topic: Rainforest People

topic: Rainforest People

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Pressure bears down around uncontacted tribes at the edge of Brazil’s arc of deforestation
- A family of three isolated Indigenous people got separated from their group and ended up contacting non-Indigenous society in one of the best-preserved areas of the Brazilian Amazon.
- For more than a month, agents with Funai, Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs, have been camping near the family, helping them hunt and fish.
- The group lives on the edge of the so-called arc of deforestation, in a mosaic of conservation areas and Indigenous territories that form a green barrier to oncoming pressure from land grabbers and cattle ranchers who want the land to increase their wealth.
- Besides the impact on isolated Indigenous communities, the destruction of this part of the Amazon would affect Brazil’s rain cycle and potentially unleash new viruses and bacteria, researchers warn.

Indigenous community calls out Cambodian REDD+ project as tensions simmer in the Cardamoms
- Indigenous Chorng communities in Cambodia allege continued land restrictions and rights violations by Wildlife Alliance, the U.S.-based NGO running the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project that includes swaths of their farmlands and forest.
- The project was reinstated last September after a 14-month suspension to review the allegations, but concerns persist over unresolved land claims, restricted access to land, and lack of financial transparency.
- Locals have complained of intimidation, threats and economic hardship after losing access to their traditional farmland and struggling to sustain their livelihoods.
- The Cambodian government and Wildlife Alliance have denied the allegations yet continue to benefit from carbon credit sales, even as Indigenous communities are left without sufficient land or decision-making power.

Communities launch new Thawthi Taw-Oo Indigenous Park amid Myanmar civil war
- On Dec. 10, communities in Myanmar’s Kayin state launched the Thawthi Taw-Oo Indigenous Park amid the country’s ongoing civil war. Some representatives call it a ‘peaceful resistance’ to the Myanmar state military.
- Inspired by the Salween Peace Park to its south, the new park is roughly the same size, spread across 318 villages, and includes 28 kaws (ancestral customary lands), four community forests, seven watersheds, six reserved forests and one wildlife sanctuary.
- The park’s charter is based on customary laws and includes guidelines to conserve the area like protected forests, rotational farming, and areas restricted for killing culturally important wildlife species.
- Communities, the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) and representatives from the Karen National Union (KNU) are working in coordination to govern and manage the park, including measures to strengthen peoples’ self-determination.

The Amazon is ablaze again. What it means for us (commentary)
- The Amazon rainforest, devastated by over 70,000 wildfires in 2019, is once again ablaze, threatening even greater destruction of wildlife, human health, and ecosystems.
- Climate change is now a tangible global threat, with rising sea levels and extreme heat affecting entire regions, while indigenous communities, like the Kogi in Colombia, have long warned of these environmental dangers, argues Mark J. Plotkin, an ethnobotanist who co-founded the Amazon Conservation Team.
- The Amazon, which stores one-fifth of the world’s terrestrial carbon, plays a crucial role in regulating global climate, but continued deforestation risks releasing this carbon and disrupting weather patterns far beyond the region.
- This text is a commentary and does not necessarily represent the views of Mongabay.

Do Indigenous peoples really conserve 80% of the world’s biodiversity?
- A new commentary piece in Nature argues that the much-cited claim that Indigenous peoples protect 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is not only baseless, but wrong.
- Although scientists and Indigenous advocates agree the statistic is under-researched, not all agree with the authors’ conclusions, especially as they did not provide evidence that suggests the statistic is wrong nor provide alternative ways of estimating biodiversity conservation on Indigenous lands.
- Scientists share their ideas and insights on calculating biodiversity on Indigenous lands, including the complexities of such research and what to avoid in the future to maintain scientific rigor.
- Indigenous advocates say the Nature commentary is unethical as it makes conclusions without enough evidence and undermines Indigenous guardianship of biodiversity, their land rights and access to funding ahead of the upcoming U.N. biodiversity conference.

