topic: Poverty

topic: Poverty

Social media activity version | Lean version

Palm oil company uses armed forces, tear gas against protesting villagers in Cameroon
- Cameroonian villagers protesting on March 25 against plantation company Socapalm’s replanting of oil palm trees on disputed land were dispersed with tear gas by local law enforcement.
- Socapalm rejects the villagers’ claim that the company was supposed to return this land following an amendment to its lease, explaining that this part of the plantation is not leased.
- Gendarmes escorted Socapalm workers despite a local official’s previous statement that replanting required an agreement with villagers.
- Socfin, Socapalm’s parent company, has been accused of land grabbing and human rights abuses, with investigators confirming many community grievances at its Cameroon plantations.

New allegations of abuse against oil palm giant Socfin in Cameroon
- For several years, coastal communities in Edéa, Cameroon, have been campaigning for the return of land they say Socapalm, a subsidiary of Luxembourg-based Socfin, illegally seized from them.
- Now a series of reports published by environmental consultancy the Earthworm Foundation in February have substantiated new allegations land grabbing and of sexual harassment on Socapalm’s oil palm plantations.
- The Socfin group requested Earthworm’s investigations of its subsidiaries’ operations in Cameroon and elsewhere; following the release of the latest findings, the group has announced the launch of quarterly action plans aimed at addressing the rights violations.
- Financial institutions that have backed Socfin declined to say how they will in their turn respond to findings that show that guidelines for ethical investment have not been effective across Socfin’s operations in West and Central Africa, as well as Asia.

Global South’s urban poor burn plastic as fuel, researchers say

Plastic is increasingly being used for fuel by much of the world’s urban poor, to the detriment of the health of local people and their environment, researchers argue in a new commentary. As of 2021, roughly 56% of the world lives in an urban area. At the same time, nearly half a billion tons of […]
Coffee companies are readier for the EUDR than they claim (commentary)
- Major coffee companies and industry groups attempted to weaken the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), delaying its implementation until 2025 despite its goal of curbing deforestation and human rights abuses.
- The EU’s coffee imports contribute significantly to deforestation, child labor, and slavery, with millions of workers trapped in extreme poverty and forests being cleared for plantations, especially in Brazil, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
- Despite industry complaints, compliance costs are minimal, and coffee supply chains are simpler than other regulated commodities; companies must take responsibility without shifting the burden onto vulnerable farmers and workers.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Amid bombs and chaos, Goma’s displaced residents share their fears and hopes
- Fighting between the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the M23 armed group around Goma has displaced and upended life for hundreds of thousands of people.
- Many have fled camps for internally displaced people and taken refuge in host families’ homes, schools and churches amid widespread looting and killing.
- Still, many residents in and around Goma say they maintain hope for a peaceful future.

The key factors fueling conflict in eastern DRC
- The eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has witnessed armed conflicts running for decades, with a recent onslaught by M23, a Rwanda-backed rebel force, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
- Conflicts in eastern DRC stem from ethnic tensions linked to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, political and corporate corruption, and the lingering effects of Western colonialism, exacerbated by natural resource extraction.
- Experts say that minerals are a significant factor in violence, but not the sole cause, even as armed groups like M23 have used their trade for financing operations.
- The ongoing instability in the eastern DRC necessitates a comprehensive approach beyond addressing conflict minerals and delving into the historical roots of the conflict, says an expert.

In the Pan Amazon, inequality and informality fuel informal economies
- In the mid-twentieth century, the combination of poverty and inequality generated political instability that gave rise to socialist and nationalist movements in different Amazonian countries.
- In societies as stratified as those of the Pan Amazon, shaped by class, ethnicity and geography, inequality is sustained by very real and concrete structural barriers.
- This has resulted in the exponential growth of the informal economy, in which people do not pay taxes to their governments. Irregularities extend to the rural economy, in which smallholder farmers and miners operate without regulation, often damaging ecosystems.

Climate change forces Jakarta fishing families to marry off young daughters

Climate change is driving families on Indonesia’s northern Javanese coast toward child marriage as a survival strategy amid dwindling fish stocks and increasing economic hardships, two Mongabay reports show. Mongabay contributor Maulia Inka Vira Fendilla traveled to North Jakarta’s Kalibaru neighborhood in 2023 and met Janah and Jaroh, sisters who were both married off at […]
In the battle against plastic pollution, Asia’s informal workers are critical allies (commentary)
- Southeast Asia is the source of over half of the world’s ocean plastic, due to inadequate waste management infrastructure in many emerging economies.
- Developing the waste management infrastructure needed to slow this worsening plastic pollution crisis will take time and resources, and until then, ‘informal’ workers like waste pickers will be crucial to the effort.
- “In the meantime, it’s clear that Asia’s informal waste workers are indispensable, and their rights and livelihoods must be protected and harnessed at a greater scale for the benefit of people and the planet,” a new op-ed states.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Global ‘Slow Food’ movement embraces agroecology (commentary)
- This week, Slow Food convenes its celebrated annual gathering, Terra Madre, in Italy, and a major focus will be the importance of expanding agroecology globally.
- There, the leading ‘good food movement’ organization officially launches its new program, Slow Food Farms, to educate its global members about the power of agroecology to feed the world sustainably and to connect farmers via a community of learning.
- “It is more important than ever to bring farmers together in a large network [where] the protagonists of the food system can come together to raise their voices, share their experiences and work more closely together towards an agroecological transition,” the president of Slow Food writes in a new op-ed.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

A one-time illegal logger grows back a forest for his people in Sumatra
- Efron Simanjuntak, once a successful illegal logger in Sumatra, became a committed forest protector after realizing the impact logging had on the livelihoods of villagers and the environment.
- After serving time in prison, Efron began replanting trees that produce resin, such as frankincense and pine, as part of his efforts to restore the damaged forest and ensure a sustainable income for his community.
- Efron credits being indebted to his ancestors and his role in protecting his family’s frankincense-farming heritage as key to his desire to protect the forest.
- Along with civil society organizations, Efron fought for the recognition of his village’s customary forest by the government, which was finally achieved in August 2024, giving his community stronger legal status to protect their forest from outside threats.

Sundarbans fisherfolk are battered by cyclones amid fishing bans
- Fishers in the Bangladesh Sundarbans have been struggling with income due to damage caused to the mangroves by the recent tropical cyclone Remal and also the seasonal ban on resource hunting from June to August.
- In every disaster, poor fisherfolk are entangled more in a complex debt trap for moving on, and this year, the situation is more aggravating as the cyclone hit just before the fishing ban started.
- Nonetheless, the government is adamant on continuing the ban for the sake of forest resource conservation.
- At the same time, the government is still in the planning stage of providing people food support during the ban period, as has been provided to sea-bound fishers during the hilsa harvest ban period.

Can Vietnam’s forests survive the spread of acacia and eucalyptus plantations? (commentary)
- The large-scale planting of acacia and eucalyptus monoculture plantations in Vietnam raises concerns about their long-term environmental impact on soil health and biodiversity.
- This aggressive expansion also leads to fierce competition for land, often displacing local communities with limited resources.
- “Fostering a spirit of cooperation between companies and farmers is essential to ensure that the Vietnamese forestry industry thrives while promoting the livelihoods of both parties,” a new op-ed states.
- This post is a commentary, the views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Fishers left with no land, no fish, in fire sale of Cambodian coast
- Coastal communities in Cambodia are facing a double threat, from land and sea, as developers evict them from their homes and farms, and trawlers encroach on their nearshore fishing grounds.
- Illegal fishing, chiefly embodied by rampant, unchecked trawling in protected and prohibited waters, has devastated fish stocks, trashed marine ecosystems and left coastal communities in dire poverty.
- At the same time, the land is being sold out from under them: Nearly half of Cambodia’s coast has been privatized since 2000, with a slew of new projects tied to politically connected wealthy investors announced in the last five years, displacing families and closing off access to the sea.
- This is the second part of a Mongabay series about challenges faced by Cambodia’s small-scale fishers along the coast.

As catches fall, Sierra Leone’s artisanal fishers turn to destructive practices
- Sierra Leone’s fish stocks have been under severe strain in recent years due to intensive industrial fishing and a growing population of artisanal fishers, with fishers consistently reporting falling catches.
- This has triggered heightened competition for increasingly scarce yields.
- To secure their livelihoods, artisanal fishers have turned to unsustainable fishing gear, such as undersize-mesh nets, and target fish breeding and nursery grounds, disrupting the fish reproductive cycle.
- The crisis is fueled by the ready availability of illegal nets, weak law enforcement and widespread economic hardship.

Fishing by dodgy fleets hurts economies, jobs in developing countries: Report
- A recent report gauged the economic damage done by fishing fleets with shady track records in five vulnerable countries: Ecuador, Ghana, Peru, the Philippines, and Senegal.
- It found that these fleets’ activities could be costing the five countries 0.26% of their combined GDP, leaving some 30,000 people jobless and pushing around 142,000 deeper into poverty.
- “The report emphasizes that the uncontrolled growth in global fishing has led to overfishing, stressing fish stocks and impacting communities and the oceans’ well-being,” one of the authors told Mongabay.

Research links deforestation in Cambodia to stunting in kids, anemia in women
- An analysis of public health data in Cambodia has found increased rates of malnutrition among children born in areas where deforestation had recently occurred.
- It also found that pregnant women in these areas were more likely to suffer from anemia, a condition that often correlates with incidences of malaria.
- Cambodia has lost nearly 30% of its forest cover this century, while more than 30% of its children under 5 have stunted growth due to malnutrition.
- The study illustrates how deforestation and the ecological disruptions it causes can compound previously existing rural health issues.

In climate-related flooding, a Ugandan river turns poisonous
- Uganda’s Nyamwamba river, in the Rwenzori Mountains, has begun to flood catastrophically in recent years, partly due to climate change.
- Along the river are copper tailings pools from an old Canadian mining operation, which are becoming increasingly eroded by the flooding.
- According to a series of studies, these tailings have been washing into the water supply and soil of the Nyamwamba River Basin, contaminating human tissue, food and water with deadly heavy metals.
- Cancer rates are higher than normal near the tailings pools, and scientists fear that as the flooding continues to worsen, so will the health crisis.

Climate change brings a river’s wrath down on western Uganda
- Since the 1960s, Uganda’s climate has warmed by an average of 1.3°C (2.3°F).
- The warming is partly responsible for an increasing number of catastrophic floods on the Nyamwamba River, in western Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains.
- In 2020 alone, 173,000 people were affected by flooding in Kasese district, when 25,000 houses were destroyed.
- Many of those rendered homeless by the floods continue to languish in temporary housing camps four years on.

As climate disasters claim their children, Bangladeshi mothers seek safety in bigger families
- Climate change is exacerbating child mortality in flood-prone areas of Bangladesh, prompting mothers to have larger families as a response to the fear of losing children to disasters.
- Studies indicate an 8% surge in infant mortality risk in flood-prone regions, resulting in more than 150,000 lives lost between 1988 and 2017.
- While Bangladesh has seen improvements in disaster management, reduced cyclone deaths, and progress in health for mothers and children, climate change poses new threats, especially to vulnerable coastal communities lacking adequate protection.
- A National Adaptation Plan offers solutions such as water conservation and livelihood opportunities, but challenges like funding, coordination and transparency need attention for effective implementation, experts say.

Labor abuse and work accidents on plantations of Cameroon’s largest sugar producer
- Industrial agriculture companies, considered drivers of economic growth in Cameroon, are also a source of conflict for workers and farmers following an increase in workplace accidents and the growing impact this industry has on the environment.
- With increasing accidents over the years, the industrial agriculture sector alone accounted for 26.4% of work-related accidents recorded in Cameroon in 2020, according to an estimate by the Cameroonian institution overseeing social protection, the CNPS.
- According to estimates from the seasonal workers’ union, the Cameroon Sugar Corporation (SOSUCAM), which holds a monopoly on sugar production in the country, is responsible for about a hundred accidents per year, some leading to death, on its plantations and in its factories.
- Local NGOs also accuse the company of polluting rivers and soil as well as destroying village plantations. Above all, the company is notorious for its glaring violations in applying Cameroonian labor, social security, and environmental protection legislation.

Cambodia’s Indigenous communities renounce communal land titles for microloans
- Indigenous rural communities in northeastern Cambodia are struggling under debts that have ballooned from modest microloans with high interest rates.
- Microlending as a means of increasing communities’ access to finance is strongly supported by the World Bank, but runs counter to efforts to grant communal land ownership of homes, farmlands and sacred forests — another World Bank initiative.
- Entire villages have opted out of the communal land titling program because it would prevent them from using this land as collateral for microloans and selling land to outsiders, often to repay debt.
- This project was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Journalism Fund.

Poverty and plantations: Nigerian reserve struggles against the odds
- Located in southern Nigeria, Oluwa Forest Reserve is supposed to be a bastion for the region’s wildlife – which includes critically endangered Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees.
- But the influx of thousands of settlers into the reserve is coming at the cost of its rainforests, with satellite data and imagery showing ongoing clearing into primary forest.
- Palm oil companies are also establishing industrial plantations in the reserve.
- Conservationists and officials warn that vulnerable wildlife populations may be wiped out if forest loss and bushmeat hunting continues at its current rate.

‘It’s a real mess’: Mining and deforestation threaten unparalleled DRC wildlife haven
- The Okapi Wildlife Reserve in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo protects unique biodiversity, including approximately one-fifth of the global okapi population, the country’s largest forest elephant and chimpanzee populations and 17 primate species, and it safeguards forest access for the Indigenous Mbuti and Efe peoples.
- Deforestation in the reserve is accelerating, according to data from Global Forest Watch.
- Artisanal and semi-industrial mining is a grave threat to the reserve, leading to deforestation and pollution of waterways, particularly in the south of the reserve along the Ituri River and the National Road 4.
- A disagreement over the boundaries of the reserve between park authorities and the mining cadastre complicates law enforcement and requires resolution at the ministerial level.

Kenya’s Lake Victoria floods leave orphaned children to run their households
- Beginning in 2019, devastating floods on the shores of Kenya’s Lake Victoria have inundated homes, displaced families and left some orphaned children in charge of caring for their siblings and running the household.
- Many families continue to live in makeshift camps, hoping to rebuild and renew their lives; the effects of the flooding have been particularly harsh on children who have had to drop out of school or work to ensure the family’s survival.
- Experts attribute the floods to a combination of factors, including climate change, increased rainfall and lack of vegetation to control runoff; in 2015, an international research team predicted swiftly rising waters that could harm the region.
- UNICEF reports a concerning increase in the number of children affected by flooding in recent years, as climate change leads to more crises that can disrupt education, destabilize families and leave long-term effects on child development and psychosocial well-being.

Cut down once again: Uncontrolled logging puts new Sahel reforestation projects at risk
- Reforestation projects to restore degraded lands in Chad and Cameroon, like the “Great Green Wall” and the “Reforestation 1400” projects, are facing increasing pressure from logging activity.
- Facing poverty, war and corrupt local authorities, locals and refugees are cutting trees in new protected areas for firewood or to sell charcoal.
- Local environmental defence organizations, officials and administrations who lead these reforestation projects are raising the alarm about the extent of deforestation which is contributing to desertification in these areas.
- Despite alternative solutions to excessive logging being proposed and implemented, locals are still harvesting from reforested areas.

On Jakarta’s vanishing shoreline, climate change seen abetting child marriages
- Marriage before the age of 18 is classified as a form of gender-based violence by the United Nations, but is commonly practiced in low-income communities to mitigate household economic pressures.
- On Jakarta’s northern coastline, child marriage is common in fishing communities responding to inflationary pressures and declining stocks of fish in near-shore waters.
- Janah, now 23, fears she lacks the agency to break a cycle that saw her married at the age of 16.

Elephants invade as habitat loss soars in Nigerian forest reserve
- Elephants straying out of Afi River Forest Reserve in the Nigerian state of Cross River are reportedly damaging surrounding farms.
- This uptick in human-wildlife conflict comes as satellite data show continuing and increasing deforestation in the Afi River reserve and other protected areas.
- The habitat in Afi River Forest Reserve provides a crucial corridor that connects critically endangered Cross River gorilla populations in adjacent protected areas.
- As in other Nigerian forest reserves, agriculture, poverty and a lack of monitoring and enforcement resources are driving deforestation in the Afi River reserve.

A just energy transition requires better governance & equity in the DRC
- The global energy transition has increased demand for critical minerals involved in the making of products such as lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and other renewable energy sources.
- In the Democratic Republic of Congo, this demand has fueled a poorly regulated mining sector that has forced Indigenous communities off their land, polluted water and air, and given little back in the way of infrastructure or development.
- The DRC has also recently opened 27 blocks of land for oil exploration under the auspices of lifting the nation out of poverty, but our guests say the handling of these other mineral revenues doesn’t bode well for an equitable oil boom.
- Joseph Itongwa Mukumo, an Indigenous community member of Walikale in the North Kivu province and director of ANAPA-DRC, and Christian-Géraud Neema Byamungu, Francophone editor at the China Global South Project, speak with Mongabay about the impacts of mining on local and Indigenous communities and what DRC residents need for a just energy transition.

