Forest Destruction News

A thick, acrid scent of smoke marks the last summer season in Australia, which has become known as the “black summer.” Between June 2019 and March 2020, a series of…

On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we look at what’s driving the intense fire seasons we’ve seen around the world in recent years, what can we expect from the…

President Jair Bolsonaro has revived a plan, conceived in the 1970s, to extend the BR-163 highway, the main soy corridor in Brazil, north to the border with Suriname. The Trombetas State Forest, one of the four conservation units the road would cut through, stores 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide — more than Brazil’s entire emissions in 2018.

A sweeping policy change by the Bolsonaro government opens unregistered ancestral indigenous lands to landgrabbers, loggers, ranchers, and soy growers, with huge risk for the Amazon.

The world has lost 178 million hectares (439 million acres) of forest cover over the past 20 years, which the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) equated to as “about…

Two environmental agency coordinators with a record of deeply reducing illegal mining and deforestation in the Amazon’s Xingu basin were sacked after they led a recent successful raid.

The Brazilian savanna has always been a dry place, but the massive conversion of native vegetation to soy is making it far dryer, as is deepening, climate change-driven, drought.

The government of South Korea is subsidizing the development of biomass power so heavily that it’s hindering the adoption of renewable energy technologies like solar and wind, new research finds.…

One of the Amazon’s most deforested regions, Lábrea, in Brazil, is remote, poorly policed and suffering from a land tenure crisis. As a result, land grabbing, illegal logging and murder are routine.

BORACAY ISLAND, Philippines — The bats that swarmed Boracay's evening skies were once as iconic as the pristine white sand beaches that made this tiny island in the central Philippines…

Environmental degradation has already triggered disease outbreaks in Brazil. The risk of a new emergent zoonotic disease arising there, like COVID-19, is intensified by Bolsonaro’s forest policies.

On 9 March 2020, Mongabay published a commentary written by Philip M. Fearnside on the “Solimões Sedimentary Area”, an oil and gas project that would implant thousands of wells spread over the western portion of the Brazilian Amazon. EPE, the Brazilian Energy Research Office, sent a response to Mongabay claiming “conceptual mistakes.” Fearnside, now, comments on these claims.

On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with acclaimed environmental journalist John Vidal about the coronavirus pandemic's links to the wildlife trade and the destruction of nature. Listen…

Conserved areas, indigenous and traditional communities are being put at risk by illegal roads rapidly being built in the Amazon’s Purus / Madeira basin, while authorities do nothing.

This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. A new company has begun clearing rainforest in an area of Indonesia’s easternmost Papua province earmarked to become the world’s largest oil…

Dung beetle species populations are moving toward collapse in parts of the Brazilian Amazon apparently due to climate change-driven drought, fires, and other human disturbances.

PEKANBARU, Indonesia — Wildlife experts have called on the Indonesian government to boost protection of critically endangered tigers in the vicinity of a major road project in Sumatra, following a…

In 2019, suspect exports of rare wood to Europe, the US and beyond were legalized, likely prompting soaring damage to the Amazon rainforest and new attacks on indigenous people by illegal loggers.

The biodiverse rainforest of the Amazon’s Purus and Madeira river basins is at risk; new roads could be built to eventually serve extensive oil and gas wells.

At a UN event, Brazil was accused of Amazon deforestation policies leading toward “ethnocide” against indigenous peoples, and “genocide” against uncontacted indigenous groups.

After decades of suppressing fire, park managers in Brazil’s savanna are relying on indigenous and traditional fire knowledge and Integrated Fire Management as a conservation tool.

ANTSOTSO, Madagascar — Moussa Evariste, 53, treads lightly on sinewy legs across fields of grass that were once forest. The terrain is sandy and prickly, punctuated by the relief of…

The murder of Sister Dorothy in 2005, and resulting international outrage, helped curb violence in Brazil for a time, but crimes against landless peasants and activists are on the rise.

‘Multinationals have cut the veins of our mother Earth,’ warned Pope Francis, urging conservation of the rapidly vanishing Amazon — but the world’s media barely took notice.

A new initiative by Nutreco, Tesco and Grieg Seafood pledges $13 million to pay soy growers not to deforest the savanna for new soy fields. More are hoped to join the fund.

JAKARTA — Indonesian President Joko Widodo has demanded accountability from his top officials over the land and forest fires that hit the country last year, as the government braces for…

Authorities in Indonesia have expanded their efforts to shut down illegal gold mining in Sumatra, where they practice has grown in recent years. Officials in West Sumatra province pledged last…

An intensification in fires, coupled with increasing deforestation and worsening climate change, could rapidly shift the Amazon toward being a carbon source by 2050.

Data obtained via the Access to Information Act reveals that Vale has 236 applications registered with the National Mining Agency for mineral exploration in Brazil’s Amazon Basin. Many of them are applications for research, the first step to obtaining authorization for mineral exploration.

This was meant to be a moment of triumph in the long battle to save the world’s forests. The year when the bold commitment hundreds of companies made to eliminate…