Ejidos are part of a land tenure system in Mexico by which land is communally managed by local villages. Many ejidos, such as Ejido Caoba in the state of Quintana…
CAQUETÁ DEPARTMENT, Colombia — The Amazon is one of the first victims of peace with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). As predicted, the process of disarmament has caused…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government looks poised to derail a long-awaited bill on the rights of the country’s indigenous groups, calling it “not a necessity” and saying it will only…
The Indian government has initiated the process of revamping its national forest policy, but the new draft has critics on edge. The current National Forest Policy 1988 (NFP-1988) was announced 30…
The call goes out over the radio: An unknown car has entered Ejido Cruz de Ocote, a community-managed forestry operation in the state of Puebla, Mexico. A short time later,…
The camera follows the men through the forest as they arrive at the splintered stump of what looks to have been a massive tree. “For me, the forest is a…
Most conservation projects today must answer a key question: How does the project affect the local people? But high-quality studies that measure the impacts of conservation projects on people’s well-being remain…
JAKARTA — Of the nearly 3,000 villages located within peatlands throughout Indonesia, only one is permitted to manage the forest — a glaring omission that the government has been slow…
JAYAPURA, Indonesia — On a sunny afternoon in early August, two tribal chiefs in northern Papua province, at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, met to formalize the system…
PUNAN ADIU, Indonesia — It’s no ordinary day here in the tiny village of Punan Adiu, tucked away in the northeastern corner of Indonesian Borneo. Devit, 9, is rushing off…
TAMBRAUW, Indonesia — It took more than two hours by boat, through a driving rain, to reach the village of Saubeba from the nearest large town of Sausapor in Indonesia’s…
TABA PADANG, Indonesia — Yoyon remembers being elected head of his village back in 2010, here on the southwestern coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, following a spate of…
MAROANTSETRA, Madagascar — Two years ago, a group of foreigners visited Marovovonana, the riverside village where Amélin Toto Arison runs a general store, to make a presentation about carbon. Arison…
ANOSY REGION, Madagascar — The land in the Mandrare River Basin, in southeastern Madagascar, does not seem like the kind of place that could support an economy based on wood.…
Despite decades of hard environmental battle against deforestation, tropical forest losses continue unabated. Forests are cut down to make way for cattle-grazing land, oil palm plantations or other non-forests uses.…
LEMBAH PERMAI, Indonesia — Joula Goni stepped out of her house cradling a skull. “A babirusa,” she explained, placing the bleached white cranium on a formica table on the patio.…
Conservation scientists meeting in Mexico are warning that planned expansion of industrial monocultures in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula poses a threat to traditional agricultural practices that help maintain biodiversity and ecosystem…
JAYAPURA, Indonesia — When Amos Ondikeleuw became a clan leader, he vowed to never give up his community’s land at the foot of the Cyclops Mountains to the migrants flooding…
Reduced-impact logging doesn’t need to be a death knell for a region’s big animals, according to a new study in Biotropica — but only if hunting is well-regulated. Employing camera…
The path of a major highway project in eastern Nigeria has been altered in response to concerns from local and international groups about its impact on wildlife and communities. The…
Companies operating in Africa would do well to avoid conflicts over land with local populations, according to new research by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington, D.C.-based NGO…
NANJIRINJI A, Tanzania – When Jamila Sallimu Chikunda found out she was pregnant with her third child in 2015, her joy quickly turned to anxiety. Chikunda’s family was struggling to…
MONROVIA, Liberia - Reaching the remote Garwin chiefdom in central Liberia isn’t an easy feat. Only about an hour and a half of the journey takes place on a paved…
NAMALULU, Tanzania - Tumaini Matinda dropped to one knee and fixed his intense gaze on a watermelon rind in the middle of the narrow path. Deep in the Tanzanian bush,…
The clearing of a corridor for the Cross River Superhighway in Nigeria, which would cut through the southern half of the country, has been temporarily halted as a result of…
Indigenous leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America attended the UN climate talks in Paris last December to present research showing that traditional indigenous territories in the Amazon Basin, the…
U Ye Aung spent most of his adult life in a war zone. For over 60 years his village of Kalaikyi served as the frontline in one of Myanmar’s longest…
Forests are vital ecosystems that provide crucial habitat to wildlife and help regulate everything from regional hydrological cycles to the global climate. But conservationists, forestry officials, and other decisionmakers often…
Community Forest Management (CFM) is an increasingly popular approach to conserving forests worldwide, due to the fact that involving the local community that uses and lives within the forests helps…
n May 2013, the journal Conservation Biology published an editorial describing 10 conservation methods that emerged since the late 1970's as fads, “approaches that are embraced enthusiastically and then abandoned.”…
Other stories in Mongabay’s series on the Maya Biosphere Reserve: Killing of Guatemalan activist in the Maya Biosphere Reserve raises alarm Successes and many challenges in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve…
Other stories in Mongabay’s series on the Maya Biosphere Reserve: Killing of Guatemalan activist in the Maya Biosphere Reserve raises alarm Successes and many challenges in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve…