West African fishers strike for fair wages and ‘respect’ on EU-owned vessels
- African fishers, mostly from Senegal and Ivory Coast who work on dozens of EU vessels that operate in West Africa and the Indian Ocean, took part in a strike that lasted from June 5-8, alleging wage violations.
- Vessels owned by EU companies are allowed to fish in foreign countries’ waters through agreements between the EU and the host nations. However, a third of such vessels operating in West Africa use flags of other countries and evade labor rights provisions agreed to under these pacts.
- Fishers who participated in the strike told Mongabay they were fighting for more than fair wages, saying that African sailors were not treated with respect on European boats despite doing some of the most arduous jobs.
- Seafarers’ unions called off the strike after the Senegalese government initiated negotiations with vessel owners and unions. Talks are expected to conclude in five months.

Can community payments with no strings attached benefit biodiversity?
- A recent study published in the journal Nature Sustainability examines the idea of a “conservation basic income” paid to community members living in or near key areas for biodiversity protection.
- The authors argue that unconditional payments could help reduce families’ reliance on practices that could threaten biodiversity by providing financial stability and helping them weather unexpected expenses.
- But the evidence for the effectiveness of these kinds of cash transfers is scant and reveals that they don’t always result in outcomes that are positive for conservation.

For urban poor in Global South, nature-based solutions have always been a way to get by
- Nature-based solutions are increasingly being seen as a way of providing societal benefits and conserving biodiversity.
- Informal settlements, which lack necessary infrastructure and are often at the forefront of climate change and other natural disasters, can benefit from nature-based solutions and improve residents’ quality of life.
- A recent study explored the different forms of nature-based solutions in practice in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, their benefits and disadvantages, and identifies factors that make them successful.
- While the term “nature-based solutions” has recently been popularized in the Global North, researchers note that communities in many parts of the world have engaged in these practices for centuries.

Fish deaths near Rio Tinto mine in Madagascar dredge up community grievances
- In March 2022, following the release of wastewater from the Rio-Tinto-owned QMM mine in southeastern Madagascar, thousands of fish turned up dead in neighboring lakes, sparking protests and a government investigation.
- Civil society groups say the mine’s effluent enters neighboring water bodies with alarming regularity, endangering people’s health and robbing them of their livelihoods, and that the mining company is doing little to better the lives of Malagasy people most impacted by its activities.
- The company says it is not responsible for the fish deaths and is providing water and aid to improve relations with local people.
- “If they want to maintain good relations, the first thing to do is not release untreated wastewater into the potable water of villagers,” Tahiry Ratsiambahotra, a Malagasy activist, told Mongabay.

It’s time to embrace community-led conservation vs. the colonial kind (commentary)
- Conservation NGOs often enter countries like Fiji and advise local and Indigenous communities on how to protect their land and sea territories, or worse, acquire land and preclude the traditional residents from it.
- More NGOs are embracing community-led conservation, though, and we must embrace this, a new op-ed by a former Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji argues.
- “Fiji does not need new ideas on how to protect their ‘iqoliqoli’ (marine areas). Instead, Fiji has a lot to teach the rest of the world,” the author writes.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Rio Tinto must repair the damage caused by their Madagascar mine (commentary)
- The giant mining conglomerate Rio Tinto has a large ilmenite mine which abuts wetlands and lies in the vicinity of a river and two lakes in one of the poorest regions of the fifth poorest country in the world, Madagascar.
- Though it’s a large employer in the region, activists say that the company’s Qit Minerals Madagascar mine contaminates water supplies and reduces food security for the vulnerable local population.
- “We [are] calling for the creation of a grievance mechanism which will truly respond to people’s concerns, and that complies with international standards – not only by giving them financial compensation, but by affording them their dignity,” a new op-ed says.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Mongabay Explores the Congo Basin: The ‘heart of the world’ is at a turning point
- Mongabay Explores is a podcast series exploring the world’s unique places, species and the people working to save them.
- This first episode in our fourth season explores the Congo Basin, its vast biodiversity, environmental challenges and conservation solutions.
- Home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, it also contains unique flora and fauna found nowhere else and some of the world’s most carbon-rich peatlands.
- Featured on this episode are Conserv Congo founder Adams Cassinga and Joe Eisen, executive director of Rainforest Foundation UK, who discuss the roadblocks to protecting peatlands and rainforests from resource extraction, the challenges with foreign aid and the difficult situation locals face in a nation wracked by conflict and insufficient critical infrastructure.

‘During droughts, pivot to agroecology’: Q&A with soil expert at the World Agroforestry Centre
- As the unabating drought in Kenya persists, pastoralists in the region are struggling as millions of their livestock perish and vast swaths of crops die. About 4.4 million people in the country are food insecure.
- International food agencies are calling it a dire humanitarian situation and highlight the vital need to build communities’ resilience to adapt and cope with drought.
- Mongabay speaks with David Leilei, a Kenyan soil biologist at the World Agroforestry Centre, on the agroecological techniques and strategies pastoralists and the government can use to restore healthy soils to promote productive farming.
- Mary Njenga, a research scientist at the World Agroforestry Centre who works with 1,200 households in northern Kenya, also speaks with Mongabay on climate-resilient strategies.

Herders turn to fishing in the desert amid severe drought, putting pressure on fish population
- As Northern Kenya’s unabating drought continues, a growing wave of pastoralists are finding it challenging to keep their livestock alive and are switching to fishing in Lake Turkana, the world’s largest desert lake.
- However, environmentalists, fishing authorities, and some fishers worry that potential overfishing and increased pressures on fish populations will cause a collapse in fish stocks and the lake’s ecosystem.
- Authorities are also concerned about the rampant use of illegal fishing gear, such as thin mesh nets that catch undersized fish in shallow breeding zones, and an illegal tilapia smuggling network draining the lake by the tons.
- Though no studies have yet been done to assess fish populations, some environmentalists and fishers are calling for better enforcement of regulations to keep livelihoods afloat.

Changing circumstances turn ‘sustainable communities’ into deforestation drivers: Study
- Subsistence communities can drive forest loss to meet their basic needs when external pressures, poverty and demand for natural resources increase, says a new study unveiling triggers that turn livelihoods from sustainable into deforestation drivers.
- The impact of subsistence communities on forest loss has not been quantified to its true extent, but their impact is still minimal compared to that of industry, researchers say.
- Deforestation tends to occur through shifts in agriculture practices to meet market demands and intensified wood collecting for charcoal to meet increasing energy needs.
- About 90% of people globally living in extreme poverty, often subsistence communities, rely on forests for at least part of their livelihoods—making them the first ones impacted by forest loss.

Chile’s denial of Dominga port project is a just energy transition victory and lesson (commentary)
- Last week, Chile rejected the Dominga copper and iron mining project and its port, proposed for a location near the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve.
- Dominga’s estimated 20 to 30 years of operation would have jeopardized a marine biodiversity hotspot, along with human livelihoods and communities’ access to basic resources.
- “Dominga’s rejection is a victory for environmental justice and a lesson about the underlying tensions in the energy transition,” writes the author of a new op-ed.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

A Philippine resin trade proves sustainable for forests, but not tappers
- Almaciga resin, also known as Manila copal, is used as an additive in industrial products like varnish and linoleum, as well as traditionally for starting fires, caulking boats and fumigating against mosquitoes.
- If practiced responsibly, harvesting almaciga resin offers an ecologically sustainable income stream for the Indigenous people and local communities best positioned to protect the Philippines’ diminishing natural forests.
- However, a string of middlemen, little transparency about pricing, and lack of access to formal financial institutions means that the communities that rely on tapping resin for cash remain mired in poverty.

Saving the economically important hilsa fish comes at a cost to Bangladesh fishers
- Many fishers across Bangladesh say they still haven’t received the compensation promised by the government during a three-week ban on fishing of hilsa, the country’s most important fish.
- The ban ends on Oct. 28, and the government was supposed to hand out 40-kilogram (88-pound) rice packages to eligible fishers at the start of it, but some of the aid may have allegedly been embezzled by local officials.
- Almost half a million fishers are directly involved in the hilsa fishery in Bangladesh, with another 2 million indirectly involved; hilsa accounts for an eighth of total fish production and more than 1% of GDP in Bangladesh.
- In light of the fish’s importance, the government has since the 2000s enforced two bans a year, to allow the fish to breed and to protect the juveniles.

Broken houses and promises: residents still in poverty near massive diamond project
- More than 14 years since the discovery of the Marange diamond fields, one of the world’s largest diamond-producing projects, relocated residents and locals living near the mines are still living in poverty.
- The government and mining companies promised homes, electricity, water, employment, social services and compensation, but residents and civil society organizations say they have still not received many of these promises since Mongabay last reported on the project in 2016.
- Rivers, which residents rely on for their livestock, vegetable plots and cleaning, are polluted and silted by artisanal miners seeking additional income and opportunities to escape poverty.
- Previously, foreign companies in Zimbabwe had to either give the majority of their shares to locals or divest money into community trusts. However, this promise has fallen short since current president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, reversed the law.

Mangrove restorers in Haiti bet on resilience amid rising violence
- Haiti is one of the most deforested countries in the world today, with its mangroves in particular now dotting just 30% of its coastline, much of it in thin, fragmented pockets.
- The main threat to the mangroves is the cutting of the trees to produce charcoal, an important fuel for cooking in a country where only a quarter of the population has access to electricity.
- Several mangrove restoration projects have been initiated over the years, and many abandoned due to waning community interest, natural disasters, or poor planning.
- More recently, rising rates of violence have prevented restoration teams from going to the field and coordinating with one another, but some are hopeful that communities remain receptive to mangrove restoration despite all the other hardships they’re experiencing.

Haiti: An island nation whose environmental troubles only begin with water
- As Haiti plunges into the worst social unrest the nation has seen in years, shortages abound. One of these is water. But in Haiti, water scarcity has deeper roots, that connect to virtually every other aspect of the environment. Haiti’s ecosystems today, say some, are under stress due to regional and global transgressions of the nine planetary boundaries.
- The planetary boundary framework originated in 2009 to define required limits on human activities to prevent collapse of vital Earth operating systems. They include biodiversity loss, freshwater, air pollution, climate change, high phosphorus and nitrogen levels, ocean acidity, land use changes, ozone layer decay, and contamination by human-made chemicals.
- Scientists defining the global freshwater boundary warn that tampering with the water cycle can affect the other boundaries. Haiti, as a small isolated island nation, suggests a laboratory case-study of these many interconnections, and offers a graphic example of the grim results for humanity and wildlife when freshwater systems are deeply compromised.
- Haiti today is plagued by an extreme socioeconomic and environmental crisis. As it fights climate change, freshwater problems, deforestation and pollution, it may also be viewed as a bleak bellwether for other nations as our planetary crisis deepens. But scientists warn that research on applying planetary boundary criteria on a regional level remains limited.

‘Viable, just & necessary’: Agroecology is a movement in Brazil
- Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) has been organizing landless families to occupy, settle, and farm throughout the country since the dictatorship ended in 1985.
- Agroecology–a highly sustainable form of agriculture–has become increasingly central to their platform of land reform, and it is taught in 2,000 schools that have been established in MST encampments nationwide.
- In the four decades since its creation, MST has organized more than 350,000 families to create communities, cooperatives, farms, small-scale food processing enterprises, and farmers markets increasingly based on this sustainable method of food production, which is also good for the climate and biodiversity.
- In an interview with Mongabay, three leaders of MST’s agroecology education program share their philosophy, accomplishments and goals.

For lightning-prone communities in Bangladesh, new warning system may not be enough
- An average of four people a week are killed by lightning in Bangladesh, and the problem is expected to get worse as climate change increases the frequency of lightning strikes.
- Most of the victims tend to be farmers and fishers, who, like members of other poor communities around the world, are bearing the brunt of climate change impacts.
- The Bangladesh Meteorological Department has rolled out an early-warning system, based on modeling developed in collaboration with NASA, that it says will provide up to 54 hours’ warning of potential lightning strikes.
- But experts say the communities most in need of these alerts are those who don’t have access to the technology, and have called for other measures, such as building lightning arresters in open fields and wetlands, to protect vulnerable communities.

Human pressures strain Lake Tanganyika’s biodiversity and water quality
- As fishing pressure has increased on Lake Tanganyika, its level has also been rising, inundating shoreline communities.
- Sedimentation as a result of farming, infrastructure projects and deforestation is causing the water level to rise and the lake to expand.
- This has not led to an increase in fish populations, however, and what little data exist suggest that the lake’s overall biodiversity–probably including hippos and Nile crocodiles–is declining.
- An EU-funded plan to coordinate management of the lake by all countries that share it aims to address some of the knowledge gaps, but is itself hobbled by budget constraints.

The Western Indian Ocean lost 4% of its mangroves in 24 years, report finds
- Analysis presented in a new report finds the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region lost around 4% its mangrove forests between 1996 and 2020.
- The WIO region includes the coastal areas of Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mozambique, which together account for 5% of the world’s mangroves.
- The report finds the majority of WIO mangrove loss was driven by unsustainable wood extraction, land clearance for agriculture and the impacts of storms and flooding.
- Mangroves provide vital ecosystem services to coastal communities and habitats, and sequester large amounts of carbon.

On the frontlines of drought, communities in Mexico strive to save every drop of water
- Sixteen Indigenous Zapotec communities in Mexico have created over 579 water infrastructure projects, including absorption wells, small dams and water pans, to conserve water in the Oaxaca Valley – a region impacted by recurrent droughts.
- Significant success in harvesting water has been realized, however, farmers still struggle to have enough water due to lack of rain – making water conservation efforts largely fall to dust.
- Last year, the Mexican government recognized their efforts and gave communities a concession to manage water resources locally. Communities are still waiting to know when they will officially receive the concession.
- Just a few women hold leadership positions in these communities, including Josefina, Esperanza and María. They have been involved in water conservation projects since a severe drought hit the region 17 years ago and hope to enhance gender equality in the region.

Niger Delta mangroves in ‘grave danger’ from oil spills, poverty, invasive species
- Southern Nigeria’s vast Niger Delta boasts Africa’s most extensive mangrove forests — and some of the world’s largest fossil fuel reserves.
- Efforts to extract oil and gas have resulted in numerous oil spills, which have damaged the region’s biodiversity, as well as the livelihoods of coastal communities.
- Niger Delta mangroves are also affected by logging, farming and urban expansion, and are being replaced by invasive nipa palm.
- Research suggests Niger Delta’s mangroves could be gone within 50 years at the current rate of loss.

How a rare Colombian flower cultivated with Indigenous know-how is changing lives
- The Inírida flower, known as flor de Inírida, grows in a small area along the Colombian-Venezuelan border.
- An Indigenous leader and botanist successfully worked together to domesticate this rare and little-known flower.
- Its conservation helps ensure the long-term protection of other species while offering potential bioremediation against contaminated soil.
- Inírida’s commercialization plays a vital role in the region’s green economy, bringing in revenues for Indigenous families.

As their land and water turns saline, Kenyan communities take on salt firms
- Between 1977 and the 1990s, the Kenyan government allocated thousands of hectares of land to salt mining companies along the country’s north coast.
- People had been living on that land for generations, despite its being officially gazetted as public land by the government.
- Following the allocation of land, local people have complained of harassment and violent evictions by the salt companies, as well as soil and waters rendered too salty to farm, drink, or fish.
- In 2020 groups representing these communities filed a lawsuit against the companies and government that consolidates many complaints and aims to provide recourse for loss of land and livelihoods and damage to the environment. The case is due before a judge in October.

Let it grow: Q&A with reforestation and land restoration visionary Tony Rinaudo
- Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) is a community-led approach to naturally restoring degraded landscapes and ecosystems, and it’s credited with reforesting many millions of hectares of degraded land, globally.
- Though FMNR has literally sprouted in many places over time, Tony Rinaudo is the best known and most vocal proponent of this technique that’s reforested an estimated six million hectares of Niger alone.
- Encouraging cleared forests to resprout makes resilient, climate-positive agroecology practices like agroforestry possible, as crops grown in the cooling shade of trees also benefit from improved soil health and water levels.
- In a wide-ranging interview, Rinaudo shares his hopes, dreams, and insights about FMNR with Mongabay readers.

