Forests News

This year, the Easter holidays didn’t bring tourists to the Presa del Llano ecotourism park in Mexico. There was none of the usual noise of kayak paddles splashing in the…

MANILA — “How can we rehabilitate a Philippine eagle during a lockdown?” That was the first thought Jayson Ibañez says crossed his mind after he answered a phone call bearing…

Censorship, persecution, and dismissals of supervisors have become the norm in Brazil’s environmental agencies since Jair Bolsonaro took office. Now, prosecutors are seeking the dismissal of his environment minister, Ricardo Salles, alleging "countless initiatives that violate the duty to protect the environment."

A federal judge has issued an emergency order giving the Bolsonaro administration just days to evict all illegal miners, and keep them out until the danger of the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

JAKARTA — Activists have called on the Indonesian authorities to probe the finances of the Korindo Group, a privately owned conglomerate, in the wake of an investigation that exposed a $22…

For 20 years, the Colima fir tree (Abies colimensis) has been at the heart of many disputes to conserve the temperate forests of southern Jalisco, a state in central Mexico.…

It’s the one-year anniversary of the finalization of a gigantic trade agreement between the EU and Mercusor, a bloc of Latin American nations, but Brazil’s soaring deforestation rate puts ratification at risk.

JAKARTA — Milder weather is expected to bring about a less severe forest fire season across Indonesia this year compared to 2019. But cutbacks to fire-prevention measures as a result…

Captured in the wild in 1973, in the country then known as Burma, Thaung Sein Win has been ridden by various mahouts over the years, dragging thousands of freshly felled…

MEDAN, Indonesia — Smugglers managed to ship more than 7,000 birds, including wild-caught songbirds, by air from Sumatra to Java in Indonesia, highlighting the country’s weak enforcement against the deeply…

On May 15, authorities in the northeastern province of Si Sa Ket in Thailand arrested two Cambodians and six Thai workers for illegally removing a large Siamese rosewood tree from…

When conservationists set up treetop cameras in Côte d’Ivoire’s Tanoé-Ehy forest, they hoped to get video of the elusive Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey (Piliocolobus waldroni), a critically endangered species…

For the past 15 years, the European Union and tropical timber-producing countries have developed innovative collaboration mechanisms to fight illegal logging and timber trade, and to make sure wood imports…

Soaring gold prices, brought on by the economic meltdown and COVID-19 uncertainty, have led to a rapid, largely un-policed, expansion of illegal gold mining in the Amazon.

JAKARTA — Martamis says he’s worried about how he’ll pay for his daughter’s education once schools reopen. He’s an oil palm farmer from the village of Lubuk Mandarsah in Indonesia’s…

JAKARTA — Indonesia is reopening dozens of conservation areas to local and foreign tourists after months of closure, even as the number of COVID-19 infections in the country continues to…

SAHN, Sierra Leone — The day they came, Margaret Fascia was in her forest garden of cocoa trees, pineapple plants, palms, ferns and cassavas. Like most days of the week,…

Climate change threatens ecological and economic systems. That is why investors are increasingly looking to invest in companies with a plan to address one of the largest drivers of climate…

In his 2006 book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, science writer David Quammen says, “Some people admire soldiers, or surgeons, or firemen, or astrophysicists, or medical missionaries, or cowboys. I admire…

This article was co-published with The Gecko Project.  This post details the analysis we carried out to estimate the revenues generated by the Korindo Group from harvesting timber as it…

Filipino lepidopterist Jade Aster T. Badon is accustomed to traveling to some of the remotest parts of the Philippines in search of new butterfly species. In August 2019, he made…

MBONJO, Cameroon — The first time Emmanuel Elong wrote a letter to Vincent Bolloré was in 2013. “The impact of the group that you are controlling on our lives is…

Between 1885 and 1908, Belgium’s King Leopold II exerted control over a vast area of Africa that would later become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His rule was characterized…

It was the middle of the afternoon in one of the world’s largest metropolises when the sky went black. Thousands of miles away, tens of thousands of fires raged, plunging…

QUITO — As COVID-19 sweeps across communities in the Amazon rainforest, the Indigenous Waorani in Ecuador are celebrating a bittersweet victory after a provincial court ruled in their favor in…

Investing in forests to fight climate change seems like a sure bet. Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, pump out oxygen, and live for decades. What could go wrong?…

This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Part 1: ‘Maybe they didn’t expect us to find it’ In April 2019, an Indonesian delegate stepped onto the stage at a…

In a corner of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, a handful of clandestine roads neatly slice the dense jungle canopy into rectangles. From the sky, an entourage of bulldozers can be…

An exclusive study shows that 114 properties have been certified inside indigenous territories awaiting demarcation in the Brazilian Amazon, spurred in large part by a recent statute that leaves these reserves unprotected from such illegal land grabs.

A first ever study has quantified carbon emissions across Brazil’s entire soy sector in detail and pinpointed the highest deforestation related emissions in the Cerrado savanna, followed by the Amazon.