KASESE DISTRICT, Uganda — In western Uganda’s Kasese district, where the Rwenzori Mountains meet the sprawling plains of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Janet Nyakairu Abwoli is on a mission to…
Nestled in the thorny shrubs of the dry forests of Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico, a small bird lights a spark for a promising future. After flying under scientists’…
In the bustling city of Dhaka, Azharul Islam Khan is developing a growing community of plant enthusiasts, one video at a time. With a degree in botany from Dhaka University…
KONSO, Ethiopia — Across rugged highlands, terraces crafted from stone and earth stretch over steep hillsides like giant ripples of water. They’re part of a 400-year-old agricultural system in southern…
A women-led reforestation effort has planted millions of mangrove trees with a high survival rate across swamps in Nigeria’s oil-rich and severely degraded Niger Delta. For decades, the Ogoni people…
BANJARMASIN, Indonesia — In October 2023 in the Indigenous Dayak village of Bangkal, Indonesian police fired on farmers demonstrating against PT Hamparan Masawit Bangun Persada (HMBP), a palm oil plantation…
MOCOA, Colombia — A bonfire crackles in the center of an Indigenous open-air pavilion atop a hill in the Putumayo jungle, adding warmth to the already sweltering Amazonian heat. The…
Traditional people need more financing, better access to energy and improved roads to get their products into the market.
Indigenous and local knowledge systems’ ability to nurture human-nature interconnection can play an important role in creating the type of transformative change needed to address the underlying causes of biodiversity…
When David Borbón first arrived in the village of El Delgadito in 1980, it was a paradise with seemingly unlimited natural resources. He continued to return seasonally to fish for…
TAOLAGNARO, Madagascar – Gabriel Andriamanjaka holds the radiotracking aerial aloft and marches into a spiky forest thicket. Branches whip around his body as he pushes through in pursuit of his…
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…
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…
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…
Amid Myanmar’s ongoing civil war, Karen and other ethnic minority communities have officially launched the Thawthi Taw-Oo Indigenous Park, a new community-led conservation area in the northern Kayin state. The…
When most people think about climate change, images of melting ice caps or rising sea levels come to mind. However, the reality is far more intricate and urgent. The effects…
Farmers in Ghana’s Upper East region traditionally decided when to plant and harvest their crops in rhythm with regular rainfall cycles. But the rains now come at increasingly odd times,…
When a copper mine started operating in Namibia’s //Huab Conservancy in 2021, blasting of rock and heavy machinery disturbed the area’s critically endangered southern black rhinos, and they moved out…
SERRO, Minas Gerais — Nature has always been intrinsic to life in Queimadas, a quilombo community located in an environmental buffer zone where the Cerrado and the Atlantic forest meet.…
JIGJIGA, Ethiopia — In his late 60s, Abdi Ahmed gears up the strength for a new day as a nomad moving around with his cattle and 19 children. The pastoralist…
Tucabaca Valley Municipal Wildlife Reserve comprises more than 2,640 square kilometers (1,020 square miles) of semi-arid forest and tropical savannah in the heart of southern Bolivia’s Chiquitania region. However, this…
CHIKOMBE BEACH, Malawi — Dressed in a red T-shirt, a yellow-and-blue wrapper tied from the chest, and flip-flops, Zainab Kassim looks like any of the ordinary people gathered at Chikombe…
JAKARTA — In Indonesia’s North Sumatra province, conservation groups and authorities have built canopy bridges that stitch back together primate habitat, including for orangutans, that were fragmented by roads over…
The village of Terrat, a settlement of around 14,000 people in the semiarid grassland and acacia forests of the Maasai Steppe, is one of many across northern Tanzania that has…
KATHMANDU — When discussing conservation in Nepal — home to iconic species such as the Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris), snow leopard (Panthera uncia) and red panda (Ailurus fulgens) —awareness-raising…
In April 2013, the Supreme Court of India delivered a historic judgement recognizing the cultural, religious and spiritual rights of the Dongria Kondh Adivasis, an Indigenous community residing in the…
A new atlas by human rights groups assessed tree cover and biodiversity hotspots on lands belonging to Afro-descendant peoples in 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Rights…
In northern Ghana, communities are facing food insecurity and declining livelihoods due to erratic weather, degraded soils and loss of forests. Among those working on ways to unpick this complicated…
DAVAO CITY, Philippines — To his fellow tribal members, Datu Julito Ahao is jokingly called matanglawin, which literally means “having an eye of an eagle.” Aptly so. Under the watch…
It was mid-2008. Mwezi “Badru” Mugerwa was almost done with his bachelor's degree in forestry, an academic field that had trained him to view forests as a resource for extraction.…
HARARE — By 6 a.m. on Sunday, the line at a water well in Harare’s Budiriro suburb is already long. It snakes all the way into a nearby street, and…
With recent conservation efforts and the involvement of Indigenous peoples and local communities in managing protected areas, forest elephant populations are on the verge of stabilizing,in at least one national…
