As climate change wreaks increasingly devastating droughts, hurricanes and storms, preserving the world’s remaining large blocks of standing forest has become a matter of survival. However, 47 million hectares (116 million acres) of forest in the Brazilian Amazon, an area…

Rosalba Gomez says she remembers many fires throughout her childhood: bright orange flames feeding on the natural grasslands surrounding her community, engulfing homes, trees and animals. Her parents spent hours in their food garden, known as kokúe, where they planted…

In the Orinoco River Basin spanning Venezuela and Colombia, biodiversity and agriculture are at odds. Cattle ranching is one of the leading causes of deforestation in Colombia’s Orinoquía and the wider Amazon, degrading habitat for wildlife in the region. Meanwhile,…

In a landmark ruling in May 2017, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights affirmed the Indigenous Ogiek’s status as ancestral owners of the Mau Forest in Kenya and ordered the government to compensate the group for both material…

Scientists agree that the biodiversity crisis we face today may be one of the most disruptive events in Earth’s history. The response so far has been for hundreds of billions in government and philanthropic donor funds – along with trillions…

There have been three major sources of Brazilian immigrants in the twentieth century: the Northeast, where emigration offers one of the few realistic opportunities to escape poverty; the South, where middle-class families embraced an opportunity to continue a farming tradition;…

Residents of the Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea are on a “green migration,” contributor Thibault Le Pivain reports for Mongabay.  The islanders are leaving their homes due to food shortages resulting from environmental degradation and rising sea levels, and…

India is bracing for intense rainfall over the next few days as a deep depression over the Bay of Bengal is set to intensify into what will be called Cyclone Fengal by Nov. 29, according to local media reports.  The…

KATHMANDU — Authorities in Nepal say they’ll continue a translocation program to even out the distribution of rhinos in the popular Chitwan National Park, despite protests from tourism operators and concerns from conservationists. The greater one-horned rhino (Rhinoceros unicornis) represents…

Encompassing some 2,700 square kilometers, Mau Forest is considered the most important water catchment in western Kenya, providing water to millions of people. But recent satellite data reveal that Mau is continuing to lose its water-giving forest cover. Most of…