On the trail of Borneo’s bay cat, one of the world’s most mysterious felines
- The bay cat, named for its brownish-red coat, is arguably the most elusive of all the world’s wildcats. And among the most endangered.
- The bay cat is the only feline endemic to Borneo. Researchers — some of whom have never seen the cat in the wild — say it is potentially threatened by habitat loss and killings by locals, with accidental snaring another possible major cause of loss.
- But the biggest threat may be ignorance. In order to better protect this species, researchers urgently need to figure out: Why is it so rare? And why is it vanishing?
- Jim Sanderson, the world’s leading expert on wildcats, suggests research on the bay cat should focus on why it’s so uncommon, what is causing its decline, and how to reduce those threats. Then conservationists can make a viable plan to protect it.

New report details rights abuses in Cambodia’s Southern Cardamom REDD+ project
- Human Rights Watch has detailed forced evictions, property destruction and violence against Indigenous communities living within a REDD+ carbon offset project area in southwest Cambodia.
- Trade of carbon credits from the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project were suspended last year amid similar allegations, and the project’s carbon certifier recently announced it’s expanding its ongoing investigation.
- Residents told Mongabay that Wildlife Alliance, the NGO that manages the project, has effectively outlawed their traditional methods of farming and livelihood, including restricting their access to sustainable forest products.
- Wildlife Alliance has denied the allegations, suggesting HRW has an agenda against carbon offsetting projects, but says it’s making improvements in response to the allegations.

‘Healthy humans without a healthy planet is a logical fallacy’: Interview with Dr. Sakib Burza
- Brought up watching nature’s grandeur in Indian Kashmir, Dr. Sakib Burza’s early inspiration in medicine began at home before he went on to work with Indigenous and local communities in tropical forest regions.
- Having worked in communities responding to the impacts of droughts and climate shocks, he says improved planetary health is crucial for better human health, and that health problems are often the symptoms of climate change or environmental problems.
- At Health In Harmony, he leads medical projects with rainforest communities through the concept of radical listening and supporting their medical needs and livelihoods.
- In an interview with Mongabay, Dr. Burza lays out his argument for how and why the health of people and the planet are connected, and actions that can improve the state of both.

Sanctioned timber baron wins new mining concessions in Cambodia’s Prey Lang
- A freeze announced late last year on new mining operations in Cambodia’s Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary comes with a massive loophole that benefits one of the country’s highest-profile deforesters.
- Try Pheap, a powerful tycoon and adviser to the previous prime minister, controls a company that was last year granted 28,000 hectares (69,000 acres) inside the sanctuary to mine iron ore.
- The name Try Pheap is synonymous with illegal logging in Cambodia, including the trafficking of high-value Siamese rosewood trees that drove the species almost to extinction in the country.
- While Try Pheap was hit by U.S. sanctions in 2019, his company that holds the mining concessions in Prey Lang, Global Green, isn’t on the sanctions list and appears to be ramping up its operations.

Who protects nature better: The state or communities? It’s complicated
- In a new study, more than 50 researchers conducted a review comparing the effectiveness of state-managed protected areas and areas managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities.
- The review found that comparing the two was very challenging for various reasons, including the difficulty in figuring out who was managing an area, as well as a lack of comparable data and different groups of researchers measuring different things, making comparisons hard.
- The studies that did allow for comparisons showed that no single governance type consistently outperformed the other. What works better seems to be super local and context dependent.
- At the same time, the review found that, in general, the existing scientific literature underscores the importance of community-driven conservation.

Shrinking civil space and persistent logging: 2023 in review in Southeast Asia
- Home to the third-largest expanse of tropical rainforest and some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, Southeast Asia has seen conservation wins and losses over the course of 2023.
- The year was characterized by a rising trend of repression against environmental and Indigenous defenders that cast a shadow of fear over the work of activists in many parts of the region.
- Logging pressure in remaining tracts of forest remained intense, and an El Niño climate pattern brought regional haze crises generated by forest fires and agricultural burning returned.
- But some progress was made on several fronts: Most notably, increasing understanding of the benefits and methods of ecosystem restoration underpinned local, national and regional efforts to bring back forests, mangroves and other crucial sanctuaries of biodiversity.

