After winning a historic lawsuit, an Indigenous community in Ecuador has finally obtained legal ownership of its land in a protected area — 80 years since being forcibly displaced. According…
Recently, carbon offset projects have been in the media, and not in the positive way that carbon market participants would like to see. Critics have raised concerns not only about…
What works better: protected areas managed by the state, or areas conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities? More than 50 different researchers came together to try to settle this…
DUBAI — It was Sara Olsvig's love of ice that brought her to the desert of Dubai for the 2023 U.N. climate summit, COP28. As an Inuit child growing up…
Mina Setra remembers a time before oil palm plantations changed the landscape of her childhood home. Setra, an Indigenous Dayak Pompakng, grew up when forests surrounded her village in the…
1. Indigenous women play a growing role as leaders Indigenous women are emerging as leaders in addressing climate change, confronting their invisibility within patriarchal structures. In a landmark event in…
In the southwesternmost corner of Arizona, the Colorado River weaves in between Mexico and the lands of the Native American Cocopah Tribe. Many spots along the river’s shore are lined…
SASIMWANI, Kenya — On a cold November afternoon, Esther Norparua and two of her daughters sat on the ground outside her homestead facing the forest. Dark clouds gathered, but the…
This year’s U.N. climate conference, COP28, featured much-improved Indigenous representation from last year’s event. Yet despite intensive lobbying by the more than 300 delegates, most Indigenous and civil society leaders…
The government of Papua New Guinea has declared two large new marine protected areas, capping a six-year effort in consultation with local communities on how to curtail the harvest of…
PHNOM PENH — “This book won’t stop deforestation, but it can show what’s at stake, what we will lose if we lose Prey Lang,” said Nerea Turreira-Garcia, assistant professor at…
Canadian mining company Belo Sun has filed a lawsuit against community leaders and environmental rights groups for allegedly invading and occupying company-owned land, in a case the defendants are calling…
A recent peer-reviewed study finds that community tropical forest management is a predictor of multiple positive outcomes, both socially and for the environment. According to the paper, published in Nature…
Kichwa leader Quinto Inuma Alvarado, president the Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu community, was murdered last Wednesday, November 29, in the San Martín region of the Peruvian Amazon. The crime took…
KATHMANDU — In the isolated kingdom of Lo Manthang, tucked away in Nepal’s Himalayas, ancient structures stand tall on arid lands that only allowed tourists in from the late 1990s.…
Funders of the historic $1.7 billion pledge announced at the 2021 U.N. climate conference say they have disbursed about 48% of the money meant to bolster the land rights of…
LA CEIBA, Colombia — Nine years ago, Delio de Jesús Suárez Gómez made a pact with wild bees. The arrangement didn’t come easy, given that neither party knew each other…
“Humanity has opened the gates to hell by allowing the climate crisis to worsen”, said Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General at the U.N. Climate Ambition Summit in September. This year, 2023,…
MRN, a mining company and aluminum producer, denied consultation rights to long-established Amazon riverine communities when it launched a new mine, impacting their way of life, say local people.
Indigenous people and advocates are fighting for the Tanaru Indigenous land to remain an Indigenous territory, but ranchers want to take possession of the plot to turn it into pastures and soy fields.
WHATCOM COUNTY, Washington — "Some mornings, the sun's hitting that reef net just right and it’s like I know it's talking to me,” said Ellie Kinley, a member of the…
Pramila Pradhan, 51, embraced thengapalli, a form of forest stewardship, because of her mother-in-law, who took her along on forest patrols. Thenga means stick, and palli means turn or rotation.…
Indigenous forest guardian Paulo Paulino Guajajara was killed in November 2019 in the Brazilian Amazon. Mongabay’s Karla Mendes, who interviewed Paulo nine months before his death, returned to the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in August 2023 to talk with his family and the other guardian who survived the attack, Laércio Guajajara, and shine a light on a case that still hasn’t gone to trial after four years.
In the village of Tarapacá, a group of women are working to strike the perfect balance between using the natural resources of the Amazon rainforest for income and protecting this…
Between spring and fall each year in coastal British Columbia, when salmon migrate upstream, the region’s First Nations manually count the number of fish passing through to get a sense…
Last week, communities and conservation stakeholders from across the African continent gathered in Windhoek, Namibia, to attend the first Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ Conservation Congress. “IPLCs themselves organized this…
BRISBANE, Australia — Formed billions of years ago from volcanic magma, the red rocks and hills of Murujuga arise in striking contrast to the surrounding green native grasses. This area,…
GOBA, Ethiopia — Nestled in the heart of Bale Mountains National Park in Ethiopia's highlands is an isolated village surrounded by lush natural forest — one of the few left…
UPPER BARAM, Malaysia — When James Nyurang became headman of Tanjong Tepalit village in 2008, he learned from his predecessor — and father — of the terms set by timber…
In the conservation world, partnerships between the big international NGOs, or BINGOs, and local grassroots organizations are often marriages of unequals. And as with any union, the biggest pain points…