing President Luis Arce,…
Likely the world’s most popular garment, jeans use huge amounts of water to grow irrigated cotton, a major factor in destroying the Aral Sea. Today, the industry, though making sustainability pledges, still does much harm.
BANTAENG, Indonesia — Stepping into Mustajab Syahrir’s home in the village of Papan Loe feels like treading on a beach of fine sand. “What am I supposed to do?” Mustajab…
“We always grew native products that come from here, like corn, beans, potatoes or lulos,” says Don Danilo, a longtime farmer near Sonsón, a small municipality in the Colombian state…
NDJI, Cameroon – Batchenga, 65 kilometers (40 miles) northeast of Cameroon’s capital Yaoundé, is slowly reopening. After serving as a ramp at the start of a national road linking the…
A 2020 move to open a futures water market on the Chicago exchange has resulted in a heated conflict between those who say monetizing is a positive step, and those who see speculation as bad for the environment and traditional peoples.
The Caribbean island is currently being convulsed by a wave of civil unrest and gang violence, immediately triggered by soaring gas prices. But a dire environmental crisis underlays and feeds Haiti’s socioeconomic and political disorder.
Water management experts have derided as “a drop in the ocean” an agreement between Bangladesh and India to share water from the Kushiara River, a minor waterway out of the…
In northern Mexico, it’s become common to see tankers delivering thousands of gallons of water to local middle and high schools. People wait in long lines outside of convenience stores…
BANDUNG, Indonesia — In a valley downstream from the source of the Citarum River, retired army general Doni Monardo approaches a magnolia tree planted in 2018 by President Joko Widodo…
As freshwater “Day Zero” looms for the climate change-stressed Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality, home to 1.28 million people, officials face a difficult choice: risk failure of short-term groundwater supplies or seek long-term solutions.
DHAKA — Bangladesh is looking to recharge its aquifers with storm water, reclaimed water, desalinated water and potable water, in an effort to ward off the depletion of this precious…
While modern water infrastructure assets such as dams and aqueducts have provided human civilization with electricity and potable water for a long time, it has also deprived us of it…
