Mongabay · Page 23

VALPARAI, India — Frequent interactions between humans and wildlife define life in Valparai, a town in India’s Tamil Nadu state, where the surrounding dense forests of the Western Ghats are fragmented by sprawling tea estates. These forests are home to…

In the late 1970s, Nepal launched a reforestation project to restore its massively deforested lands in the southeastern Terai landscape. However, the main tree of choice, eucalyptus, after showing initial signs of success has now proven detrimental to the…

TOCOA, Honduras – On a rainy November day in 2024, Storm Sara, a slow-moving tropical cyclone, struck Honduras, claiming at least six lives and displacing more than 6,000 people. Along the country’s northern coast, trees were bent or broken, roads turned…

At least two dozen people were recently killed across seven states in the U.S. South and Midwest. Several days of heavy rain starting April 2 from simultaneous storms and tornadoes led to severe flooding across the region. The same area experienced a string of…

Populations of the critically endangered Indochinese tigers in eastern Thailand’s forest reserves remained stable between 2018 and 2021, but a shortage of prey and the presence of highways prevented their expansion to promising habitat, a recent study has…

Javier Monzon has been deploying camera traps for close to two decades. He likens retrieving the equipment and the data to opening a present. “You just don’t know what’s inside until you look,” Monzon, associate professor of biology at Pepperdine…

Socotra Island, known as the Galápagos of the Indian Ocean, hosts an unusual diversity of plants found nowhere else on Earth. Nine of these endemic plant species, belonging to the genus Boswellia, are now closer to extinction, according to the IUCN, the…

JAKARTA — Rights activists have lambasted Indonesia’s parliament for delaying yet again a long-awaited Indigenous rights bill — stuck in limbo for more than a decade — even as communities continue to lose millions of hectares of land and face…

In 2024, a police raid on Brazil’s largest producer of carbon credits marked the lowest point yet in the long reputation crisis of REDD projects. Major companies that had bought credits from those forest conservation efforts suddenly saw themselves linked to…

At a time when media outlets are downsizing newsrooms and the audience for traditional news is in decline, Mongabay continues to grow thanks to its impact-driven, nonprofit model. Mongabay’s director of philanthropy, Dave Martin, joins the podcast this week…

Jaguar tourism in Porto Jofre, a remote outpost in the Pantanal wetlands of western Brazil, has become so successful that researchers now say it needs new rules to survive. Brazil’s Pantanal is home to the second-largest population of jaguars (Panthera onca)…

In the Mexican port city of Acapulco, in southwestern Guerrero state, human activities have put so much pressure on the most important lagoons that the mangrove areas in this city have been severely damaged by urbanization and made more vulnerable to damage…

New research has found that some tropical trees in the Peruvian Amazon can be used to monitor mercury pollution from gold mining, offering an alternative to expensive air monitors. Roughly 16 million people worldwide engage in artisanal and small-scale gold…

This is part three of a series on the operation to evict illegal gold miners from the Munduruku Indigenous Territory. Read part one here and part two here. Part four and five are coming soon. Indigenous people recruited by illegal miners in Brazil’s…

What’s new: Almost half of global average temperature rise and a third of sea-level rise can be attributed to the “carbon majors,” the world’s 122 largest fossil fuel and cement producers, a recent paper shows. What the study says: Research from…

Tires play an essential role in modern society, but have enormous negative environmental impacts. Mongabay recently reported on how the world’s top tire manufacturers are unable to prove that the supply chain of their rubber products is deforestation-free. A…

Bonobos, one of humanity’s closest relatives, appear to string together vocal calls in ways that mirror a key feature of the human language, a new study carried out in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has found. While bonobos (Pan…

Global reforestation and forest restoration efforts are facing a serious setback due to the recent U.S. foreign aid freeze. The sudden halt in funding has left projects around the world scrambling for alternative resources, jeopardizing years of progress.…

BOGOTÁ — In June 2022, Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla member, was elected as Colombia’s first avowedly leftist president, promising to fight inequality, bring “total peace” to the country, and dismantle the fossil fuel industry.  After Petro took…

The strongest ocean current on Earth circles Antarctica. It’s the primary way water moves between the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, and helps regulate the global climate. But a new study suggests the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), which until…