Rainforest Deforestation

A group of supermarket chains that includes Sainsbury’s in the U.K. and Lidl in the Netherlands said this week that they will either reduce or outright halt sales of Brazilian beef in the coming months. The move comes in the wake of an investigation published by the environmental advocacy group Mighty Earth and Repórter Brasil […]

JAKARTA — In 2019, fires raged through Indonesia’s rainforests and peatlands, sparked by the deliberate burning of land for agriculture, and fanned by an El Niño system bringing drier-than-usual weather conditions. Ultimately, the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry would put the total affected area at 1.64 million hectares (4.05 million acres), an area half […]

At least 12,500 tonnes of wood came from rainforest species considered threatened by the Brazilian Forestry Service (SFB).

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 earlier this month that shows how much activity by soy traders is causing tree cover loss. The tool is intended to implement more rigorous oversight […]

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 firm’s activities in the Peruvian Amazon. While the case was formally dismissed by a Peruvian court last month, it wasn’t the first time that Tamshi […]

BALI, Indonesia — Satellite imagery has detected deforestation in a gold mining concession in Indonesia that overlaps with the habitat of the most threatened great ape in the world. U.S.-based environmental advocacy group Mighty Earth said it had detected 13 hectares (32 acres) of forest loss within the Martabe gold mining concession in North Sumatra province […]

A one-minute audio clip made the rounds on Venezuelan Twitter last year, in which a state official being interviewed on a radio show tells citizens that, because of ongoing national shortages, they should pick and choose when to cook with gas. “Save it to make pasta, rice and those things,” said Dante Rivas, protector of […]

Mount Mulanje’s bare granite face looms above the lush surrounding landscape. Said to be the inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lonely Mountain (home to Smaug the dragon), Malawi’s highest mountain also holds a treasure: a mating pair of spotted ground thrushes, one of the rarest birds in the world. “Ground thrushes are like the holy grail […]

JAKARTA — UNESCO has renewed its call for the closure of a road running through Indonesia’s Lorentz National Park after the nation’s environment minister said shutting it down would be impossible. The park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, encompasses a variety of biodiversity-rich ecosystems on the western coast of the island of New Guinea. BirdLife […]

The 2016 peace deal that the Colombian government reached with the country’s largest and oldest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was also heralded as being strikingly “green.” The agreement set out to correct unequal land use caused by internal displacement while also investing in the management of protected reserves. But five […]