Despite progress, small share of climate pledge went to Indigenous groups: report
- A report from funders of a $1.7 billion pledge to support Indigenous peoples and local communities’ land rights made at the 2021 U.N. climate conference found that 48% of the financing was distributed.
- The findings also show that only 2.1% of the funding went directly to Indigenous peoples and local communities, despite petitions to increase direct funding for their role in combating climate change and biodiversity loss.
- This is down from the 2.9% of direct funding that was disbursed in 2021.
- Both donors and representatives of Indigenous and community groups call for more direct funding to these organizations by reducing the obstacles they face, improving their capacity, and respecting traditional knowledge systems.

Communities track a path of destruction through a Cambodian wildlife sanctuary
- Illegal logging persists deep in the heart of Cambodia’s Chhaeb-Preah Roka Wildlife Sanctuary amid government inaction and even complicity with the loggers.
- Routine patrols by local activists and community members have painstakingly documented the site of each logged tree in the supposedly protected area, even as these community patrols have been banned by the authorities.
- Mongabay reporters joined one of these patrols in April, where a run-in with rangers underscored complaints that the authorities crack down harder on those seeking to protect the forest than on those destroying it.
- A government official denied that the logging was driven by commercial interests, despite evidence to the contrary, instead blaming local communities for cutting down trees to build homes.

Logging route cut into Cambodia’s Prey Lang from Think Biotech’s concession
- A road carved from a reforestation concession into the heart of Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia appears to be facilitating the illegal logging and trafficking of valuable timber, a Mongabay investigation has revealed.
- The road originates in the concession of Think Biotech, a company previously implicated in forestry crimes, but its director denies being involved in the new road.
- The road had advanced 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) into the ostensibly protected Prey Lang before authorities ordered a crackdown — one that activists say was just for show and targeted only small-time loggers.
- Community groups and activists say Prey Lang’s forests are being decimated at alarming rates, with satellite data showing nearly the same amount of forest cover loss in the past five years as in the previous 18.

New online map tracks threats to uncontacted Indigenous peoples in Brazil’s Amazon
- Mobi, a new online interactive map, draws information from public databases, government statistics and field observations to paint a comprehensive picture of the threats that uncontacted Indigenous peoples face in the Brazilian Amazon.
- The exact location of uncontacted communities is deliberately displaced on the map to avoid any subsequent attacks against them from those who engage in illegal activity in or near their territories.
- The tool can help Indigenous agencies deploy more effective protective actions to fend off threats such as diseases and environmental destruction, which can wipe out vulnerable populations.
- Activists hope the platform will help create a vulnerability index that ranks uncontacted populations according to the severity of threats against them, which can promote stronger public policies.

Brazilian Indigenous artists take the forest to the world
- In recent years, several exhibitions held abroad have featured Indigenous people from Brazil and Latin America, giving unprecedented visibility to artists historically erased by gallery owners and museums.
- Some examples include Siamo Foresta in Milan; The Yanomami Struggle in New York, and BEĨ: Benches of Brazilian Indigenous Peoples in Japan.
- According to curators, the works transcend a mere aesthetic vision, being deeply connected to each people’s cosmologies, in addition to taking political and socioenvironmental issues into museums and galleries.

Militarized conservation: Insecurity for some, security for others? (commentary)
- The militarization of conservation has been heavily criticized by critical social scientists, Indigenous rights activists and NGOs for resulting in human rights violations and the marginalization of Indigenous and local communities.
- In war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), field research and interviews by Dr Fergus O’Leary Simpson of University of Antwerp finds that many Indigenous and local people perceive armed park guards in Kahuzi-Biega National Park as a source of insecurity while others see them as a source of stability. The effects on broader conflict and instability are mixed.
- The authors of this op-ed, Dr Fergus O’Leary Simpson and Professor Lorenzo Pellegrini of Erasmus University Rotterdam, argue that militarized conservation presents the only viable means of conservation law enforcement in regions like the eastern DRC, where multiple armed actors violently compete for control of land and resources within protected areas.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay.

More evidence backs Indigenous territories as best safeguard against Amazon deforestation
- Protected areas and Indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest experienced just one-third the loss of primary forest compared to non-protected areas, according to a new report by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP).
- Over the five-year study period, between 2017 and 2021, protected areas lost slightly less forest than Indigenous territories, but deforestation was lower in Indigenous territories.
- The MAAP study estimated that 11 million hectares (27 million acres) of primary forest were lost over the five years of the study, of which 71% were lost to deforestation and 29% to fire.
- The study highlights the effectiveness of Indigenous territories in protecting forests and the need for more protective designations, particularly for Indigenous territories.

