Mongabay · Page 62

In 2024, the U.N.’s climate and biodiversity conferences, COP29 and COP16, drew the attention of more than 3,500 media delegates and 1,000 journalists, respectively. Though these massive global negotiations are consequential for international policy on the…

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center Rainforest Reporting Grant. YURIMAGUAS, Alto Amazonas, Peru — The boat sets sail early in the morning. The plan is to travel down the Huallaga River, reach the Marañón, then head north and…

BALI, Indonesia — “We didn’t have electricity in our village of Taro, near Ubud, until I was 12 years old,” says conservationist Wayan Wardika. To find their way through the rice fields at night, Wardika and his schoolfriends would capture fireflies…

At last month’s COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, oil-trading giant Trafigura announced that it was injecting $100 million into the company’s Brújula Verde tree-planting project in Colombia. Working in partnership with green investment…

In early 2024, Mongabay published a five-part series on the voluntary carbon market that drew on more than a year of reporting examining the overall landscape and individual projects on three continents. The trade in carbon credits is a contentious strategy…

Last month’s COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, left tropical forest countries frustrated yet again at the tepid promises and lack of urgency from the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters on tackling climate change. And yet even as this year’s…

KATHMANDU — Nepal is set to receive $45 million under a World Bank program rewarding it for protecting its forests, but the communities on the frontlines of that effort could miss out, stakeholders say. That could potentially turn this inaugural payment from…

Pangolins have the dubious distinction of being the most trafficked mammals in the world. Yet as often as they wind up in wildlife seizures, authorities and conservationists have no universal way to track and identify individual pangolins. But researchers are…

Five Hawaiian forest crows known as ʻalalā, which were declared extinct in the wild decades ago, were released into Hawaii Island’s Maui forests in the United States in November, marking their potential comeback into wildlife. The jet-black ʻalalā…

Climate change is driving families on Indonesia’s northern Javanese coast toward child marriage as a survival strategy amid dwindling fish stocks and increasing economic hardships, two Mongabay reports show. Mongabay contributor Maulia Inka Vira Fendilla…

This year marks the second full year of Mongabay’s Y. Eva Tan Conservation Reporting Fellowships. Participants, selected from a pool of hundreds of applicants around the world, spend six months in a deep dive into environmental journalism. The program…

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Ecuadorian authorities pursued a geopolitical strategy that reflected a long-held conviction that they were cheated out of large territories in the Western Amazon. Most of their claims were adjudicated in favor of…

When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, illegal gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon was out of control. According to the research collective MapBiomas, illegal miners — garimpeiros, as they are known in Brazil — almost…

“You’re engulfed in waves of steam and sweating buckets and there’s no cool water anywhere,” Kenneth Feeley, a professor at the University of Miami, tells Mongabay. He’s describing the Boiling River in Peru’s Amazon Rainforest. “If you look at…

Ocean-based carbon dioxide removal technology is ramping up, with startups and existing companies racing to develop electrochemical techniques that either remove carbon from seawater or prompt oceans to suck up more. Electrochemical marine carbon dioxide…

In a major policy shift, South Korea announced Dec. 18 that it will end renewable energy subsidies for new biomass projects, as well as for state-owned coal and biomass cofired power plants starting in January 2025. The nation’s ministries also committed to…

TOAMASINA, Madagascar — Abraham Botovao, a boat skipper and the president of the Association of Progressive Fishers of Toamasina, has become accustomed to seeing an unusual activity while out at sea. Every day, people in boats plunder a local reef for…

NIEUWOUDTVILLE, South Africa — It is the devil’s breath, this wind, blowing dry and mercilessly across a plain left threadbare by decades of overgrazing. With this wind at their backs, small groups of mostly men have toiled upslope, along historic…

You could be forgiven for thinking there’s no water in the Atacama Desert. In fact, the driest desert on Earth has underground springs that feed the Chaxa, Cejar and Tebenquiche lagoons, as well as other bodies of water, providing oases for various animals…

JAKARTA — In recent United Nations biodiversity conferences, global leaders have championed Indigenous peoples as critical partners in achieving conservation goals. Indonesia, as a signatory to an international treaty on biodiversity protection, pledged to…