In Sumatra, rising seas and sinking land spell hard times for fishers
- Fishers operating near the port of Belawan on the Indonesian island of Sumatra are reporting declining catches and a hit to their livelihoods from tidal flooding.
- The flooding has grown more frequent and severe, exacerbated by rising seas and the clearing of mangrove forests for oil palm plantations.
- Traders who buy local catches have also been affected by the flooding, which can cut off commercial transport routes.
- This region of northern Sumatra is one of the areas targeted by the Indonesian government for mangrove restoration, but until that yields results, the fishers say they’re essentially helpless.

Farmer-to-farmer agroecology: Q&A with Chukki Nanjundaswamy of Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre
- The Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre in southern India is one of dozens of education hubs around the world providing a space for farmer-to-farmer training in agroecology.
- In a wide-ranging interview with Mongabay, the center’s Chukki Nanjundaswamy discusses their model of agriculture, its Gandhian roots, and how it grew out of the rejection of Green Revolution farming techniques that rely on chemical inputs and expensive hybrid seeds.
- Nanjundaswamy shares some of their innovative approaches to growing food without inputs, plus clever techniques to thwart notorious pests like fall armyworm, which is also prevalent in Africa.

For women on Bangladesh’s coast, rising seas pose a reproductive health dilemma
- In coastal areas of Bangladesh, where poor families often can’t afford menstrual pads, women and adolescent girls are compelled to use cloth rags that they wash in water that’s becoming increasingly saline.
- This has led to a spate of uterine diseases, prompting many women and girls to misuse birth control pills in an effort to stop their menstrual cycles altogether.
- Health experts say this practice, carried out without medical advice, poses both short- and long-term risks to their reproductive and mental health.
- The root of the problem is the ever-worsening intrusion of saltwater into the water table, driven by a combination of rising sea levels, seepage from shrimp farms, and falling levels of the Ganges River.

Return to agroforestry empowers women in Nepal
- Although farmers traditionally practiced agroforestry in Nepal, they gave it up with the advent of the green revolution.
- A women’s group in Kavre district decided to return to agroforestry four years ago, and they are already seeing the benefits.
- The program is not only helping conserve soil nutrition and promote food security, it is also empowering women.

Does citizen ownership of natural resources hold the key to realizing deforestation commitments? (commentary)
- The approaches to COP26’s global commitment to stop deforestation by 2030 may be inadequate, as they can only partly address the major drivers of deforestation.
- An additional approach based on transparent economic data disclosure and mobilization of public awareness could be a promising addition to that commitment.
- Such approaches that emphasize citizen ownership of natural resources, and which quantify net owner shares, losses, and the very large prospective societal returns, could work, a new op-ed argues.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

In Sierra Leone, local fishers and foreign trawlers battle for their catch
- At wharfs across the Freetown peninsula in Sierra Leone, local fishers say in recent years it’s become harder to get a good catch. They blame foreign trawlers for overexploiting the country’s fish stocks.
- Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources says it has systems meant to curb illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, but enforcement remains a challenge.
- In 2019, China signed a fisheries agreement with Sierra Leone that includes a promise to build a $55 million harbor, but some fishers say boats owned by its citizens are among the worst offenders.

Malawi steps up action against illegal charcoal trade (analysis)
- New forestry laws and improved capacity in Malawi’s courts have improved law enforcement’s ability to fight forestry-related crimes, like illegal charcoal production.
- Under a new amendment to the country’s Forestry Act, which treats charcoal as a forest product, the government now has the authority to issue stronger penalties, fines and jail sentences.
- The USAID and UKAID-funded Modern Cooking for Healthy Forests (MCHF) program supports the government in improving its capacity to investigate and prosecute these activities.
- This post is an analysis of the situation by a MCHF contractor. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Boom and bust on Lake Victoria: Q&A with author Mark Weston
- In a new book, British author Mark Weston examines an environmental crisis on East Africa’s Lake Victoria that’s been a century in the making and stems from the introduction of the non-native Nile perch to the lake in the 1950s.
- Weston lived on Ukerewe, the lake’s largest island, for two years, and relates the knock-on legacy of the fish’s introduction through the experiences of the people he met there.
- The boom and bust of the fishery brought about a surging population, deforestation, declining land fertility, and increased pollution in the lake.
- With Nile perch catches down precipitously and little else to sustain the economy of Ukerewe, residents struggle through poverty, lack of opportunity and a trickling exodus from the once-prosperous community, in search of a better life for themselves and their families.

Reframing trophy hunting’s socio-economic benefits in Namibia (commentary)
- Namibia is often cited as a case study to make arguments for trophy hunting, a morally contentious practice that has been adapted into a conservation strategy there by various stakeholders including community-based conservancies.
- But a 2016 study of the total revenue generated by trophy hunting revealed that 92% went to ‘freehold’ landowners, over 70% of whom are white, while less than 8% went to communal conservancies.
- If we are sincere about aligning environmental and social justice, then centering trophy hunting related debates in Namibia around racial inequalities would be an essential and meaningful step, a new op-ed argues.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Cradle of transformation: The Mediterranean and climate change
- The Mediterranean region is warming 20% faster than the world as a whole, raising concerns about the impacts that climate change and other environmental upheaval will have on ecosystems, agriculture and the region’s 542 million people.
- Heat waves, drought, extreme weather and sea-level rise are among the impacts that the region can expect to see continue through the end of the century, and failing to stop emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could make these issues worse.
- Charting a course that both mitigates climate change and bolsters adaption to its effects is further complicated by the Mediterranean’s mix of countries, cultures and socioeconomics, leading to wide gaps in vulnerability in the region.

Analysis: Myanmar’s gemstone riches bring poverty and environmental destruction
- Myanmar is endowed with rich reserves of jade, rubies and other gemstones, but endemic corruption and poor regulation mean little wealth has flowed to ordinary citizens.
- The jade-mining hotspot of Hpakant, in Kachin state, is emblematic of the problem: There are currently no licensed mines in the area, but jade extraction nonetheless continues at a massive scale.
- The speed and size of these poorly regulated operations results in both massive environmental damage and human casualties, as scavengers flock to unstable dumpsites to hunt for jade left behind by machines.

Donors must rethink Africa’s flagging Green Revolution, new evaluation shows (commentary)
- A scathing new analysis of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) finds that the program is failing at its objective to increase food security on the continent, despite massive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the US, UK, and German governments.
- On March 30, critics of AGRA will brief U.S. congressional aides about why they think it is doing more harm than good.
- As fertilizer and food prices spike with rising energy prices from the Russia-Ukraine war, African farmers and governments need the kind of resilient, low-cost alternatives that techniques like agroecology offer, a new opinion piece argues.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

NGOs alert U.N. to furtive 2-million-hectare carbon deal in Malaysian Borneo
- Civil society organizations have complained to the United Nations about an opaque “natural capital” agreement in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo.
- The agreement, signed behind closed doors in October 2021, involved representatives from the state government and Hoch Standard Pte. Ltd., a Singaporean firm. But it did not involve substantive input from the state’s numerous Indigenous communities, many of whom live in or near forests.
- The terms ostensibly give Hoch Standard the right to monetize carbon and other natural capital from Sabah’s forests for 100 years.
- Along with the recent letter to the U.N., the state’s attorney general has questioned whether the agreement is enforceable without changes to key provisions. An Indigenous leader is also suing the state over the agreement, and Hoch Standard may be investigated by the Singaporean government after rival political party leaders in Sabah reported the company to Singapore’s ambassador in Malaysia.

UK trophy hunting import ban not supported by rural Africans (commentary)
- While a UK bill to ban the import of hunting trophies enjoys popular support there, rural Africans directly affected by such decisions are voicing opposition.
- Researchers tasked by the Namibian government surveyed local people and conservation leaders with insight on the challenges and benefits of elephant conservation.
- Animal rights campaigners “must take responsibility for the damages caused by elephants. They should come and experience what is happening on the ground. It is not easy to live with wild animals and not benefit from them,” one respondent argues.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Malaysian officials dampen prospects for giant, secret carbon deal in Sabah
- The attorney general of the Malaysian state of Sabah has said that a contentious deal for the right to sell credits for carbon and other natural capital will not come into force unless certain provisions are met.
- Mongabay first reported that the 100-year agreement, which involves the protection of some 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) from activities such as logging, was signed in October 2021 between the state and a Singapore-based firm called Hoch Standard.
- Several leaders in the state, including the attorney general, have called for more due diligence on the companies involved in the transaction.
- Civil society representatives say that a technical review of the agreement is necessary to vet claims about its financial value to the state and its feasibility.

Endangered chimps ‘on the brink’ as Nigerian reserve is razed for agriculture, timber
- As rainforest throughout much of the country has disappeared, Nigeria’s Oluwa Forest Reserve has been a sanctuary for many species, including Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees – the rarest chimpanzee subspecies.
- But Oluwa itself has come under increasing deforestation pressure in recent years, losing 14% of its remaining primary forest between 2002 and 2020.
- Oluwa’s deforestation rate appears to be increasing, with several large areas of forest loss occurring in 2021– including in one of the last portions of the reserve known to harbor chimps.
- Agriculture and timber extraction are the main drivers of deforestation in Oluwa; smallholders looking to eke out an existence continue to move into the reserve and illegally clear forest and hunt animals for bushmeat, while plantation companies are staking claims to government-granted concessions.

‘Unprecedented’ fires in Madagascar national park threaten livelihoods and lemurs
- Ankarafantsika National Park protects an oasis of dry forest in northern Madagascar, providing vital habitat to critically endangered lemurs and other wildlife.
- In September and October, fires raged across the southern portion of the park, burning more than 40 square kilometers (15 square miles).
- While fire is a natural part of Ankarafantsika’s ecosystems, researchers say fire on this scale is “unprecedented” and amounting to a “conservation crisis.”
- The fires are also drying out the landscape and reducing neighboring communities’ crop yields, which conservationists warn could have knock-on effects for nearby forests as people turn to natural resources to survive.

Indigenous leader sues over Borneo natural capital deal
- An Indigenous leader in Sabah is suing the Malaysian state on the island of Borneo over an agreement signing away the rights to monetize the natural capital coming from the state’s forests to a foreign company.
- Civil society and Indigenous organizations say local communities were not consulted or asked to provide input prior to the agreement’s signing on Oct. 28.
- Further questions have arisen about whether the company, Hoch Standard, that secured the rights under the agreement has the required experience or expertise necessary to implement the terms of the agreement.

Bornean communities locked into 2-million-hectare carbon deal they don’t know about
- Leaders in Sabah, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, signed a nature conservation agreement on Oct. 28 with a group of foreign companies — apparently without the meaningful participation of Indigenous communities.
- The agreement, with the consultancy Tierra Australia and a private equity-backed funder from Singapore, calls for the marketing of carbon and other ecosystem services to companies looking, for example, to buy credits to offset their emissions.
- The deal involves more than 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of forest, which would be restored and protected from mining, logging and industrial agriculture for the next 100-200 years.
- But land rights experts have raised concerns about the lack of consultation with communities living in and around these forests in the negotiations to this point.

Deforestation soars in Nigeria’s gorilla habitat: ‘We are running out of time’
- Afi River Forest Reserve (ARFR), in eastern Nigeria’s Cross River state, is an important habitat corridor that connects imperiled populations of critically endangered Cross River gorillas.
- But deforestation has been rising both in ARFR and elsewhere in Cross River; satellite data show 2020 was the biggest year for forest loss both in the state and in the reserve since around the turn of the century – and preliminary data for 2021 suggest this year is on track to exceed even 2020.
- Poverty-fueled illegal logging and farming is behind much of the deforestation in ARFR. Resource wars have broken out between communities that have claimed the lives of more than 100, local sources say.
- Authorities say a lack of financial support and threats of violence are limiting their ability to adequately protect what forest remains.

Plantation giant Socfin accused of dodging taxes in Africa
- A new report by Bread for all, Alliance Sud, and the German Network for Tax Justice has accused Belgian-French multinational Socfin, which operates rubber and palm oil plantations across West Africa, of shifting profits from Africa to Switzerland.
- According to Socfin’s corporate filings, of 600 million euros in revenues booked in 2020, 100 million euros were said to have been generated in Europe, despite the fact that it does not produce commodities there.
- The use of “transfer pricing” to avoid taxation is common among multinationals operating in Africa, depriving low-income governments of badly needed revenue.

Conservation after coronavirus: We need to diversify and innovate (commentary)
- Protected areas, the ecotourism industry, and many conservation initiatives and communities, which depend on international tourism, took a financial hit as COVID-19 lockdowns started. As poverty swelled in these regions, there’s been an increase in poaching in Africa’s protected areas, including Zambia’s Kafue National Park.
- Long before the emergence of COVID-19, the conservation community has suffered from a chronic dearth of resources; with the pandemic, protected areas and related communities experienced a sharp retraction in investment.
- With examples from across the world, philanthropist Jon Ayers and Panthera CEO Frederic Launay call for diversified and innovative steps to increase funding and support for conservation communities.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Study shows how sustainable livelihood programs for Indonesian fishers can succeed
- Projects offering alternative livelihoods to fishers in Indonesia tend to succeed when they work closely with local NGOs and link participants to markets where they can sell what they produce.
- That’s the finding of a new study that looks at what makes successful sustainable livelihoods interventions tick, including partnership with local people to develop their skills and leverage traditional resource-management knowledge.
- Projects that failed tended not to understand the social context in which they were situated, including gender dynamics, resource and land-tenure systems, and the desires of local fishers.
- The study authors say the findings highlight best practices for alternative-livelihoods projects and are important given that communities with negative past experiences of such projects are less likely to engage with them again in the future.

China joins the foreign fleets quietly exploiting Madagascar’s waters
- For decades, fleets of industrial vessels from several nations have fished in Madagascar’s waters.
- Now China appears to have joined the fishing spree, sending at least 14 industrial longliner fishing vessels in the last several years, new evidence shows.
- Clues from official documents indicate that Madagascar’s government may have authorized these vessels to fish, at least since 2019.
- If so, the authorization process was not public, raising renewed concerns about the lack of transparency in Madagascar’s offshore fishing sector.

A world of hurt: 2021 climate disasters raise alarm over food security
- Human-driven climate change is fueling weather extremes — from record drought to massive floods — that are hammering key agricultural regions around the world.
- From the grain heartland of Argentina to the tomato belt of California to the pork hub of China, extreme weather events have driven down output and driven up global commodity prices.
- Shortages of water and food have, in turn, prompted political and social strife in 2021, including food protests in Iran and hunger in Madagascar, and threaten to bring escalating misery, civil unrest and war in coming years.
- Experts warn the problem will only intensify, even in regions currently unaffected by, or thriving from the high prices caused by scarcity. Global transformational change is urgently needed in agricultural production and consumption patterns, say experts.

Study puts 2050 deadline on tipping point for Mekong Delta salinity
- The increasing salinity in Mekong Delta is currently being driven by the building of dams upstream and sand mining downstream, but climate change will likely be the predominant factor by 2050, a new study shows.
- The Mekong Delta is a key farming region, and already more frequent and extensive saltwater intrusion is killing off large swaths of crops with greater frequency.
- The study’s authors say regional stakeholders need to address the anthropogenic drivers of saltwater intrusion in the delta now, before climate change makes it a global problem.
- The study also has implications for other delta systems across Asia, which face similar pressures, both anthropogenic and climate change-driven.

Turning Kenya’s problematic invasive plants into useful bioenergy
- The shores of Lake Victoria are clogged with water hyacinth, a South American invasive plant that is hurting Kenya’s freshwater fishery, economy and people’s health. While manual removal is effective, it is labor intensive and can’t keep up with the spreading plant.
- Kenyans are innovating to find ways to reduce water hyacinth by finding practical uses for the invader. In 2018, a program was launched to turn the exotic species into biogas which is then offered to economically vulnerable households to use as a biofuel for cooking.
- One proposal being considered: a scaled up industrial biogas plant that would use water hyacinth as a primary source of raw material. Efforts are also underway to convert another invasive plant, prickly pear into biogas used for cooking. A biocontrol insect is also proving effective, though slow, in dealing with prickly pear.
- These economically viable and sustainable homegrown solutions are chipping away at Kenya’s invasive species problem, though to be truly effective, these various projects would need to be upscaled.

Cleaning up Cambodia’s kitchens could curb deforestation, climate change
- NGOs and companies across Cambodia are taking action in response to the mass use of charcoal and forest biomass in household and restaurant kitchens countrywide. The shift away from these polluting fuel sources to cleaner energy alternatives is being sparked by health and environmental concerns.
- Education is a key strategy for implementing the shift away from charcoal and wood, as their use is ingrained in the culture, with many Cambodians saying food doesn’t taste as good when cooked with other fuels.
- One innovative solution is turning the country’s coconut husks into “green charcoal,” which is already earning the nation recognition for being a global leader within the sustainable charcoal sector.
- Cambodia’s farmers are also moving away from using forest biomass for energy, and are instead utilizing biodigesters to turn household and farm waste into biogas for cooking and to make organic fertilizer.

