In April, South Korean conglomerate Hyundai announced that it would prevent its excavators from being used in illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon. This followed a recent Greenpeace report that…
Mark Wishnie felt pleased when he heard the news: Joe Biden announced his support of a $50 million debt investment for the timber farmland project he heads at Latin America’s…
JAKARTA — Most peatlands in Indonesia that need protection are currently not protected, a new study has found. It identifies 5.65 million hectares (13.96 million acres) of peatlands — an…
Drug trafficking, logging, oil palm plantations, oil spills, highways, illegal fishing, expanding Mennonite communities — in the Peruvian Amazon, there’s no shortage of threats against Indigenous peoples or their lands.…
JAKARTA — Top officials from Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s biggest palm oil producers, will meet European Union policymakers in Brussels amid a diplomatic standoff over a new deforestation rule…
Peru has attracted millions of dollars in forest conservation projects over the years, has a series of international agreements and targets to protect forests and has 254 public and private…
SANTA ELENA DE UAIRÉN, Venezuela — Flying over a dense jungle in southern Venezuela, the sea of trees below is suddenly replaced by large patches of bare soil, tree stumps…
JAKARTA — Suryani grew up in a family of farmers on the island of Java in Indonesia. Her parents are members of a farmer’s union called SPP. The land they…
A major oil spill earlier this month in the Ecuadorian Amazon has sparked criticism of cleanup efforts and the lack of transparency from the government regarding the spill’s environmental impact.…
It's easy to miss the mosses, the ubiquitous green, silver and brown carpets that drape across nature's surfaces, from forest to fen. It’s also easy to underestimate just how big…
A recent chemical spill in a protected reserve in northern Nicaragua is raising concerns about the contamination of several river ecosystems and the public health fallout for thousands of Indigenous…
Degraded by human activity, mountain forests across the tropical Andes are having a hard time bouncing back. But while scientists have long analyzed what drives their decline, they have largely…
JAKARTA — Indonesia has made strides in developing its plantation industry, catapulting the country into the world’s largest producer of palm oil. Its sprawling plantations produce more than half of…
JAKARTA — As the European Union is set to adopt a landmark regulation that prohibits companies from trading commodities from deforested areas and illegal sources, the proposed law continues to…
MEXICO CITY — As climate change continues to choke off rainfall, many parts of the Amazon are facing a higher probability of dying off from drought than previously thought. A…
Officials are struggling to keep up with an increasing wave of deforestation in one of Guatemala’s largest protected areas, where squatters are clearing the rainforest to make room for settlements,…
MEXICO CITY — A major reform approved by congress last week is supposed to limit harmful practices by the mining industry and improve protections for the environment and Indigenous peoples.…
Protected areas and Indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest experienced just one-third the amount of primary forest loss as non-protected areas, according to a new report. The Monitoring of the…
JAKARTA — The combination of weak antigraft policies, lack of transparency, revolving-door politics, and the prevalence of politically exposed persons within companies makes Indonesia’s palm oil industry highly prone to…
JAKARTA — When Indonesia embarked on its Mega Rice Project in the mid-1990s, it cleared vast swaths of forest for farmland, mostly in the peatlands of Borneo — only to…
Six grassroots environmental activists received the Goldman Environmental Prize on April 24. Known as the "Green Nobel Prize," the Goldman Prize honors environmental activists from the six continental regions. The…
Newly captured images from camera traps in the Tayna Nature Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have recorded two mother-infant pairs of critically endangered eastern lowland gorillas. These…
Mining is one of the top drivers of deforestation globally, with huge swaths of forest being cleared for excavation pits, access roads and workers’ settlements. Yet details about mining’s environmental…
The European Union is one step closer to adopting landmark regulations that hold companies accountable for ensuring their products don’t contribute to deforestation. A new law, passed with an overwhelming…
JAKARTA — When scientists made the bombshell announcement in 2017 that the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis) was a new species, the apes were immediately put under the global spotlight. With…
More than 7% of all mountain forests have been destroyed during the past two decades, according to a new study published in the journal One Earth. Using high-resolution satellite data…
A court in Ecuador ordered oil companies to stop the hazardous practice of burning natural gas at extraction sites because it was a major driver of cancer and other illnesses…
Communities in the Intag Valley of Ecuador have won a significant legal victory after a court ruled to halt copper mining in one of the world’s most biodiverse forests. The…
When it comes to climate solutions, your first thought may not be the wildebeest. But in the Serengeti, these buffalo-looking antelopes are the key to carbon capture. Wildebeest eat large…
JAKARTA — Deforestation associated with oil palm cultivation has declined in recent years in Indonesia, but in a biodiversity haven at the northern tip of Sumatra, the forest is being…