The focus of experts in global security tends to orbit familiar threats. War in Europe and the Middle East. Trade disruption and financial volatility. Technology shocks and threats to information integrity. But the most…
A week ago, the media reported that the Ministry of Forestry estimated the total cost of rehabilitating Indonesia’s forests and critical lands at Rp153.78 trillion, or about US$9.2 billion, over…
I am often asked what Mongabay’s legacy is, or what it might turn out to be. The question usually comes with an assumption that a quarter-century of publishing should yield…
For most of modern history, the open ocean has been treated as a place apart. Beyond the 200-nautical-mile limits of national jurisdiction, it was governed by custom, fragmented rules, and…
It was 27 December 2004. I was sitting at my computer in my office in Jakarta, Indonesia, my mind busy with plans for the New Year party I had organized…
Extinction is rarely a moment. It is a process that unfolds offstage, marked by missed sightings, thinning records, and the slow reassignment of hope to footnotes. Discovery, too, is rarely…
I recently contributed a section on how to communicate about the Amazon for the “Amazonia in Danger” report, a collection of 22 articles written by 55 authors from different fields.…
The planet just crossed a grim milestone: last year’s global temperature averaged more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, shredding our margin for error under the Paris Agreement. That doesn’t doom…
The global environmental crisis is also a crisis of information. The destruction of forests, reefs, and rivers proceeds faster than our ability to explain it. Yet in many countries, the…
Heading into COP30, where tropical forests are set to be a central theme, it seemed worth attempting a thought experiment: to trace today’s trajectories a little further forward and imagine…
Belize sells itself as a small-country answer to a big problem: how to keep the sea alive and the people who depend on it working. The pitch is strong. A…
When a logging concession in Gabon threatened a community’s ancestral forest, their appeals to officials went nowhere—until someone wrote about it. Once the facts reached the public record, the environment…
More than eight hundred years ago, Maimonides wrote that the highest form of giving is to make charity itself unnecessary. That wisdom feels newly relevant today as questions about power…
A few weeks ago, I wrote about navigating conservation’s crisis. During Climate Week in New York, I joined discussions with grassroots leaders from the Global South that offered a sharper…
I find it hard to believe Jane Goodall is gone. She was more than an icon to me. She was a friend, a mentor, and someone whose presence—whether with presidents,…
On a dawn drive through a savannah reserve in Zambia, a ranger slows the truck and points to a faint trail in the dust. It is not the spoor of…
Call it a crossroads. Ecological decline is accelerating in too many places at once; institutions that once limited the damage are wobbling; the information channels we rely on to coordinate action are…
The forest in northern Gabon didn’t look like a battleground. It was a patchwork of hunting trails and village paths, home to fruit trees and ancestral graves. When a…
The gorilla should have vanished. In the late 1980s, the mountain gorilla clung to survival in the misted borderlands of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Poaching,…
A recent study in the US, UK, and Australia showed that referring to the terms “climate change” or “global warming” did not affect whether people accepted what the science tells us—that…
If tropical rainforests are the lungs of the Earth, then 2024 was a year of respiratory failure. Fires, fueled by climate extremes and human recklessness, tore through vast stretches of…
Brazil is facing an alarming surge in forest fires. Last year, the country registered 237,000 fires and over 30.8 million hectares of vegetation were consumed by flames—an area the size of Italy. This represented a 79% increase in…
The situation is worse than previously thought In February 2025, three scientific papers were published showing that the climate situation is much worse than the scientific community thought, much less…
The mounting pressure on Brazil’s federal environmental agency (IBAMA) to approve the disastrous project to extract oil from the mouth of the Amazon River (see here and here) should be…
There have been 29 United Nations Climate Change Conferences (UNFCCC COPs) so far. The first COP meeting was held in Germany in 1995, and the 29th meeting of the Conference…
The earth is on the brink of a sixth extinction crisis, making it urgent to expand programs to conserve nature and its biodiversity, especially in tropical countries with the highest…
In 2019, the world watched in horror as images of the Amazon rainforest ablaze flooded the news. Over 70,000 wildfires raged uncontrollably, killing wildlife, filling hospitals with patients struggling to…
The proposed reconstruction of Brazil’s BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) highway (Figure 1) needs a new environmental impact assessment (EIA). No rational decision can be made on going ahead with this project…
On September 14, Brazil’s National Department of Transportation Infrastructure (DNIT) submitted to the Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region (TRF1) a consultancy report that DNIT had contracted from Engespro…
Relentless climate change and biodiversity loss are pushing the world's ecosystems to the brink of collapse. The planet may have already surpassed at least six of nine planetary boundaries crucial…
In just one generation, Costa Rica halted deforestation and reversed land degradation. Currently, Costa Rica boasts 57% forest cover, with 25% of its land territory protected. All of this has…
Would another Trump presidency be “game over” for the Amazon forest and global climate? At least there is still a question mark at the end of that sentence! Global warming…