Deforestation spikes in Virunga National Park, DRC
- Satellite data has detected several dramatic spikes in deforestation activity in Virunga National Park in 2021.
- Virunga National Park is situated in the northeastern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), right over its border with Uganda.
- Virunga is home to many endangered species and subspecies, including mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei).
- The park’s major threats include logging for charcoal production and clearing for agriculture, both of which are driven by poverty.

Rush to turn ‘black diamonds’ into cash eats up Uganda’s forests, fruits
- As recently as 2018, only a little over 42% of Ugandans had access to electricity — many were too poor to afford it. As of 2016-17, 90% of all households burned wood fuel for cooking, with just 15.5% using charcoal in rural areas, but 66.4% of urban households using it.
- Those using charcoal account for roughly 23% of the country’s total population, which means that some 10.7 million citizens in a nation of 46.8 million rely on charcoal to cook their meals, based on recent U.N. data.
- Charcoal producers are working hard to meet this exploding demand, degrading and depleting the nation’s forest reserves, and now buying up fruit trees on private lands to make into briquettes. Many charcoal producers lack the licenses required by the government, so are cutting trees and making charcoal illegally.
- The surging charcoal industry is destroying Uganda’s forests and biodiversity, while briquette burning is also causing respiratory and other health problems, and its carbon emissions are adding significantly to global climate change.

Scientists call for solving climate and biodiversity crises together
- A new report from United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) highlights the importance of confronting climate change and biodiversity loss together.
- Global climate change and the unprecedented loss of species currently underway result from a similar suite of human-driven causes, the report’s authors write.
- As a result, solutions that take both issues into account have the best chance of success, they conclude.

A tale of two seas: Closed season is a mixed bag for Philippine sardines industry
- Since 2011, the Philippine government has imposed a closed fishing season on various major fishing grounds during the sardine spawning season.
- Implemented during the tail end of the year until March the following year, the closed fishing season has been both a boon and bane for communities.
- In the sardine capital of the Zamboanga Peninsula in the country’s south, the ban has boosted catch sizes for artisanal fishers, while in the Visayan Sea in the central Philippines, catches have dwindled.
- Experts point to different implementations of the fishing ban in the two regions and highlight the need to assess the economic implications of the measures, particularly to marginalized fishers.

Teachers create lasting change for people and primates via clean cookstoves (commentary)
- Kibale National Park has the highest diversity of primates in the world and 300+ species of birds, but wildlife are threatened by habitat degradation from activities like firewood collection.
- Fuel-efficient cookstoves can be used to reduce wood consumption, improve cook times, and mitigate smoke inhalation associated with cooking on open fires.
- Many such projects fail over time, but a new project involves the multiplicative effect of involving teachers in educating the community about their usefulness, since a single teacher can influence many students.
- This article is a commentary and the views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Pet trade relies on ‘disposable’ wild chameleons from Madagascar
- Despite being difficult to keep alive and healthy, chameleons are among the most popular reptiles in the exotic pet trade.
- Each year hundreds of thousands of these slow-moving reptiles are taken from the wild, both legally and illegally, many of them from threatened species living in the forests of Madagascar.
- Observers say the international trade in chameleons must be changed to avoid harming wild populations and improve the well-being of animals during transit and captivity.
- They also point to the need to make the trade fairer and more transparent, so local people can benefit from it.

Nature-based solutions needed to enhance climate resilience in Southeast Asia (commentary)
- Developing nature-based solutions (NBS) is necessary to address the climate emergency and enhance resilience of biodiversity, ecosystems, and communities.
- This has been recognized globally, with NBS being one of the five primary themes of focus on the road to the 2021 UN climate conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland.
- Southeast Asia is one of the most vulnerable regions to the impacts of climate change, and would enjoy an outsized benefit from robust investments in nature-based solutions.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Brazilians impacted by mining assert: ‘Genocide legalized by the state’
- Residents of traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon municipality of Barcarena, near the mouth of the Amazon River, say that their subsistence and commercial livelihoods, and their health, have been destroyed by an invasion of mining companies which began in the mid-1980’s.
- Among the gigantic companies moving into the region were Brazil’s Vale, Norwegian-Japanese Albrás, Norway’s Norsk Hydro, and France’s Imerys Rio Capim Caulim. Community complaints say that the firms allegedly stole community land and polluted land, water and air.
- Meanwhile, according to residents, the government rewarded the companies with subsidies, looked the other way when community lands were appropriated and pollution occurred, and paid for mining firm infrastructure, including the Tucurui mega-dam; port of Vila do Conde, and a network of new roads.
- Also, a string of mining disasters punctuated the years, with the worst by Norsk Hydro in 2018 at the Hydro Alunorte facility. Though local waters, blood and hair have proven to be contaminated with mining-related toxins, the companies defend themselves by saying no particular firm can be pinpointed with the harm.

Bug bites: Edible insect production ramps up quickly in Madagascar
- In the last two years, two insect farming projects have taken off in Madagascar as a way to provide precious protein while alleviating pressure on lemurs and other wild animals hunted for bushmeat.
- One program, which promotes itself with a deck of playing cards, encourages rainforest residents in the northeast to farm a bacon-flavored native planthopper called sakondry.
- Another program focuses on indoor production of crickets in the capital city, Antananarivo.
- Both projects are on the cusp of expanding to other parts of the country.

Sumatra’s deforestation demystified
- Sumatra contains some of the largest tracts of intact rainforest left in the world, which are relied upon by Indigenous and local peoples plus a massive diversity of wildlife found nowhere else.
- These vast forests are under threat from the rapid expansion of industrial-scale agribusinesses that market both palm oil and pulp and paper products to the global market.
- To understand the causes of the threat better, this episode of the podcast interviews Nur Hidayati, director of top Indonesian environmental group Walhi, and Mongabay editor Philip Jacobson.
- They share that while there are some signs of progress, corruption and a lack of corporate transparency must be dealt with, and alternatives to the production of commodities like palm oil should be pursued.

Protecting African wildlife: A defense of conservation territories (commentary)
- W National Park, so named for its shape, spans Benin, Niger, and Burkina Faso, and has been called a ‘paper park.’
- Along with the adjacent Pendjari National Park, it represents one of the last best refuges for wildlife in western Africa.
- African Parks Network recently announced it would formally take over the management of the Benin side of W. To succeed, it must learn from the past and consider deploying fences and fines.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

New road cutting into Manu Biosphere Reserve in Peruvian Amazon sparks debate, fears and a film
- A new documentary film about a road project in the Manu Biosphere Reserve in Peru’s southeastern Amazon chronicles an Indigenous community’s debate about its future.
- With the road will likely come new opportunities and problems: the area is already beset by illegal logging and narco-trafficking.
- Some in the community fear the problems will worsen and their culture will erode further, others say it’s the only way for the community to survive.
- The Peruvian government has prioritized road building in this area, and just announced that this road will be connected to the Interoceanic Highway, which will perhaps magnify the problems inside Manu.

Madagascar minister calls protected areas a ‘failure,’ seeks people-centric approach
- Madagascar’s environment minister has criticized the way protected areas are managed in the country, setting the stage for a potential overhaul of the system to make conservation more people-centric.
- The stand has flustered some in the conservation community in Madagascar because it could mean reorienting their efforts in one of the planet’s most biodiverse countries, which is also extremely poor with high rates of environmental destruction.
- At a two-day meeting in late June, protected area managers, including a quasi-governmental agency and several international and local NGOs, shared details of their work, financial position, and challenges, with ministry officials.
- The ministry is expected to collate and analyze this information as a first step toward a broader evaluation and potential overhaul of the protected area system that could happen this year.

Though forests burn, trees retake farmland globally as agroforestry advances
- Agroforestry is an ancient agricultural technique being rediscovered all over the world as limitations of the globe’s highly industrialized agriculture become obvious.
- On the old and exhausted soils of Africa, trees’ power to nourish life is potentially integral to a reboot of the continent’s agriculture.
- Agroforestry is the intentional combination of woody perennials like trees and shrubs with crops and also livestock to create a resilient “food ecosystem” that benefits farmers, biodiversity and the climate.
- In an analysis for Mongabay, agroforestry expert Patrick Worms suggests that while news reports show forests burning in many places, one can take heart from the fact that trees are busily taking root upon the world’s vast swaths of farmland.

Life among the turtles: Traditional people struggle inside an Amazon reserve
- The Brazilian Amazon’s Trombetas River is well known for its exceptional biodiversity, including nesting turtles. In 1979, to protect flora and fauna there, the REBIO Trombetas was founded; it’s a highly restrictive form of conservation unit where today only very limited economic activity is permitted.
- The two traditional communities inside the reserve — the Último Quilombo and Nova Esperança Quilombo (Afro-Brazilian communities of runaway slave descendants) — complain that the government has unfairly penalized them for conducting forest and river livelihoods including Brazil nut collecting and fishing.
- Local residents also contend that while they’re fined for such minor infractions, MRN, the world’s fourth largest bauxite mining company, located near the REBIO, has done extensive ecological damage due to ore ship traffic and water pollution, which severely impacts turtle populations.
- In fact, MRN’s mines, ore processing and bauxite waste lagoons are located inside the Saracá-Taquera National Forest, a protected area known as a FLONA, on the Trombetas River. MRN has been fined often for its environmental violations there, fines it has appealed and not yet paid; the firm says it’s operating within the law.

Helping the poor can protect forests too, Indonesian welfare program shows
- A study has found that a poverty-alleviation program in Indonesia was just as successful as dedicated conservation programs in reducing deforestation.
- The researchers attribute this to the program serving as a sort of insurance against harvest failures, by guaranteeing rural communities cash transfers and making it less likely they will cut down forests as a source of income.
- The study calculates that the economic benefit from the avoided carbon emissions alone could be (at maximum) 10 times greater than the cost of administering the program.
- The researchers have called for similar studies to be done in other tropical rainforest countries, and insist that poverty alleviation and forest conservation aren’t mutually exclusive goals.

World Bank-backed attempt to commercialize Madagascar’s beef industry falters
- In 2018, the IFC, the arm of the World Bank that invests in the private sector, approved a $7 million investment in a company that wanted to buy zebu cattle from farmers in Madagascar and export the beef mainly to rich Middle Eastern countries.
- The BoViMA project hit a major roadblock when Malagasy President Andry Rajoelina banned the export of zebus last year, and has failed to recover.
- Despite being aimed at reducing poverty, the project has invited scrutiny for its potential impacts on food security, especially the sourcing of human-edible crops for cattle feed in one of the poorest and most water-scarce regions in the world.
- When fully operational, the slaughterhouse and feedlot would require 120,000 tons of feed and 150 million liters of water a year.

Risking death and arrest, Madagascar fishers chase dwindling sea cucumbers
- For centuries, Chinese people have sought sea cucumbers as an ingredient in traditional medicine or as a high-status food.
- In recent decades, skyrocketing demand and prices have led to a marine gold rush for sea cucumbers around the world.
- In Madagascar, as elsewhere, wild sea cucumbers are declining.
- Fishers are venturing further out to sea and into deeper waters to pursue them illegally using unsafe SCUBA gear.

Brazil’s indigenous hit especially hard by COVID-19: why so vulnerable?
- At least 78 indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon are infected by COVID-19, with 3,662 individuals testing positive and 249 dead among 45 of those peoples. Detailed data is lacking for the other 33 peoples. Experts say poverty, poor resistance to Western diseases, and lack of medical facilities may explain high vulnerability.
- The Coordination of Indigenous Organizations in the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), which gathered and tallied this data, expects cases and deaths are underreported. Many leaders and elders continue dying among indigenous people, including elders of the Munduruku, Kayapó, Arara, Macuxi, and Tuyuka peoples.
- COVID-19 has now penetrated the Xingu river basin, a vast area south of the Amazon River in Pará and Mato Grosso states. The Arara people there were devastated by disease and violence in the 1980s. Now, of 121 remaining Arara, almost half have tested positive for the coronavirus.
- Of the 1,818 Xicrin in southwest Pará state, 270 (15%) have tested positive, with seven deaths. Analysts speculate this high infection and death rate (higher than Brazil’s general populace, and even many other indigenous groups), may be due to poor underlying health due to water allegedly polluted by a Vale nickel mine.

One-two punch of drought, pandemic hits Madagascar’s poor and its wildlife
- Because of the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, for the first time in years poverty is rising in Madagascar, already one of the poorest countries in the world.
- Near Tsimanampesotse National Park in the southwest of the country, the loss of tourists has coincided with a disastrously dry rainy season, and restrictions associated with the pandemic are adding to rural distress; an estimated half a million people will need food aid in the coming months.
- Erratic rainfall patterns and food scarcity don’t just affect humans but also the lemurs living in the park, according to Lemur Love, a nonprofit that works in Tsimanampesotse National Park.
- The hunger crisis created by the drought and compounded by the pandemic could force people to lean even more heavily on nature; to impinge on forests and consume more wild meat to survive.

MRN bauxite mine leaves legacy of pollution, poverty in Brazilian Amazon
- Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) arrived in the Trombetas River basin in the 1970s with plans to mine bauxite on a gigantic scale. Today, MRN is the fourth largest producer of bauxite in the world, providing the valuable aluminum ore to nations and manufacturers around the planet.
- On arriving in the Amazon, MRN immediately annexed lands from the traditional riverine community of Boa Vista, reportedly displacing 90 families to build its port company town. Boa Vista is a quilombo, a community of Afro-Brazilians (known as quilombolas), the descendants of runaway slaves.
- While MRN says it provided jobs, education and health services, quilombo residents report a decade of horrendous water pollution from mine waste — never cleaned up — the loss of fisheries and hunting grounds, rampant poverty, a lack of electricity, health services, and proper sanitation.
- The harm done by industrial mining to Boa Vista, and lessons learned, and not learned, over the last 40+ years, are especially relevant today, as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro aggressively pushes forward his agenda to open indigenous reserves and other Amazon conserved lands to industrial mining.

How coffee growers can adapt to a precipitous industry: Q&A with Dean’s Beans founder Dean Cycon
- Climate change is making traditional coffee-growing areas in the tropics less suitable for the crop, forcing farmers to look for new land at higher elevations and higher latitudes.
- Scientists are trying to tackle the problem by developing climate-resistant coffee plants, but solutions already exist from arid regions in Africa that can be adapted by farmers in Latin America.
- “This is something the scientific community is completely ignoring,” says Dean Cycon, founder of Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee and a longtime advocate of social justice for the millions of coffee farmers in the global south.
- In an interview with Mongabay, Cycon offers his unique insights into one of the world’s favorite beverages, the challenges of climate change, the plight of tropical farmers, and the solutions he sees as still within reach.

Market-based solutions cannot solely fund community-level conservation (commentary)
- In the last two decades, conservation and the market economy merged into what is called “neoliberal conservation,” where economic growth and the protection of nature are thought to be essentially compatible.
- However, conservation in places like North Sumatra will be last on the agenda when markets tumble and the economic system that people are now addicted to – in even the most remote places – collapses.
- Schemes like ecotourism and payment for ecosystem services should be paired with programs like sustainable local agriculture to prevent the re-emergence of poaching and illegal logging, and to ensure that conservation-oriented behaviors persist when markets fail.
- This article is a commentary and does not necessarily reflect the views of Mongabay.

Feed your neighbor, solve big problems (commentary)
- Rich countries must quickly invest in tropical forest nations if they expect them to keep their forests standing in the name of fighting climate change, argues Darrel Webber, managing director of global forest strategies for the nonprofit Earth Innovation Institute.
- Market actors too have a role to play.
- Attempts to “flatten the curve” during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak may hold lessons in this regard.
- This post is a commentary and does not necessarily reflect the views of Mongabay.

Silvopasturing improves ranches and the environment in Panama
- Ranching in Panama dates back to the 1500s, when Spanish settlers decided that cattle were the agricultural commodity that grew best in the tropical climate.
- This tradition has severely deforested the tropical nation and depleted its soil resources too, twin problems that are worsening in tandem with the effects of climate change.
- However, the agroforestry technique of silvopasture ranching, where trees and woody shrubs are planted into livestock pastures, is gaining ground here.
- Not only is it much more profitable than conventional ranching, but the system also provides habitat for monkeys, insects, birds and more while sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.

Positive ways forward for chocolate industry tainted by deforestation and child labor (commentary)
- The world’s major chocolate companies have for years vowed to rid their supply chains of child labor and deforestation without much success.
- Marianne Martinet at the Earthworm Foundation argues that there are solutions to the issue.
- One way forward that also strengthens cocoa farmers’ resilience is agroforestry, the planting of useful trees and shrubs on, around, and among cocoa trees.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily Mongabay.

