JAKARTA — Activists have welcomed the Indonesian government’s announcement to carry out a nationwide audit of all palm oil companies operating here, in response to a shortage of cooking oil…
JAKARTA — For decades, oil palm farmers in Indonesia have drained — and destroyed — tropical peatlands on the basis that the crop doesn’t grow well in the boggy soil.…
It was a banner moment at COP26, one of the climate summit’s headline achievements. On stage, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson sat with President Félix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic…
Plants build themselves from sunlight, water, and soil. And, as it turns out, what crops “eat” can influence the nutrients on our own plates. A recent study, published in the…
One day in 2017, as a truck loaded with oil palm fruit drove down the main road in his village on the island of Borneo, Rita Dihales decided he’d had…
A California court has ruled that state legislation on endangered species can apply to invertebrates. The decision this week by the Third District Court of Appeal means insects, including four endangered native…
A new analysis of satellite data of the Amazon published in late May provides the most detailed analysis yet of year-to-year deforestation in the region, revealing exactly where and why…
Satellites have detected forest clearing within Triunfo do Xingu this year, an area that’s supposed to be a legally protected swath of Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s northern state of Pará.…
JAKARTA — Lawmakers in Indonesia are pressing the government to uncover the true scale of illegal oil palm plantations in the country, following the revelation that the state missed out…
The Amazon gets a lot of attention, but there’s another massive forest in South America: the Gran Chaco. This hot, dry forest stretches across Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina, covering 87…
While trying to put together a review of what happened to Venezuela’s environment in 2021, conservationists ran into a problem. The government publishes virtually no statistics on things like deforestation,…
KATHMANDU — Ram Prasad Paudel of Maramche village in Nepal's Gandaki province decided not to grow maize on his farm this spring. He opted for green vegetables, instead. "But I…
The Amazon Rainforest is resilient: the largest rainforest on the planet has been around for at least 55 million years, surviving repeated ice ages and warming. But human impacts, combined…
The Amazon lost millions of hectares of primary forest in 2021, mostly as the result of cattle ranching and other agricultural activities, a new report reveals. Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of…
As more people are born onto this great green planet, the demand for food grows. Feeding the nearly 8 billion of us here today is a challenge, not only because…
JAKARTA — The establishment of large-scale agriculture under the Indonesian government’s “food estate” program is harming local farmers in Sumatra, a study has found. The program was announced in 2020 by President…
Fires in El Salvador are spreading farther and lasting longer than in previous years, threatening protected areas and reforestation efforts throughout the country. As it enters the peak of its…
JAKARTA — A plan to clear forests in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua for food crops will release as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as Australia emits in an…
Amid the smog, butterflies, bees and other insects are having a hard time smelling the flowers they so dutifully pollinate. Researchers found that common, ground-level air pollutants such as nitrogen…
The ongoing drought in Paraguay, now moving into its third year, has put increasing pressure on conservation efforts throughout the country to support local communities and protect wildlife. Record-breaking heat…
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 46 cotton-farming families in Brazil’s Minas Gerais began practicing agroecology, a sustainable farming approach that works with nature.
Chances are, if you live in North America, you’ve eaten corn from the Corn Belt, a region in the United States Midwest that produces 75% of U.S. corn. Scientists have…
For the Amazon, 2021 was yet another year under the pandemic where the onslaught against nature never seemed to end. Deforestation continues, surging at year’s end Deforestation continued in the…
With humans sending probes to Mars and the sun, one might think we’ve already explored the full extent of our own planet. But scientists say we’ve only begun to find…
Local stories in Michoacán tell how, when the Spanish invaded what would later be known as Mexico in the 1500s, they found Indigenous communities tapping pine trees and using the…
France is taking new steps to ensure that products imported from Brazil aren’t contributing to deforestation in vulnerable forests and savannahs. The French government published a new risk analysis platform…
In November 2020, Peruvian cacao company Tamshi filed a lawsuit against Mongabay Latam staff reporter Yvette Sierra Praeli for “aggravated defamation” over her reporting of a government investigation into the…
At the very southern tip of Colombia, Indigenous communities practice a sustainable food system that involves artisanal fishing and rotating crop structures within cycles of flooding periods. This has allowed…
Son of a sharecropper and lifetime farmer, Dale Strickler has lived his life by the soil. Strickler grew up in an impoverished area near the Ozarks in the U.S. Midwest,…
JAKARTA — Indonesia has no effective mechanism for resolving its epidemic of land conflicts between rural communities and palm oil companies, according to a new study. Indonesia is the world’s…
