Rodrigo Agostinho, head of IBAMA, Brazil's federal environmental agency, for two years now, spoke with Mongabay about the progress of his agency and the challenges it faces in protecting the country's biomes after four years of regression under former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Conservation groups in Panama are trying to halt the construction of a new port in the Pacific province of Chiriquí that they say could destroy breeding grounds and nurseries for…
According to the Brazilian Federal Police, Bruno Heller is one of Amazon's largest deforesters and relied on legal and technical advice, including a fake contract, bribing police officers, and near-real-time monitoring of deforestation work through satellite imagery, investigators said.
Plans for a major mining project in western Suriname have sounded alarms in nearby Indigenous communities, who say that the project will destroy local ecosystems, violate their land rights and…
Environmentalist Justin Landry Chekoua says he’s shocked by images of century-old trees uprooted and rivers contaminated in the northern Sangha region of the Republic of Congo. Mongabay had taken photos…
JAKARTA — Prominent Indonesian environmental forensic expert Bambang Hero Saharjo faces yet another potential lawsuit for serving as a state witness against alleged violators, this time in a high-profile tin…
Lawmakers in El Salvador have voted to reintroduce industrial mining in the country, ending a landmark ban that was meant to protect freshwater and public health. The law, pushed through…
Humanity achieved a fateful milestone last year. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has officially declared 2024 the hottest year on record, and the first year in history with…
Among New Guinea’s rainforest inhabitants is a group of birds called pitohuis, chatty songbirds that stand out for their loud, attractive songs. But there’s more to these birds than their…
Attending the UN climate (COP28) and biodiversity (COP16) conferences during the past two years, it strikes this observer that the UN specialist environmental agreements on climate, biodiversity, pollution, hazardous waste,…
South America recorded the highest number of fire outbreaks in 14 years in 2024, with Brazil at the epicenter of the crisis.
Traditional people need more financing, better access to energy and improved roads to get their products into the market.
The Bangladeshi government’s forest department recently added surveillance drones to their arsenal of conservation tools. Wildlife inspectors started using this technology to prepare a dragnet around a poaching hotspot with…
The Amazon Rainforest, where next year’s COP30 climate summit will be hosted, is reeling from two consecutive years of severe drought, with major rivers at record lows, leading to water shortages and transportation disruptions for local communities.
For Thảo, a journalist based in Hanoi, online reports from Vietnamese internet users were key to her and her colleagues’ coverage of Typhoon Yagi and its aftermath. The storm, the…
Over the last two decades, Bangladesh has spent a large amount of money to restore its waterways by dredging the rivers across the country to clear some silt and sand.…
2024 was a big year for Indigenous lands worldwide, whether through land rights gains, land grabbing, restoring spiritual connections to lands, or analyzing how these lands support biodiversity conservation. Land…
Twelve countries, including Brazil, are currently discussing the Tropical Forest Finance Facility (TFFF) framework, which is expected to be concluded by next January.
In 15 conservation units, illegal gold miners destroyed 330 hectares (815 acres) — an area close to the size of Central Park in New York City — in only two months.
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,…
“I tried to live a normal life,” Yana, 31, tells Mongabay. In 2020, after the Philippine government forcibly shut down schools for the Indigenous Lumad in the country’s south, Yana,…
ALIAĞA, Türkiye — Every day, as dusk settles over the Aegean Sea, small vans ferrying workers homeward bustle in and out of Aliağa, a town nestled against lush, forested hills…
On Dec. 6, Iceland’s caretaker government announced it had issued five-year licenses to hunt fin and minke whales in Icelandic waters. It granted the fin whale hunting license to Hvalur…
ESQUIPULAS, Guatemala — An estimated 8 million migrants have entered the U.S. during the Biden administration, the highest number in centuries. Many still come from the so-called Northern Triangle, made…
Yaounde - African youths have adopted "The Yaounde African call on more than doubling Adaptation Finance for a Resilient Africa," calling for a large raise in the share of adaptation…
Most of the exported timber belongs to the almost-extinct ipê species and was sent to a company in Portugal.
Working on fishing vessels has for centuries been one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. To this day, forced labor and other human rights abuses remain relatively common,…
“Just wait till next year!” goes the slogan often attributed to disappointed sports fans. Those same words could equally apply to proponents of an internationally binding U.N. agreement to phase…
Mongabay examined four REDD+ projects in Pará state and found that all were developed in partnership with sawmill owners with a long history of environmental fines.
Significant inconsistencies and gaps in governmental policies for peatland science and protection in Peru’s Imiría Regional Conservation Area have impacted the livelihoods of Indigenous Shipibo residents, according to a new…
Conservation groups have made progress setting up complaints systems in protected areas in the Congo Basin, but there’s still a ways to go, the Rainforest Foundation UK says in a…
Bengal tigers, Asian elephants, Ganges river dolphins, langurs and hoolock gibbons, along with a few other endangered and vulnerable animal species, have been prominent in Bangladesh’s wildlife conservation scenario for…