A new dawn: The story of deforestation in the next decade must be different to the last (commentary)
- 2020 was to be the year when the bold commitment made by hundreds of companies to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains was met. Instead, the failure to achieve this goal can be measured by the sharp rise in deforestation since 2014.
- Yet despite this bleak picture – and the need to act being more urgent than ever – there’s another story to tell about the last decade.
- It’s the story of how the pledge to eliminate deforestation from supply chains by 2020 was doomed to fail. It’s also – perhaps surprisingly – about the immense journey some companies, NGOs, and institutions have made in that time and how the path to remove the stain of deforestation from the products we consume is now clearer than ever.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Madagascar: Is NGO-led conservation too conservative to conserve much?
- International environmental NGOs working in Madagascar assume a relatively narrow role of supporting local conservation and development in line with government strategy.
- The nature of the NGOs’ legal relationship with the Malagasy government, which has close ties to the extractive industries, and the restrictions that come with international funding make it difficult for them to take a broader role or push for systemic environmental reforms.
- The result, some critics say, is that international NGOs fail to address the country’s most serious conservation challenges.
- Homegrown civil society groups have more room to operate in Madagascar and do some of the most important conservation work.

Madagascar: Opaque foreign fisheries deals leave empty nets at home
- Malagasy fishers blame shrimp trawlers that ply coastal waters for their declining catches.
- However, the bulk of industrial fishing in Madagascar’s waters takes place far from shore and out of view. It’s conducted by foreign fishing fleets working under agreements that critics say lack transparency.
- Conservationists argue that these foreign vessels are also depleting the country’s fish stocks and marine ecosystems.
- With negotiations to renew a fisheries deal with the European Union having flopped late last month and uncertainty lingering over an enormous and controversial fisheries deal with a Chinese company, much is at stake for Madagascar’s small-scale fishers.

Demand for charcoal threatens the forest of Madagascar’s last hunter-gatherers
- The Mikea, who number around 1,000 people, are facing what many of them say is an existential environmental problem.
- Their ancestral forest in southwestern Madagascar is partly protected inside a national park.
- However, it is rapidly being chopped down to supply a growing demand for charcoal, the country’s primary source of cooking fuel.
- Some Mikea, having lived their entire lives hunting and gathering, are facing a shortage of game and other food and are now considering whether they must abandon the forest, and their way of life, for good.

Manila’s informal settlers face relocation in exchange for clean bay
- The Philippine government has begun the process of relocating more than 200,000 families living along waterways to restore Manila Bay, the main body of water in the capital.
- Some residents worry about their impending displacement, citing a lack of jobs in resettlement sites.
- Relocating informal settlers is part of a seven-year program to rehabilitate Manila Bay, one of the most polluted bodies of the water in Metro Manila.
- Increased rainfall due to extreme weather events poses threats to informal settlers in the area as it could cause landslides and flooding.

Notes from the road: 5 revelations from traveling the Pan Borneo Highway
- Construction of the Pan Borneo Highway will add or expand more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) of roadway in Malaysian Borneo.
- Mongabay staff writer John Cannon spent several weeks traveling the proposed route in July 2019 to understand the effects, both positive and negative, the road could have on communities, wildlife and ecosystems.
- The project is designed to energize the economies of the region, and though officials have responded to entreaties from NGOs to minimize the harmful impacts of the road, they remain singularly focused on the economic benefits that proponents say the highway will bring.

Pan Borneo Highway development endangers the Heart of Borneo
- The construction of the Pan Borneo Highway in the Malaysian state of Sabah could disrupt the connections between wildlife populations and appears to run counter to the state’s conservation commitments, according to a new study.
- Passages under the highway and the rehabilitation of key forest corridors could lessen the impacts of the road, but the authors of the study caution that these interventions are expensive and may not be effective.
- They argue that planners should consider canceling certain sections of the road with the greatest potential for damaging the surrounding forest.

REDD+ more competitive than critics believe, study finds
- Critics have argued that the strategy known as REDD+, or reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, hasn’t adequately slowed emissions from forest loss in developing countries in the way it was intended.
- Introduced in 2007, REDD+ is meant to help individual countries earn money for development when they lower the amount of released carbon from clearing and degrading forests.
- In a recent paper focused on the South American country of Guyana, a team of researchers argues that the problems with REDD+ stem from its implementation at the project level.
- REDD+ implementation across the jurisdiction of an entire country would address nearly all of the problems with individual REDD+ projects, and societies would benefit more financially than they currently do from commercial forest uses such as gold mining and logging, the researchers say.

The end of the road: The future of the Pan Borneo Highway
- The construction of more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) of road for the Pan Borneo Highway across Malaysian Borneo holds the promise of spurring local economies for its proponents.
- But from the outset, conservationists and scientists voiced concerns that the road would displace people, harm sensitive environments, and threaten Borneo’s splendid diversity of wildlife.
- As construction moves forward, these groups are working with planners to find a way for the highway’s construction to avoid the worst environmental damage.

The Pan Borneo Highway on a collision course with elephants
- Out of the controversy surrounding the Pan Borneo Highway and its potential impacts on the environment has arisen a movement to bring conservationists, scientists and planners together to develop a plan “to maximize benefits and reduce risks” to the environment from the road’s construction.
- The chief minister of the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo has called for the highway to avoid cutting through forests.
- But a planned stretch would slice through a protected forest reserve with a dense concentration of elephants.
- A coalition of scientific and civil society organizations has offered an alternative route that its members say would still provide the desired connection while lowering the risk of potentially deadly human-wildlife conflict.

Aimed at linking communities, Malaysian highway may damage forests
- Leaders hope that the construction of a road linking the Pan Borneo Highway between the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak will connect remote communities to markets and to each other.
- But conservationists warn that the highway will cut through some of the last remaining dense forest in Sarawak.
- In addition to the challenges of building in a rainy tropical environment, the mountainous terrain will make construction and maintenance difficult, skeptics of the road say.

Connecting an island: Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway
- The Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah are in the midst of building more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) of the Pan Borneo Highway.
- The goal is to boost the states’ economies and connect them with the Indonesian provinces on the island of Borneo as part of the Trans Borneo Highway.
- Advocates of the highway, including many politicians, say the upgraded, widened and in some places entirely new stretches of highway will link markets and provide a jolt to the promising tourism sector in Malaysian Borneo.
- But skeptics, including scientists and conservationists, argue that parts of the highway cut through ecologically sensitive areas and that planning prior to construction didn’t adequately account for the damage that construction could cause.

Madagascar: What’s good for the forest is good for the native silk industry
- People in the highlands of central Madagascar have long buried their loved ones in shrouds of thick wild silk, typically from the endemic silkworm known as landibe (Borocera cajani).
- With support from NGOs, traditional silk workers have widened their offerings to include scarves made of wild silk for sale to tourists and the country’s elites.
- In recent years, the price of raw materials has shot up as the forests the landibe grows in succumb to fire and other threats, making it difficult for silk workers to continue their craft.
- However, where there are forest-management challenges, there is also opportunity: the silk business provides an incentive for local people to protect their trees. Some well-organized and well-supported community groups are cashing in on conservation, in spite of the broader silkworm recession.

Eat the insects, spare the lemurs
- To solve the twin challenges of malnutrition and biodiversity loss in Madagascar, new efforts are promoting edible insects as a way to take pressure off wildlife that people hunt for meat when food is scarce.
- Insects are widely eaten in Madagascar. They are also incredibly nutritious and one of the “greenest” forms of animal proteins in terms of their land, water and food requirements and their greenhouse gas emissions.
- One program is testing the farming of sakondry, a little-known hopping insect that tastes a lot like bacon. Another is setting up a network of cricket farms.
- Other attempts to reduce reliance on forest protein include improving chicken husbandry in rural areas.

In India’s Sundarbans, communities shrink as their island sinks
- In India and Bangladesh, millions of people live in the Sundarbans islands and face losing their homes to rising seas caused by climate change.
- The region was the first in the world to record an unfolding climate refugee crisis as people fled an island lost to the sea. More islands remain at risk of succumbing to the rising waters.
- The government has long relied on building embankments to keep the seawater out, but in a report it co-wrote in 2014 it acknowledges that this measure is no longer sufficient.
- One expert calls for restoring the Sundarbans’ original mangrove habitats to both mitigate the impacts of rising seas and storm surges, and to serve as a carbon sink in the fight against greenhouse gas emissions.

As climate chaos escalates in Indian Country, feds abandon tribes
- South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Oglalla Sioux Indian Reservation is one of the most impoverished places in the U.S. But in 2018 and 2019, the reservation was struck by two horrific storms — with economic harm to their homes and livelihoods that the community’s low income residents have found it extraordinarily difficult to absorb.
- High Plains weather has been getting more variable, erratic and destructive: in 2011 came severe drought and wildfires, followed in 2012 by severe flooding. Sometimes these oscillations take the form of high-powered storms, with a rash of tornadoes in 2016, a destructive ice storm in 2018, and a bomb cyclone in 2019.
- According to the National Climate Assessment issued at the end of 2018, “Climate change is expected to exacerbate these [extreme weather] challenges.” But starting with Bill Clinton and continuing under Donald Trump, the federal government has severely slashed federal aid to Indian reservations and their low income residents.
- As a result, Pine Ridge is increasingly forced to rely on its own resources and on creative solutions, including crowdfunded local and national volunteer teams who have risen to the challenge and helped the communities repair storm damage. But as extreme weather intensifies on the High Plains, surviving there will get tougher.

Dam in Ethiopia has wiped out indigenous livelihoods, report finds
- A dam in southern Ethiopia built to supply electricity to cities and control the flow of water for irrigating industrial agriculture has led to the displacement and loss of livelihoods of indigenous groups, the Oakland Institute has found.
- On June 10, the policy think tank published a report of its research, demonstrating that the effects of the Gibe III dam on the Lower Omo River continue to ripple through communities, forcing them onto sedentary farms and leading to hunger, conflict and human rights abuses.
- The Oakland Institute applauds the stated desire of the new government, which came to power in April 2018, to look out for indigenous rights.
- But the report’s authors caution that continued development aimed at increasing economic productivity and attracting international investors could further marginalize indigenous communities in Ethiopia.

Altered forests threaten sustainability of subsistence hunting
- In a commentary, two conservation scientists say that changes to the forests of Central and South America may mean that subsistence hunting there is no longer sustainable.
- Habitat loss and commercial hunting have put increasing pressure on species, leading to the loss of both biodiversity and a critical source of protein for these communities.
- The authors suggest that allowing the hunting of only certain species, strengthening parks and reserves, and helping communities find alternative livelihoods and sources of food could help address the problem, though they acknowledge the difficult nature of these solutions.

Global warming is exacerbating global economic inequality: Study
- New research finds that global warming has exacerbated global economic inequality, making already-wealthy nations even richer while slowing economic growth in poorer countries.
- According to the study, published in PNAS late last month, between 1961 and 2010 rising temperatures led to a 17 to 30 percent decrease in per-capita wealth in the world’s poorest countries. Meanwhile, the wealthy countries that are the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters have seen their per-capita GDP grow about 10 percent higher today than they would have in a world without warming.
- Poor countries that, by and large, have not enjoyed the benefits of fossil fuel energy have been made relatively poorer by the energy consumption of wealthy countries — but renewable energy sources might offer a partial solution to both the climate crisis and global inequality.

’Unprecedented’ loss of biodiversity threatens humanity, report finds
- The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services released a summary of far-reaching research on the threats to biodiversity on May 6.
- The findings are dire, indicating that around 1 million species of plants and animals face extinction.
- The full 1,500-page report, to be released later this year, raises concerns about the impacts of collapsing biodiversity on human well-being.

Community buy-in stamps out elephant poaching in Zambian park
- No elephants were poached in Zambia’s North Luangwa National Park in 2018, and the surrounding area had a 50 percent decrease in poached carcasses found.
- The North Luangwa Conservation Programme, a partnership between the Frankfurt Zoological Society and the country’s Department of Parks and Wildlife, has been around since the late 1980s and has focused its efforts on community involvement in stopping poachers from going after elephants, rhinos and other wildlife in the park.
- Staff of the program say the participation of the communities living near the park’s borders is critical to protecting the elephants of North Luangwa.
- The broader Luangwa ecosystem is home to more than 63 percent of Zambia’s elephants.

Deforestation diminishes access to clean water, study finds
- A recent study compared deforestation data and information on household access to clean water in Malawi.
- The scientists found that the country lost 14 percent of its forest between 2000 and 2010, which had the same effect on access to safe drinking water as a 9 percent decrease in rainfall.
- With higher rainfall variability expected in today’s changing climate, the authors suggest that a larger area of forest in countries like Malawi could be a buffer against the impacts of climate change.

Malaysian state chief: Highway construction must not destroy forest
- The chief minister of Sabah, one of two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo, said that the Pan Borneo Highway project should expand existing roads where possible to minimize environmental impact.
- A coalition of local NGOs and scientific organizations applauded the announcement, saying that it could usher in a new era of collaboration between the government and civil society to look out for Sabah’s people and forests.
- These groups have raised concerns about the impacts on wildlife and communities of the proposed path of the highway, which will cover some 5,300 kilometers (3,300 miles) in the states of Sabah and Sarawak.

Proximity to towns stretches giraffe home ranges
- A recent study found that female giraffes that live close to towns have larger home ranges than those living further afield.
- The study’s authors believe that large human settlements reduce giraffes’ access to food and water.
- The team cites the importance of understanding the size of the area that giraffe populations need to survive to address the precipitous decline in the animal’s numbers across Africa in the past 30 years.

Illegal corn farming menaces a Madagascar protected area
- Deforestation within Menabe Antimena Protected Area, a large swath of unique dry forest ecosystem on Madagascar’s west coast, has increased dramatically in recent years.
- Slash-and-burn agriculture is the primary driver. Unlike in most places in Madagascar, it isn’t done for subsistence farming but to plant corn, a cash crop traded by a powerful local elite.
- Conservation groups have teamed up to organize raids that have resulted in a number of arrests, and are making inroads into the corn distribution networks.
- So far, however, only impoverished laborers have been held to account, many of them new arrivals to the area who have fled drought in southern Madagascar; none of the well-connected backers of the deforestation have been touched.

Illegal gold mining destroys wetland forest in Madagascar park
- Over the last two years, small crews of miners using rudimentary hand tools have made repeated incursions into Ranomafana National Park in southeastern Madagascar, to dig hundreds of shallow pit mines.
- The wave of mining coincides with a steadily worsening security situation in the area, complicating attempts at enforcement and limiting researchers’ ability to quantify the problem.
- In a new paper, authors used satellite imagery to analyze changes in forest cover and drone photography to survey the wetlands in the heart of Ranomafana.
- The area affected is still relatively small, but experts fear the problem could easily become much worse.

Saving the forests of the Congo Basin: Q&A with author Meindert Brouwer
- Central African Forests Forever, first published in 2017, takes readers to the heart of the continent, introducing them to the people and wildlife of this region.
- Its author, independent communications consultant Meindert Brouwer, says the book also functions as a tool for sharing information about efforts to address poverty and environmental issues in the region.
- Mongabay spoke with Brouwer to learn more about his motivations and the reception of his work in Central Africa.

‘There are no laws’: Cattle, drugs, corruption destroying Honduras UNESCO site
- Poverty and political violence are driving Hondurans into Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage site holding some of the region’s largest tracts of old growth rainforest.
- Local conservation and agroforestry organizations say the settlers are contributing to deforestation in the reserve. However, research indicates illegal ranching is the biggest deforestation driver in the area.
- Locals say many illegal cattle ranchers maintain ties to the drug business. They claim government corruption and apathy are also contributing to the situation.
- An investigation found criminal groups are able to operate with impunity in Honduras because of an ineffective justice system and corrupt security forces.

The river of blood (insider)
- Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler’s account of his trip down the Manambolo River in Western Madagascar where he was nearly attacked by bandits.
- This post is insider content, which is available to paying subscribers.

‘Punished’: Bolivian communities opposed to highway cry foul over neglect
- Indigenous leaders from 14 villages settled within the TIPNIS nature reserve say that government programs and public works have not reached their areas because they are opposed to a planned highway running through the park.
- The inhabitants of Trinidadcito complain that the health post is not used because there’s no resident doctor and that their school doesn’t have walls.
- In the community of Nueva Galilea, an indigenous leader says a public pool and a school that the government claims to have built are among the “phantom” public works projects that were paid for but never built.

