The world’s nations committed to halving overall threats to biodiversity from pesticides and other highly hazardous chemicals by 2030 at the 15th United Nations Biodiversity Conference in 2022. But new…
CIÉNAGA, Colombia — A handful of men swarm around a coffee collection center in the city of Ciénaga, shouldering burlap sacks of coffee as they move in and out of…
BANYUMAS, Indonesia — The first two months of the year would ordinarily see Ganjar Budi Setiaji hurrying around Plana village’s durian orchard, here in the hilly Javanese district of Banyumas.…
BRASÍLIA — Indigenous leaders and researchers in Brazil say an end to a key zero-deforestation agreement, the Amazon Soy Moratorium, will increase deforestation around Indigenous lands and encourage the invasion…
The hill people of Bangladesh have been moving to profitable cash crops for the last couple of decades, dropping traditional agricultural practices. However, the economic gain soon turned into ecological…
The Amazon Rainforest generates its own weather. Each day, the forest's 390 billion trees release approximately 20 billion metric tons of water vapor into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration, creating what…
The production of food continues to eat its way into the world's tropical forests. Agricultural expansion drives nearly 90% of global deforestation, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of…
Rainfall is often treated as a gift of geography — a function of latitude, oceans, and atmospheric circulation. A growing body of research suggests that in the tropics, it is…
The Amazon Rainforest is approaching a dangerous threshold. Scientists warn that continued deforestation could push the world’s largest rainforest past a tipping point, transforming it into a degraded, fire-prone savanna…
Agriculture is on the cusp of its most profound transformation in a century. Just as the Green Revolution shifted farming from sun and soil to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, we…
“Spekboom is everywhere, it’s all anyone talks about … what used to be an Angora goat farming town is now a spekboom town,” says field ecologist Rae Attridge. In the…
PELALAWAN, Indonesia — A radical new policy to relocate people living in a notoriously deforested national park on Sumatra has moved hundreds of families to date, with Indonesian officials presenting…
This is the second of two stories about the potential impact of Cambodia’s planned Funan Techo Canal. Read part one, about consequences for coastal communities and wildlife, here. TAKEO, Cambodia…
Officials in Suriname are trying to cancel a controversial agribusiness contract that could result in the clearance of over a hundred thousand hectares of Amazon rainforest, risking the country’s carbon-negative…
When agribusiness giant Socfin found itself embroiled in allegations of human rights and environmental violations at its plantations in Africa and Southeast Asia in 2017, it called on the Switzerland-based…
For farmers, sometimes the easiest way to save a crop or prevent catastrophic insect damage is to spray a pesticide. But this common practice is wreaking havoc on the soil,…
Bolivia has added nearly a million hectares to its protected areas over the last several months, an effort by local governments to link Indigenous territories with nearby national parks and…
Ramon “Chin-Chin” Uy Jr. is a sustainable-food entrepreneur based on Negros Island in the Philippines, which recently hosted the global “good food” movement Slow Food’s first-ever regional conference in Asia…
As global soy giants walk away from a landmark pact, land grabbers move in to clear the forest for new crops.
Mongabay recently launched the Australian Biodiversity Special Reporting Project, which will produce sustained, high-quality journalism on Australia’s unique wildlife, ecosystems, and the threats they face—including habitat destruction, invasive species, climate…
LOEHA RAYA, Indonesia — The road to the headquarters of the Loeha Raya Farmers’ Cooperative is inundated from the monsoon, and a baby cayman splashes around in a puddle formed…
JAKARTA — Indigenous rights activists have condemned the Indonesian government’s decision to grant 328,000 hectares (810,505 acres) of cultivation rights for a massive rice plantation project in Papua, warning that…
The packed-earth trail winds through the dense and tangled forest of Vanuatu, the ocean crashing just meters to our right. Richard Rojo’s feet don’t mind the stones and stumps, and…
SILIMA PUNGGA-PUNGGA DISTRICT, Indonesia — Rainim Purba first heard the rumor in 1996. Back then, in her mid-30s, villagers were saying a zinc mining company was going to operate near…
BACOLOD CITY, Philippines — For five days last November, the city of Bacolod in the central Philippine province of Negros Occidental became a crossroads of food cultures from across Asia…
JAKARTA — Indonesia has reclaimed more than 4 million hectares (9.9 million acres, about the size of Switzerland) of land nationwide that had been used for plantations, mining or other…
In the rolling hills of Iñapari, a remote town in the Peruvian Amazon on the tri-border with Bolivia and Brazil, cattle ranchers are ditching grass monocultures, which have been shown…
In 2019, Bangladesh set a target to end the use of traditional bricks and switch to concrete blocks in all government construction works by June 2025. Aimed at preventing the…
Brazil’s Triunfo do Xingu Environmental Protection Area encompasses an area of Amazon Rainforest more than half the size of Belgium. Or at least it used to. The embattled reserve has…
The water-filled ditches that laced through the oil palm plantation in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, nagged at Kuno Kasak when he saw them in 2022.…
Smallholders produce significant quantities of Vietnam’s coffee, Indonesia’s palm oil, and Thailand’s rubber exported into the EU. Yet under the bloc’s upcoming deforestation-free regulation (EUDR), industry experts say small-scale producers…
The world’s most expensive plant, saffron, is as delicate as it is valuable. Each purple flower blooms for less than three weeks a year, and only its three tiny, fragile…