Local fishers oppose $2.7 billion deal opening Madagascar to Chinese fishing
- Two months ago, a little-known private Malagasy association signed a 10-year, $2.7 billion fishing deal — the largest in the country’s history — with a group of Chinese companies that plans to send 330 fishing vessels to Madagascar.
- Critics of the deal include the country’s fisheries minister, who said he learned about it in the newspaper; environmental and government watchdog groups; and local fishers, who are already struggling with foreign competition for Madagascar’s dwindling marine stocks.
- Critics say no draft of the deal has been made public and the association that signed it did not conduct an environmental impact assessment or any public consultation.
- The issue has drawn media attention in the run-up to the presidential election on Wednesday. The incumbent and a leading candidate, Hery Rajaonarimampianina, was present at the fisheries deal’s signing, although he later claimed not to be familiar with it.

Top Madagascar shrimp co. moved millions among tax-haven shell companies
- Aziz Ismail, 85, a French citizen born in Madagascar, bought into Madagascar’s shrimp business in 1973. His empire, known generally as Unima, now includes at least eight privately held companies in Europe and Africa that are mainly involved in seafood from Madagascar, where operations are centered.
- Ismail has also owned a British Virgin Islands-based shell company called Ergia Limited since 2000. In the last decade, Ergia appears to have had financial transactions totaling several million dollars with another apparent shell company in Mauritius that has close ties to Unima, and with Unima companies in Europe.
- Although owning and using offshore companies is generally legal, tax and law enforcement officials are increasingly scrutinizing transactions through tax havens like the British Virgin Islands and Mauritius. Tax inspectors from Madagascar and other experts said Unima’s use of multiple offshore companies raises the risk of lost taxes for one of the world’s poorest countries.
- Files obtained from the now-defunct Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca as part of the “Panama Papers” were the basis for this investigation by Mongabay and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Bandits raid village near Madagascar park, killing conservation worker
- Armed bandits attacked a village on the edge of Ranomafana National Park in southeastern Madagascar in late July.
- They robbed residents and killed a technician for the Centre ValBio research institute.
- The incident is part of a growing pattern of banditry, both in the Ranomafana area and across Madagascar, where instability has increased in the run up to presidential elections scheduled for later this year.

‘Not doing anything is no longer acceptable’: Q&A with Alice Thomas, climate refugee expert
- Mongabay spoke with Alice Thomas, an expert on climate refugees, about the growing impact of climate change on the refugee crisis worldwide.
- To date, no one has been able to claim asylum due to climate change because the official definition of a refugee does not allow for climate-induced migration.
- One of the least-understood aspects of climate migration, however, is that most migrants won’t be leaving their country, but will be moving within their national borders.
- Smarter, better policies could not only mitigate such migrations, but allow communities to adapt to ongoing changes due to climate change, Thomas says.

Angry farmers set fire to offices of Madagascar eco group, gov’t agency
- Large swaths of forest inside northwestern Madagascar’s Bongolava Forest Corridor, a protected area, have been burned to make way for commercial corn farming, raising the fortunes of many residents accustomed to living on the edge of subsistence.
- Last month, angry farmers armed with sticks and machetes stormed into the northwestern city of Boriziny, also known as Port–Bergé, to demand the release of people arrested for illegally clearing farmland inside the protected area.
- The group destroyed the offices of the local nonprofit that manages the protected area and set fire to the building it shares with an outpost of the environment ministry, as well as to the homes of the group’s coordinator and the government administrator for the area.
- The episode highlights the difficulty of achieving meaningful conservation in an area where the populace largely views ecological goals as conflicting with an important source of income.

Primate-rich countries are becoming less hospitable places for monkeys, apes and lemurs
- New research shows that many of the 65 percent of the world’s primate species found in four countries — Brazil, Indonesia, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo — face the threat of extinction.
- The scientists involved in the study used maps of primate ranges and information on the threats they face to predict what might happen to the animals through the end of the 21st century.
- They found that increases in the amount of land turned over for human food production could cause the primate habitats to shrink substantially in these countries.
- However, the team also found that intensive conservation measures could dramatically reduce the loss of primate habitat by 2100 and potentially avert the mass extinction of these species.

To protect the Congolese peatlands, protect local land rights (commentary)
- In 2017, researchers reported the existence of the largest tropical peatland complex in the world in the Congo Basin.
- In early 2018, a team of scientists, including the author, traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to probe deeper into the peatlands, which cover an area about the size of England and hold some 30 billion tons of carbon.
- Around the same time, the DRC government has awarded logging concessions that overlap with the peatlands, in violation of a 16-year-old moratorium on logging.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Lessons for developing countries in expansion of Madagascar’s protected area network
- Between 2003 and 2016, protected area coverage in Madagascar was quadrupled, from 1.7 to 7.1 million hectares. Whereas most protected areas (PAs) established in Madagascar prior to 2003 were managed solely by the Malagasy government, post-2003 PAs adopted a variety of new management and governance systems.
- The aggressive growth of Madagascar’s PA system and the diversity of approaches employed make for a particularly poignant case study, according to the authors of a recent paper published in the journal Biological Conservation that looks at what other developed countries can take away from Madagascar’s experience.
- The researchers hope that the successes achieved and the challenges identified via their examination of Madagascar’s efforts to expand its PA system might help inform how global protected area coverage continues to expand.

Cooperative agroforestry empowers indigenous women in Honduras
- The Lenca indigenous group in a dry region of Honduras has practiced agroforestry for millennia, planting timber and fruit trees over food and medicine crops to provide shade that increases soil humidity.
- Recently a group of women formed a cooperative to market their coffee grown in the shade of these trees as organic and fair trade, and they have enjoyed a sizable price increase.
- The Lencas’ agroforestry system also provides fruit and timber products that are ready for sale or trade during times of the year when the coffee crop is not ripe.
- Agroforestry is beneficial to the climate because it sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, and it also benefits biodiversity: the village has observed an increase in populations of animals like opossums, snakes, hares, armadillos, squirrels, birds and coyotes as the agroforestry plantings expand.

‘Annihilation trawling’: Q&A with marine biologist Amanda Vincent
- For years marine biologists have been raising concerns about bottom trawling, a fishing technique that unintentionally scoops up non-targeted creatures as bycatch and disrupts marine habitat.
- While the technique is widely acknowledged to be destructive, seahorse expert Amanda Vincent is calling attention to a new problem: in Asia and elsewhere, bottom trawlers are no longer targeting particular species at all but going after any and all sea life for processing into chicken feed, fishmeal and other low-value products.
- In an interview with Mongabay, Vincent describes her observations in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Cerrado: Agribusiness boomtown; profits for a few, hardships for many
- Luís Eduardo Magalhães (LEM) is a soy boomtown, built on Cerrado agribusiness. Its population has grown fourfold since 2000, to 83,000 people, and is one of Brazil’s fastest growing cities. But LEM has suffered growing pains as the people from rural areas have rushed there seeking jobs and opportunities.
- Public services have failed to keep up, with most urban streets still dirt and sanitation services lagging behind population growth. Many new arrivals from the countryside, lacking specialized skills, have been unable to get good jobs or gain access to the highly mechanized and specialized industrial agribusiness economy. So they remain poor.
- Many have ended up in Santa Cruz, an impoverished neighborhood where drug trafficking and gang violence are a constant daily threat. Those with better skills and more luck may end up in Jardim Paraíso (Paradise Garden), a nearby upscale neighborhood marked by security fences and security alarms as protection against crime.
- Experts say LEM seems likely to follow the path of agribusiness boomtowns globally: population grows rapidly, but initial economic gains and urbanization aren’t followed by ongoing development and investment. Disorderly growth negatively impacts the environment, leading to more poverty and a concentration of land ownership and wealth.

Will Madagascar’s industrial shrimp trawlers make way for local fishers?
- Shrimp is one of Madagascar’s most lucrative exports.
- But local fishers and environmental groups say shrimp trawlers are harming the country’s marine environment and leaving too few fish in the sea for the fishing communities that depend on them.
- Until now, relatively little has been done to address the issue.
- But there are small signs that may be starting to change, with fishing communities raising their voices to press for exclusive access to Madagascar’s coastal waters.

Illegal cattle ranching deforests Mexico’s massive Lacandon Jungle
- According to authorities and residents, cattle from Central America are brought to Mexico illegally over the porous border with Guatemala and left to graze in the Lacandon Jungle, a protected area.
- The Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas state once covered 1.5 million hectares. Today, it is only a third of that size and continuing to shrink.
- A potent mix of poverty, porous borders and lack of government control of protected areas has contributed to the proliferation of small cattle ranches throughout the area, which, combined, have a major impact on the ecosystem.

Red Cloud’s Revolution: Oglalla Sioux freeing themselves from fossil fuel
- Henry Red Cloud, like so many Oglalla Sioux young men, left the reservation to work in construction. When he returned home in 2002, he needed a job, and also wanted to make a difference. He attended a solar energy workshop and saw the future.
- Today, Red Cloud runs Lakota Solar and the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center, which have become catalysts for an innovative new economic network – one that employs locals and connects tribes, while building greater energy independence among First Nations.
- The company is building and installing alternative energy systems, and training others to do the same, throughout remote areas of U.S. reservations, thus allowing the Sioux and others to leap past outdated fossil fuel technology altogether.
- Henry Red Cloud’s company has another more radical purpose: it helps provide energy to remote Water Protector camps, like the one at Standing Rock protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Solar power and other alternative energy sources are vital at such remote sites, as they power up cellphones, connecting resistors to the media and outside world.

Trumping Colombia’s peace: U.S. drug war threatens fragile accord, forests
- President Donald Trump has brought new tension to U.S.-Colombian relations, threatening to cut crucial funding at a pivotal moment in Colombia’s peace process and to decertify that agreement for a perceived failure to tackle the drug trade.
- According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Colombian coca production has risen to an all-time high, with around 90 percent of cocaine entering the U.S. coming from that Latin American country.
- U.S. officials blame the cocaine resurgence on Colombia’s decision to halt aerial spraying of Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide – a controversial tactic considered to have serious health and environmental impacts by some, but rejected by others.
- Now, with Colombia’s fragile internal truce taking hold, the Trump administration’s stance – reminiscent of the War on Drugs strategy of the 80s and 90s – could be a great hindrance to peace, with knock-on negative effects for Colombia’s rural population and world-renowned biodiversity.

IUCN, UN, global NGOs, likely to see major budget cuts under Trump
- President Donald Trump has proposed cutting foreign aid funding to nations and inter-governmental organizations by 32 percent, about $19 billion – cuts the U.S. Congress has yet to vote on. Voting has been delayed since September, and is next scheduled for 19 January, though another delay may occur.
- One inter-governmental organization on Trump’s cutting block is the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) best known for its global Red List, the go-to resource for the status of endangered species planet-wide. Over the past four years the U.S. contributed between 5 and 9 percent of the IUCN’s total framework funding, and 4 to 7 percent of its programmatic funding.
- Currently it remains unclear just how much, or even if, the IUCN budget will be slashed by Congress, leaving the organization in limbo. Another organization potentially looking at major cuts under Trump is TRAFFIC, the international wildlife trade monitoring network.
- Also under Trump’s axe are the UN Population Fund ($79 million), the Green Climate Fund ($2 billion, which no nation has stepped up to replace), and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ($1.96 million annually, funding already replaced by other nations for 2018).

Chainsaws imperil an old-growth mangrove stronghold in southern Myanmar
- Tanintharyi, Myanmar’s southern-most state, is home to the country’s last remaining old-growth mangrove forest. The trees support village life and a booming fishing industry up and down the coast.
- But logging for charcoal and fuel wood, much of it illegal, is taking a toll. Studies show that roughly two-thirds of the region’s remaining mangrove forests have been degraded, with consequences for people and wildlife.
- Conservationists are attempting to expand community forestry and set up mangrove reserves to combat the widespread degradation.

So long, UNESCO! What does U.S. withdrawal mean for the environment?
- Since 2011, the U.S. has refused to pay its agreed to share to UNESCO as a Member Nation who has participated in and benefited from the organization’s scientific, environmental and sustainability programs. Now, President Trump has announced U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO, effective at the end of 2018.
- Experts say the pullout won’t in fact do any major damage to the organization, with most of the harm done to UNESCO when the U.S. went into arrears starting in 2011, with unpaid dues now totaling roughly $550 million. However, America’s failure to participate could hurt millions of Americans.
- UNESCO science initiatives are international and deal multilaterally with a variety of environmental issues ranging from basic earth science, climate change, freshwater, oceans, mining, and international interrelationships between indigenous, rural and urban communities.
- Among the most famous of UNESCO science programs are the Man and the Biosphere Programme and the World Network of Biosphere Reserves, now including 669 sites in 120 countries, including the United States.

Abandoned by their sponsors, Madagascar’s orphaned parks struggle on
- A dozen protected areas that were created amid the rapid buildup of Madagascar’s conservation sector in the aughts were later abandoned by their NGO sponsors after the political crisis of 2009.
- Among these so-called orphan protected areas is the 606-square-kilometer (234-square-mile) Bongolava Forest Corridor in the country’s northwest. The U.S.-based NGO Conservation International spent 15 years spearheading Bongolava’s creation, then abandoned the project in 2012.
- A year ago, a scrappy group of locals returned to Bongolava to resuscitate the protected area. Working with a slim budget, they are confronting both intense pressure for farmland inside the protected area and widespread corruption.
- This is the eighth story in Mongabay’s multi-part series “Conservation in Madagascar.”

Carbon dreams: Can REDD+ save a Yosemite-size forest in Madagascar?
- When Makira Natural Park launched in 2005, it seemed to present a solution to one of the most intractable problems in conservation: finding a source of funding that could be counted on year after year.
- The sale of carbon offset credits would fund the park itself as well as development projects aimed at helping nearby communities improve their standard of living and curtail deforestation.
- But more than a decade later, carbon buyers are scarce and much of the funding for community development has been held up. And although deforestation has slowed considerably in and around Makira, it is falling well short of deforestation targets set at the outset of the project.
- This is the seventh story in Mongabay’s multi-part series “Conservation in Madagascar.”

It is time to recognize the limits of certification in agriculture (commentary)
- In early 2017, the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) decided that it was going to stop working with certification in agriculture.
- It was actually a fairly easy and straightforward decision: After working with this tool for over 20 years, we could look back and conclude that certification was not the best approach to improve the sustainability of most farmers in the world, especially when considering the huge challenges we face from climate change, poverty, deforestation, soil and water contamination, and human rights violations.
- In our history, we have seen many positive impacts from certification for workers, producers and the environment. But we have also increasingly come to recognize the limitations of certification as a tool to drive change in agricultural production systems at scale.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Trump family planning policy may increase population, hurt women and environment
- In January, U.S. President Donald Trump reinstated the global gag rule, first introduced under Ronald Reagan. It requires foreign NGOs receiving U.S. global family planning assistance to certify that they will not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” with non-U.S. funds.
- According to Marie Stopes International (MSI), the gag rule could result in a minimum of 2.2 million abortions from 2017-2020, with 21,700 women dying as a result. And that only accounts for services lost from MSI.
- Research shows that the gag rule is also likely to increase population growth in the developing world by reducing the ability of organizations to provide family planning services. This could endanger the environment in a variety of ways. For example, population growth puts more pressure on forests and wildlife.
- A lack of family planning can lead to large families, with women spending more of their time on childrearing, largely leaving them out of any active role in community sustainability and conservation projects, as well as education programs that train them in sustainable livelihoods.

Fish vs. forests? Madagascar’s marine conservation boom
- Inspired by early successes in marine conservation, locally controlled fisheries projects have expanded quickly along Madagascar’s 3,000-mile-long coastline over the past 15 years.
- Now that growth is poised to skyrocket, with rising interest in fisheries management and conservation from international donors, including a planned injection of more than $70 million by the World Bank.
- But the scale of funding for marine conservation has prompted concerns from both small NGOs that already work on fisheries and advocates of terrestrial conservation, who point to the uneven track record of locally controlled fisheries projects around the country.
- This is the fifth story in Mongabay’s multi-part series “Conservation in Madagascar.”

Trump budget undercuts U.S. commitment to global wildlife conservation
- President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget would make extensive cuts to already underfunded programs to combat wildlife trafficking and to aid African and Asian nations in protecting elephants, rhinos, tigers, pangolins and other endangered wildlife.
- Trump’s budget proposes a 32 percent across-the-board cut in U.S. foreign assistance, affecting hundreds of sustainability, health and environmental programs.
- Major cuts would come to the Department of State, USAID, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service programs.
- Congress needs to approve a 2018 budget by December, and no one knows if it will approve the president’s desired deep cuts. However, hostility from the administration and many in the GOP to wildlife programs is unlikely to go away any time soon, with more and larger reductions in years to come.

Agroforestry: An increasingly popular solution for a hot, hungry world
- Agroforestry integrates trees, shrubs, and crops in a system that functions well together — it covers over 1 billion hectares of land worldwide and its best known examples include shade grown coffee and chocolate.
- Indigenous peoples have practiced agroforestry for millennia but this technique is now gaining popularity with farmers everywhere.
- Agroforestry mitigates climate change through carbon sequestration and also benefits biodiversity, water cycling, food security, and more.
- This is the first in a yearlong series about farmers and communities implementing agroforestry worldwide.

The Philippines commits to science-anchored fishery policies
- The Philippines ranks 10th in the world in terms of its annual catch, and Filipinos consume 32.7 kilograms (72.1 pounds) of fish each year.
- At the same time, 70 percent of the Philippines’ fish populations are overfished.
- The country is now set to work with the Environmental Defense Fund to bring data analysis and science into fisheries decisions by 2022.

Conservation in a weak state: Madagascar struggles with enforcement
- In the years since Madagascar’s 2009 coup d’état, the area around Ranomafana National Park has faced security threats from illegal gold miners, armed cattle rustlers, and bandits that have made it increasingly difficult to operate parts of the park.
- Elsewhere in the country illegal logging and mining, corruption, impunity and other breaches threaten to undermine conservation efforts, and limited funds make enforcement difficult.
- The problem underscores a broad challenge for conservationists across Madagascar: how to make progress on a set of environmental goals that depend fundamentally on the rule of law?
- This is the second story in Mongabay’s multi-part series “Conservation in Madagascar.”

Communities struggle to save Sabah’s shrinking mangroves
- A development plan establishing shrimp farms and timber plantations begun purportedly to reduce poverty in northern Sabah, Malaysia, has attracted criticism from local communities and NGOs, which say the project is ignoring communities’ land rights.
- Satellite imagery shows the clearing of large tracts of mangrove forest for shrimp farms. Critics of the development say this is depriving forest-dependent local communities of their livelihoods as well as threatening mangrove wildlife.
- Several communities have banded together and are together petitioning the government to officially recognize their rights to the remaining mangroves and prevent further clearing for development.

Kenyans fear proposed Trump cuts could threaten elephants, ranger jobs
- In March, President Trump proposed cuts to the 2018 USAID global budget totaling 40 percent, a recommendation Congress isn’t required to follow, but which the legislature won’t likely vote on before October 1st.
- As a result, nations in the developing world are in limbo over cuts, and worried they’ll lose vital USAID funds. Trump’s budget is only slated to reduce USAID to Kenya by 10 percent, but officials and NGOs there still fear environmental programs will be slashed.
- They worry USAID funds to protect elephants and curb trafficking, to pay community ranger salaries, and to keep East Africa’s only wildlife forensics lab open will be lost. There are no known plans to cut these programs at present, but rumors abound, with many rangers disheartened and “losing motivation to work” according to one observer.
- An unnamed U.S. embassy official in Nairobi told Mongabay that the Trump administration has, however, taken one action that could harm environmental research, with 34 visas denied to Kenyan scientists wishing to travel to the United States.

What happens after a mining rush? Photographs from Madagascar
- Precious and semi-precious stone mines, legal or not, are born, die, and spring back to life all over Madagascar.
- Much of the gem mining in Madagascar is unofficial and therefore unregulated, so the immediate impacts are high, both envirnmentally and socially. But people seldom examine the long-lasting effects.
- Toward the end of 2016, photoreporter Arnaud De Grave spent several months in the country’s eastern Alaotra-Mangoro region, in an area experiencing a mining recession.
- His photos show the toll of mining on people’s lives and the landscape.

Trump budget threatens Zimbabwe climate change resilience programs
- President Trump has threatened to cut U.S. aid to developing nations by a third. This could impact Zimbabwe which receives $150 million annually to decrease food insecurity for 2.1 million people.
- Aid to Zimbabwe is important to rural farmers, victims of escalating drought due to climate change. USAID finances dams and irrigation projects, making agriculture sustainable.
- The 2018 budget isn’t due to be finalized by Congress until October 1, 2017, leaving Zimbabwe’s people in uncertainty as to the direly needed aid.
- What seems certain is that the climate resilience program will not be expanded to meet the needs of yet to be served Zimbabwean communities.

Singapore statement on International Day of the Tropics: infrastructure deficit must be met sustainably (commentary)
- The majority of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities are in the Tropics, and will be most affected by environmental challenges like climate change.
- The landmark report State of the Tropics in 2014 outlined the full range of these challenges.
- As the world celebrates the second UN International Day of the Tropics on June 29, 2017, a new report on one of the great needs, Sustainable Infrastructure in the Tropics, is launched in Singapore.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Delicate Solomon Island ecosystem in danger of heavy logging
- Foreign and domestic companies are making a push – at times using allegedly unethical means – for the timber found on the island of Nende in the Santa Cruz chain of the Solomon Islands.
- The island’s old-growth forests are home to animals like the Santa Cruz shrikebill, which is found nowhere else on Earth.
- Concerns have been voiced that logging could wreak havoc on the ecosystem, from the watersheds in the mountains down to the coral reefs ringing the island, if large-scale logging is allowed to proceed.

Officials, Greenpeace nab four boats for illegally fishing near Guinea-Bissau
- Between March 21-24, Greenpeace and officials from Guinea-Bissau’s Fisheries Surveillance Department sent four boats into the port of Bissau, where the companies that own the boats face sanctions for unpaid fines for past violations, improperly indicating the names of vessels, and what’s known as ‘illegal transshipment.’
- Two of the boats were owned by a Spanish company, and the other two were owned by companies based in China, which has by far the most ‘distant-water fishing’ boats at sea of any country.
- The UN Food and Agriculture Organization found that, in 2009, the fisheries off West Africa had the highest rates of overexploitation in the world.

Environmental costs, benefits and possibilities: Q&A with anthropologist Eben Kirksey
- The environmental humanities pull together the tools of the anthropologist and the biologist.
- Anthropologist Eben Kirksey has studied the impact of mining, logging and infrastructure development on the Mee people of West Papua, Indonesia, revealing the inequalities that often underpins who benefits and who suffers as a result of natural resource extraction.
- Kirksey reports that West Papuans are nurturing a new form of nationalism that might help bring some equality to environmental change.

Scrapping Nigerian superhighway buffer isn’t enough, say conservation groups
- The superhighway project, intended to stimulate the Cross River state economy, will no longer include a 20-kilometer-wide buffer zone along its 260-kilometer length.
- The NGO Wildlife Conservation Society said minimizing the destruction necessary for the buffer zone was an important step, but that it will still disrupt communities and wildlife.
- Representatives of the Cross River governor, Ben Ayade, told the media that they intended to move forward with the superhighway despite the criticism.

Enforcement, development and education define efforts to save Vietnam’s rare primates
- An expert warns that a “wave of extinctions” among these populations could be imminent.
- According to official and independent assessments, forest conservation enforcement is not enough to meet government-issued standards.
- Educating local communities about forest conservation and its impact on protecting rare primates is widely seen as a key measure for preservation and species recovery.

Lakes in community hands spur gains for people and fish
- In an 8-year study covering a 500-kilometer stretch of a tributary to the Amazon, a team of scientists from Brazil and England found that the often-overfished arapaima came back in community-managed lakes.
- Protected lakes had populations more than 30 times those where commercial fishing was allowed.
- The team estimates that each protected lake is worth about $10,000 per community in revenue from arapaima stocks annually.

Youth, women, indigenous group pay the price of logging in Kenya
- Members of the Ogiek indigenous group have been subject to evictions from their forest homeland as part of a government effort to restore the Mau forest, a critically important watershed where deforestation and illegal logging are persistent problems.
- Many Ogiek are impoverished, living in camps for displaced persons. Children with poor access to schooling are turning to work in the region’s thriving timber industry.
- A new law giving local communities more control over their forests may improve the situation, but advocates say it needs to go further in specifically addressing the needs of marginalized women and children.

Can helping women achieve financial freedom help the environment, too?
- Conservation organizations across the board are focusing on women with programs that attempt to achieve social and environmental change in one fell swoop.
- A small subset of these organizations uses the prospect of financial freedom to encourage women to participate in projects that benefit the environment.
- But outcomes are difficult to measure and research into whether the approach actually works is hard to come by, leaving experts to rely more on instinct than hard evidence in evaluating them.

A dangerous, illegal necessity: charcoal reform comes to Virunga
- Like elsewhere in Africa, charcoal has become a big problem for Virunga National Park. Illegal production in the park has been high in recent years as producers try to meet the demand from the millions of impoverished people who depend on charcoal as their only source of fuel.
- This demand has led to the destruction of vast swaths of Virunga’s forest – as well as the deaths of gorillas and other wildlife that depend on it.
- Eco-Makala, a project funded through REDD+, is seeking to reduce the impact of charcoal on the park by establishing tree plantations around it and distributing cookstoves that burn charcoal more efficiently. In the process, the project hopes to ease deforestation-driven CO2 emissions.

Amid epic drought, villagers bitter over Zimbabwean ethanol plant
- The Green Fuel plant in Chisumbanje in eastern Zimbabwe became operational in 2011.
- Since then the livelihood of local farming people, already thin, has become dire. Community members and advocacy groups offer a litany of complaints against the company.
- In April, Billy Rautenbach, the owner of the companies with a controlling stake in Green Fuel, was named in the Panama Papers as having offshore accounts, prompting calls for an investigation into his financial dealings that has yet to materialize.

India’s “environmentalism of convenience” threatens forest-dwellers’ rights
- The author outlines the rise of an “environmentalism of convenience” in India.
- This includes environmental standards that increasingly come with a legal framework that makes it as easy as possible for businesses to comply, the government and industry demonizing as “anti-development” any efforts to toughen the standards or to address human rights, and the government’s quelling of dissent in order to streamline decision-making.
- This post is a commentary — the views expressed are those of the author.

Abuse, displacement, pollution: the legacy of Zimbabwe’s Marange diamonds
- Eastern Zimbabwe’s Marange diamond fields, discovered in 2006, have been touted by experts as the world’s biggest diamond find in generations.
- In 2008, government forces ruthlessly drove out illegal diamond miners, killing more than 200, according to human rights groups. Since then villagers suspected of illegal mining have been subject to torture and brutal extra-judicial punishments, rights groups allege. Mine waste has polluted local water sources, and some villagers relocated to make way for the mines have been resettled in starvation conditions.
- The Zimbabwean government recently ousted from the Marange fields all but one mining company, which it owns, leaving local people’s future in limbo.

Conservation and birth control: a controversial mix?
- Some 215 million women in the Global South have an unmet need for modern contraception, with many of them living in remote communities that may lack basic health care services.
- To meet some of this need and reduce pressure on the environment, some conservation groups have started providing health and family-planning services.
- But critics, including some women’s rights advocates, contend that it’s difficult for organizations to ethically mix conservation and family planning.

Massive profiteering uncovered in Indonesian fertilizer distribution
- A yet-to-be published government report describes corrupt practices among state-backed retailers entrusted with selling subsidized fertilizers to small farmers.
- The retailers are also said to be colluding to sell the fertilizers at higher prices.
- The allegations were reported by Reuters, which claims to have seen parts of the government’s report.

As education grows so does the awareness of conserving biodiversity
- Madagascar is home to more than 250,000 species, yet despite its wealth in natural resources, it’s one of the poorest countries in the world.
- Poverty levels in Madagascar prevent many families from completing their education, a problem that is contributing to the country’s diminishing biodiversity.
- Madaworks, a new non-profit, is focused on providing education scholarships for girls from rural Malagasy families and creating environmentally sustainable opportunities for them to make a living.

Overcoming poverty through ‘regreening’
- Regreening is the regeneration of natural vegetation on previously cleared land.
- A recent report shows success in large-scale, farmer-managed regreening in parts of Africa.
- The authors say regreening could be used to improve local economies and even reduce refugee migration.

Pollinator collapse could lead to a rise in malnutrition

A bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) covered in pollen. Photo by: P7r7/Creative Commons 3.0 Saving the world’s pollinators may be a public health issue, according to recent research from Harvard and the University of Vermont. Scientists have long believed that pollinators are important for human nutrition, but this is first time they have tested the hypothesis. What […]
Scientific association calls on Nicaragua to scrap its Gran Canal

ATBC warns about canal’s impact on water security and indigenous people A volcanic island rises from Lake Nicaragua. Photo by Aaron Escobar/Creative Commons 2.0 The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC)—the world’s largest association of tropical biologists and conservationists—has advised Nicaragua to halt its ambitious plan to build a massive canal across the country. […]
The Gran Canal: will Nicaragua’s big bet create prosperity or environmental ruin?

Chinese consortium pushes new canal through Nicaragua, threatening indigenous people, environment. A stealthy jaguar moves across a camera trap in Bankukuk, Nicaragua along the path of the Gran Canal. Conservationists fear the impact of the canal on Nicaragua’s already-imperiled wildlife, including far-roving jaguars. Photo by: Christopher Jordan. A hundred years ago, the Panama Canal reshaped […]
From triumph to tragedy: famine could hit world’s newest country by August

South Sudan at risk of imminent famine Suffering from a six month civil war, the world’s youngest country could begin experiencing famine conditions in the next few weeks, according to an analysis from a group of British aid agencies. The UN has been warning for months that South Sudan—which was only established in 2011—faces a […]
Booming populations, rising economies, threatened biodiversity: the tropics will never be the same

For those living either north or south of the tropics, images of this green ring around the Earth’s equator often include verdant rainforests, exotic animals, and unchanging weather; but they may also be of entrenched poverty, unstable governments, and appalling environmental destruction. A massive new report, The State of the Tropics, however, finds that the […]
Next big idea in forest conservation? Linking public health and environmental degradation

Innovation in Tropical Forest Conservation: Q&A with Dr. Chris Golden Members of the MAHERY (Madagascar Health and Environmental Research) team that includes social surveyors, lemur researchers, tenrec researchers, veterinarians and human health professionals. Photo courtesy of: Christopher Golden. Dr. Christopher Golden is an explorer on a mission. As both an epidemiologist and ecologist, he is […]
Vazaha is Malagasy for ‘gringo’: Conservation, national identity, and conflicting interest in Madagascar

Ring-talked lemur: the national animal symbol of Madagascar. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. In the fight for conservation Madagascar is without a doubt on the front lines. Not only are most of its forests already destroyed—with a mere 10% of intact forest remaining at best—but there’s still much to lose in what remains. Madagascar is […]
Seeing the Forest for the Trees: How ‘One Health’ Connects Humans, Animals, and Ecosystems

This article first appeared on the May 2014 cover of Environmental Health Perspectives and was funded under Mongabay.org’s Special Reporting Initiative: Innovation in tropical biodiversity conservation. A gossamer mist settles over the jagged peaks of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a 318-square-kilometer park on the eastern flank of the Albertine Rift in southwest Uganda. It’s a […]
How locals and conservationists saved the elephants of Mali amidst conflict and poverty

Mali elephant family group which consist of females and their offspring. They are headed by a matriarch who has decades of experience and memories to depend on, including where to find water during droughts. Photo by: Carlton Ward Jr. At a time when Africa’s elephants are facing a relentless poaching crisis—to the tune of over […]
Apocalypse now? Climate change already damaging agriculture, acidifying seas, and worsening extreme weather

It’s not just melting glaciers and bizarrely-early Springs anymore; climate change is impacting every facet of human civilization from our ability to grow enough crops to our ability to get along with each other, according to a new 2,300-page report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The massive report, from the Nobel Prize-winning […]
The lemur end-game: scientists propose ambitious plan to save the world’s most imperiled mammal family

Verreaux’s Sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi), listed as Vulnerable, in a heated chase. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Due to the wonderful idiosyncrasies of evolution, there is one country on Earth that houses 20 percent of the world’s primates. More astounding still, every single one of these primates—an entire distinct family in fact—are found no-where else. The […]
The making of Amazon Gold: once more unto the breach

New film documents a shadow world: the illegal gold mines of the Peruvian Amazon. When Sarah duPont first visited the Peruvian Amazon rainforest in the summer of 1999, it was a different place than it is today. Oceans of green, tranquil forest, met the eye at every turn. At dawn, her brain struggled to comprehend […]
Madagascar’s most famous lemur facing big threats

The ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), perhaps the most well-known of Madagascar’s endemic animals, is facing a “very high” risk of extinction in the wild. The Madagascar Section of the IUCN Primate Specialist Group reassessed the Red List status of ring-tailed lemurs and upgraded the species from Near-Threatened (2008) to Endangered (2012). Ring-tailed lemurs are facing […]
Richest countries spent $74 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2011, eclipsing climate finance by seven times

In 2011, the top 11 richest carbon emitters spent an estimated $74 billion on fossil fuel subsidies, or seven times the amount spent on fast-track climate financing to developing nations, according to a recent report by the Overseas Development Institute. Worldwide, nations spent over half a trillion dollars on fossil fuel subsidies in 2011 according […]
Tapirs, drug-trafficking, and eco-police: practicing conservation amidst chaos in Nicaragua

An interview with Christopher Jordan, a part of our on-going Interviews with Young Scientists series. Baird’s tapir caught on camera trap in Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast. Photo courtesy of: Christopher Jordan. Nicaragua is a nation still suffering from deep poverty, a free-flowing drug trade, and festering war-wounds after decades of internecine fighting. However, like any country […]
Worst drought in 30 years threatens millions in southern Africa with food insecurity

Around 2 million people face food insecurity in northern Namibia and southern Angola as the worst regional drought in decades takes its toll, according to the UN. Two years of failed rains have pushed families into desperate conditions in a region already known for its desert-like conditions. In Namibia alone, experts estimate that over 100,000 […]
Hope rises as new malaria vaccine shows promise

Last week U.S. scientists with the biotech company, Sanaria, announced a possible breakthrough on an experimental malaria vaccine: an early trial led to a success rate of 80 percent for the two highest doses. Malaria remains one of the world’s worst scourges. In 2010, the World Health Organization reported 219 million documented cases of malaria […]
Solving ‘wicked problems’: ten principles for improved environmental management

As agriculture continues to expand at the expense of forests in the tropics, humanity struggles to meet environmental protection goals. Despite global efforts towards sustainable agriculture and some progress towards the gazetting of protected areas, there are as yet no general and effective solutions for meeting both conservation goals and food needs, and thus the […]
Building a new generation of local conservationists: how improving education in Uganda may save one of the world’s great forests

The 2013 Zoos and Aquariums: Committing to Conservation (ZACC) conference runs from July 8th—July 12th in Des Moines, Iowa, hosted by the Blank Park Zoo. Ahead of the event, Mongabay.com is running a series of Q&As with presenters. For more interviews, please see our ZACC feed. Students learn about sustainable farming. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth […]
Costa Rican environmentalist pays ultimate price for his dedication to sea turtles

Jairo Mora Sandoval walking on the beach where he died after releasing over a hundred turtle hatchlings in 2012. Photo by: Carlyn Samuel. On the evening of May 30th, 26-year-old Jairo Mora Sandoval was murdered on Moin beach near Limón, Costa Rica, the very stretch of sand where he courageously monitored sea turtle nests for […]
Saving Gorongosa: E.O. Wilson on protecting a biodiversity hotspot in Mozambique

If you fly over the Great African Rift Valley from its northernmost point in Ethiopia, over the great national parks of Kenya and Tanzania, and follow it south to the very end, you will arrive at Gorongosa National Park in central Mozambique. Plateaus on the eastern and western sides of the park flank the lush […]
Local economy ruined by pesticide pollution in the Caribbean

On 15 April more than 100 fishermen demonstrated in the streets of Fort de France, the main town on Martinique, in the French West Indies. In January they barricaded the port until the government in Paris allocated €2m ($2.6m) in aid, which they are still waiting for. The contamination caused by chlordecone, a persistent organochlorine […]
NGO: conflict of interests behind Peruvian highway proposal in the Amazon

As Peru’s legislature debates the merits of building the Purús highway through the Amazon rainforest, a new report by Global Witness alleges that the project has been aggressively pushed by those with a financial stake in opening up the remote area to logging and mining. Roads built in the Amazon lead to spikes in deforestation, […]
‘Suffering…without witnesses’: over a quarter of a million people perished in Somali famine

A new report estimates that 258,000 people died in 2011 during a famine in Somalia, the worst of such events in 25 years and a number at least double the highest estimations during the crisis. Over half of the victims, around 133,000, were children five and under. The report, by the UN Food and Agricultural […]
Up for grabs: how foreign investments are redistributing land and water across the globe

In 2007, the increased human population, increased prices in fuel and transportation costs, and an increased demand for a diversity of food products prompted a Global Food Crisis. Agricultural producers and government leaders world-wide struggled to procure stable food sources for their countries. But the crisis had impacts beyond 2007: it was also the impetus […]
Infamous elephant poacher turns cannibal in the Congo

Early on a Sunday morning last summer, the villagers of Epulu awoke to the sounds of shots and screaming. In the eastern reaches of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that can often mean another round of violence and ethnic murder is under way. In this case, however, something even more horrific was afoot. The […]
Poachers enlisting impoverished wildlife rangers as accomplices in elephant, rhino killing

Defensive elephants in Tanzania, where experts say corrupt wildlife rangers have helped poachers decimate the nation’s elephants for the black market ivory trade. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Corruption among wildlife rangers is becoming a serious impediment in the fight against poaching, fuelled by soaring levels of cash offered by criminal poacher syndicates, senior conservation […]
New pope: ‘let us be protectors of creation’

Pope Francis I. Photo by: Casa Rosada. In his first homily as the new pope, Francis I spoke of the need to act as protectors both for the environment as well as for the poor and weak. With his focus on the environment the new pope echoes both his namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi, as […]
Innovative idea: wildlife income may help people withstand drought in Africa

Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe. Getting local people to become invested in wildlife conservation is not always easy, especially in parts of the world where protected areas are seen as taking away natural resources from local communities. This tension lies around Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe, where a growing population of livestock herders competes with […]
Warlords, sorcery, and wildlife: an environmental artist ventures into the Congo

Roger Peet (in blue shirt) posing with Forest Rangers. Photo courtesy of Roger Peet. Last year, Roger Peet, an American artist, traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to visit one of the world’s most remote and wild forests. Peet spent three months in a region that is largely unknown to the outside world, […]
Investors beware: global land grabbing ends in ‘financial damage’ and human rights violations

A fence keeps locals from their traditional lands in Liberia, where Sime Darby has planted a contested palm oil plantation. Photo courtesy of the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI). Investing in companies that flout local community rights in developing countries often leads to severe economic losses, according to a new report from the Rights and […]
Throwing our food away: Up to 50% of the food produced worldwide is wasted

A new report titled “Global food, waste not, want not” published by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers has found that 30 to 50 percent of all food produced in the world never reaches a stomach. The authors of the study warn that these figures are quite conservative. The large amounts of land, energy, fertilizers and […]
Wealthy nations’ fossil fuel subsidies dwarf climate financing

Coal-powered Castle Gate Power Plant in Ohio. Photo by: David Jolley. A new analysis finds that 21 wealthy countries spent five-times more on subsidizing fossil fuels in 2011 than they have on providing funds for poor nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change. The analysis, by Oil Change […]
Forests, farming, and sprawl: the struggle over land in an Amazonian metropolis

An interview with Karimeh Moukaddem, a part of our on-going Interviews with Young Scientists series. Typical farmhouse outside of Parauapebas. Photo by: Karimeh Moukaddem. The city of Parauapebas, Brazil is booming: built over the remains of the Amazon rainforest, the metropolis has grown 75-fold in less than 25 years, from 2,000 people upwards of 150,000. […]
Wolves, mole rats, and nyala: the struggle to conserve Ethiopia’s highlands

Gaysay Grasslands in Bale Mountains National Park. Photo courtesy of the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS). There is a place in the world where wolves live almost entirely off mountain rodents, lions dwell in forests, and freshwater rolls downstream to 12 million people, but the place—Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains National Park—remains imperiled by a lack of legal […]
World Bank: 4 degrees Celsius warming would be miserable

Hurricane Sandy on October 25th in the Caribbean. Scientists say that climate change may have intensified Hurricane Sandy with its impact worsened by rising sea levels and increased evaporation from hotter marine waters. Recent studies predict that worsening climate change will bring more intense hurricanes. Photo by: NASA. A new report by the World Bank […]
Hurricane Sandy pushes Haiti toward full-blown food crisis

Hurricane Sandy on October 25th in the Caribbean. Photo by: NASA. Although Haiti avoided a direct hit by Hurricane Sandy, the tropical storm caused severe flooding across the southern part of the country decimating agricultural fields. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs now warns that 1.5 million Haitians are at risk of […]
Over 100,000 farmers squatting in Sumatran park to grow coffee

Motorbikes carrying coffee bags out of Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park. Photo courtesy of Patrice Levang. Sumatra’s Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park—home to the Critically Endangered Sumatran rhinos, tigers, and elephants—has become overrun with coffee farmers, loggers, and opportunists according to a new paper in Conservation and Society. An issue facing the park for decades, […]
From ‘fertilizer to fork’: food accounts for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions

Children stand in sweet potato fields in Indonesian New Guinea. A new report finds that poor and small-holding farmers are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Growing, transporting, refrigerating, and wasting food accounts for somewhere between 19-29 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2008, according to […]
One in eight people suffer from malnutrition worldwide

Girl in village in Madagascar. One of the world’s poorest countries, it has been estimated that about 70 percent of Malagasy people suffer from malnutrition. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. In a world where technology has advanced to a point where I can instantly have a face-to-face conversation via online video with a friend in […]
Conflict and perseverance: rehabilitating a forgotten park in the Congo

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s last herd of zebra run free in Upemba. Photo courtesy of the FZS. Zebra racing across the yellow-green savannah is an iconic image for Africa, but imagine you’re seeing this not in Kenya or South Africa, but in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Welcome to Upemba National Park: […]
Soccer lights up kids’ lives: new technology produces cheap, portable power

SOCCKET: the soccer ball that produces electricity. Photo courtesy of Uncharted Play. Recently, Jessica O. Matthews and Julia Silverman, both Harvard graduates, were awarded Harvard Foundation’s Scientists of the Year award for their invention of a soccer ball that converts kinetic energy to electricity. The two women, who were both social science majors, came up […]
Wealthy consumption threatens species in developing countries

Deforestation of tropical forests for oil palm plantations in Sabah, Malaysia. Palm oil is one of over 15,000 commodities in a recent study that have been linked to biodiversity loss in developing countries connected to consumption abroad. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Consumption in wealthy nations is imperiling biodiversity abroad, according to a new study […]
Poaching in the Serengeti linked to poverty, high legal hunting prices

Lion with kill in the Serengeti ecosystem. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. In the effort to protect the Serengeti—arguably Africa’s most famous ecosystem—one of the major problems is the bushmeat trade. Population growth, little available protein, poverty, and a long-standing history of hunting has led many communities to poach wildlife within Serengeti National Park. Interviewing […]
Agricultural area larger than Texas has been ‘land-grabbed’

Vegetables in a Congo market. Photo by: Nancy Butler. Compiling over 1,000 foreign land deals from 2000-2010, a new report finds that 702,000 square kilometers (271,043 square miles) of agricultural land worldwide has been sold-off to foreign governments or international corporations, an area larger than Texas. The report by the Worldwatch Institute finds that such […]
Cowards at Rio?: organizations decry ‘pathetic’ agreement

A Malagasy girl. While Madagascar faces widespread deforestation and erosion, it is estimated that 70 percent of its people suffer from malnutrition. The Rio+20 Summit is attempting to tackle both environmental degradation and poverty, but civil groups say the agreement falls far short of what is needed. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. As world leaders […]
Experts: ignoring climate change at Rio+20 makes other goals “meaningless”

Turkana children from northern Kenya, a region which suffers prolonged and extreme droughts. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. The Climate Change Task Force (CCTF)—made up of 30 climate scientists, other experts and world leaders—warned today that sidelining climate change at the Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development threatened progress on the conference’s other goals, which includes […]
Featured video: the Rio speech heard round the world

Cattle ranches carve into the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. As world leaders, officials, NGOs, businesses, and experts gather in Rio de Janeiro for the UN Summit on Sustainable Development, or more well known as Rio+20, it might be useful to look at the landmark Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which […]
Scientists: if we don’t act now we’re screwed

Aerial view of the infamous Río Huaypetue gold mine in the Peruvian Amazon. This remote but massive gold mine is known for the destruction of primary rainforest, widespread mercury pollution, and child and slave labor. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Scientists warn that the Earth may be reaching a planetary tipping point due to a […]
The vanishing Niger River imperils tourism and livelihoods in the desert

Contrary to conception, the Sahara Desert’s most common feature is really the Hamada, or stone plateaus and gravel plains, which cover over three quarters of its surface, and harbors at great distance the barely visible silhouette of the once-majestic Niger River. Photo by: Linda Leila Diatta. Severely affected by recent turmoil across its northern frontiers, […]
Indigenous group paid $0.65/ha for forest worth $5,000/ha in Indonesia

Aerial view of jungle and delta in Indonesian Papua. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. A palm oil company has paid indigenous Moi landowners in Indonesian Papua a paltry $0.65 per hectare for land that will be worth $5,000 a hectare once cultivated, according to a new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Indonesian […]
Groups urge President Obama to attend Rio+20 Sustainability Summit

Deforestation in the Amazon for cattle pasture. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Twenty-two conservation, indigenous, health and science groups have called on U.S. President Barack Obama to attend the up-coming Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development. “Your presence at this Summit would signal its critical importance to all Americans, demonstrate our country’s deep concern over urgent […]
Charting a new environmental course in China

An interview with the Nature Conservancy’s China Program. TNC staff and volunteers repairing signage at Meili Snow Mountain National Park in northwest Yunnan. Community benefits and ecotourism are at the heart of TNC’s program to establish national parks in China. Photo by: Tang Ling. Founded in 1951, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) works in more than […]
Consumption, population, and declining Earth: wake-up call for Rio+20

Suburban sprawl in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The average American’s ecological footprint is the fifth highest in the world. Photo by: Jeremy Hance. Human society is consuming natural resources as if there were one-and-a-half Earths, and not just a single blue planet, according to the most recent Living Planet Report released today. If governments and societies […]
‘The real Hunger Games’: a million children at risk as Sahel region suffers punishing drought

Livestock lay dead during the East Africa famine last year. Photo by: Oxfam East Africa. The UN warns that a million children in Africa’s Sahel region face malnutrition due to drought in region. In all 15 million people face food insecurity in eight nations across the Sahel, a region that is still recovering from drought […]
High-tech hell: new documentary brings Africa’s e-waste slum to life

Keyboard finds its way to Agbogbloshie. Photo by: David Fedele. Shirtless boys rapidly pull the computer apart, discarding bits and pieces, until they expose the wires, yank them out, and toss them into a fire. Acrid, toxic smoke blooms as the boys prod the wires and the fire strips the plastic around the wires, leaving […]
For Earth Day, 17 celebrated scientists on how to make a better world

Observations of planet Earth from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on July 11, 2005. Photo by: NASA. Seventeen top scientists and four acclaimed conservation organizations have called for radical action to create a better world for this and future generations. Compiled by 21 past winners of the prestigious Blue Planet Prize, a new paper […]
Gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon: a view from the ground

Illegal gold mining boat in Peru. Photo courtesy of Katy Ashe. On the back of a partially functioning motorcycle I fly down miles of winding footpath at high-speed through the dense Amazon rainforest, the driver never able to see more than several feet ahead. Myriads of bizarre creatures lie camouflaged amongst the dense vines and […]
Scientists say massive palm oil plantation will “cut the heart out” of Cameroon’s rainforest

Aerial photographs of Talangaye oil palm nursery in Nguti subdivision of Herakles Farms planned oil palm plantation. Photographs taken in February 2012. Photographer wishes to remain anonymous. Eleven top scientists have slammed a proposed palm oil plantation in a Cameroonian rainforest surrounded by five protected areas. In an open letter, the researchers allege that Herakles […]
Without data, fate of great apes unknown

Improving the evidence base for African great ape conservation: An interview with Sandra Tranquilli. Silverback gorilla in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Our closest nonhuman relatives, the great apes, are in mortal danger. Every one of the six great ape species is endangered, and without more effective conservation measures, they […]
Scientists recommend marine protected areas for Madagascar

Local fishing in Madagascar. Photo by: Julie Larsen Maher/WCS. With the government of Madagascar planning to increase marine protected areas by one million hectares, a group of researchers have laid out flexible recommendations in a new study in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The researchers employed four different analyses in order to highlight a […]
Innovative conservation: wild silk, endangered species, and poverty in Madagascar

Moth larvae munching on a host plant. Photo by: Tom Corcoran. For anyone who works in conservation in Madagascar, confronting the complex difficulties of widespread poverty is a part of the job. But with the wealth of Madagascar’s wildlife rapidly diminishing— such as lemurs, miniature chameleons, and hedgehog-looking tenrecs found no-where else in the world—the […]
Another food crisis looming in Africa: nearly 5 million South Sudanese lacking food

A village in South Sudan. Photo by: Steve Evans. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP) have warned that South Sudan is facing a food crisis and that immediate action is needed to stave off a disaster. Currently 4.7 million people do not have enough to eat in South Sudan, […]
Recognizing value of nature could boost income for the world’s poor

The rural poor would substantially boost their income if the ecological services of the ecosystems they steward were valued and compensated by the rest of the world, claims a new study published in the journal Bioscience. The study assessed the value of benefits from receive from healthy and functioning ecosystems — including crop pollination, foods […]

Feeds: news | india | latam | brasil | indonesia