Bearded pigs a ‘cultural keystone species’ for Borneo’s Indigenous groups: Study
- A recent study examined the impacts of ecological and sociocultural influences on bearded pig populations in Malaysian Borneo.
- The researchers found that the presence of pigs is “compatible” with Indigenous hunting in certain areas.
- The team’s findings point to the importance of a nuanced understanding of nearby human cultural values and local ecology in determining policies toward hunting.

Despite pledges, obstacles stifle community climate and conservation funding
- As science has increasingly shown the importance of conservation led by Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs), donors have begun to steer funding toward supporting the work these groups do.
- In 2021, during last year’s COP26 U.N. climate conference, private and government donors committed $1.7 billion to secure the land rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.
- But a recent assessment of the first year of the pledge shows that little of the funding goes directly to them, often going first through international NGOs, consultancies, development banks and other intermediaries.
- Most aid intended to support IPLC-led conservation work follows this path. Now, however, donors and IPLC leaders are looking for ways to ease the flow of funding and channel more of it to work that addresses climate change and the global loss of biodiversity.

Small share of land rights pledge went to Indigenous groups: Progress report
- A report from funders of a $1.7 billion pledge to support Indigenous and community forest tenure made at the 2021 U.N. climate conference found that 19% of the financing has been distributed.
- The findings from 2022 also show that only 7% of the funding went directly to Indigenous and community organizations, despite the protection they provide to forests and other ecosystems. (A subsequent analysis in 2023 revised this figure downward to 2.9%.)
- Both donors and representatives of Indigenous and community groups are calling for more direct funding to these organizations by reducing the barriers they face, improving communication and building capacity.

First-ever regional court case involving rights of uncontacted peoples awaits verdict
- The Inter-American Court of Human rights, one of three regional human rights tribunals, is evaluating the first-ever case concerning the rights of Indigenous communities in voluntary isolation, also known as uncontacted tribes.
- At the base of Ecuador’s case are three massacres against the Tagaeri and Taromenane people, which occurred in 2003, 2006, and 2013. Some members of the Waorani nation have been accused of perpetrating at least two of these massacres.
- Logging and extraction in the forest put pressure on the rainforest and resources, increasing violent conflict between communities, say the lawyers representing the uncontacted peoples. The outcome of the case could set a major legal precedent for other communities in voluntary isolation across the Amazon.
- The state insists that it has done what it could to support human rights in the region and that the oil industry nor the state is a cause of violent attacks between communities.

In Congo, a carbon sink like no other risks being carved up for oil
- New research has revealed that the peatlands of the Congo Basin are 15% larger than originally thought.
- This area of swampy forest holds an estimated 29 billion metric tons of carbon, which is the amount emitted globally through the burning of fossil fuels in three years.
- Beginning July 28, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where two-thirds of these peatlands lie, will auction off the rights to explore for oil in 27 blocks across the country.
- Scientists and conservationists have criticized the move, which the government says is necessary to fund its operations. Opponents say the blocks overlap with parts of the peatlands, mature rainforest, protected areas, and a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Dams on Brazil’s Jamanxim River: The advancing assault on the environment and Indigenous peoples in the Tapajós basin (commentary)
- Brazil’s electrical authorities have given the go-ahead for studies to prepare for building three large Amazonian dams that would flood Indigenous lands and protected areas for biodiversity.
- The decision shows that Brazil’s presidential administration is confident that the National Congress will approve the bill submitted by President Bolsonaro to open Indigenous lands to hydroelectric dams, and probably also allow dams to continue to be built without consulting impacted Indigenous peoples.
- The decision also shows that Brazil’s electrical authorities continue to ignore inconvenient information on climate change, the financial viability of Amazonian dams and their many social and environmental impacts, as well as the country’s better energy options.
- This text is translated and expanded from the author’s column on the Amazônia Real website. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Indigenous land rights take center stage in a new global framework for biodiversity conservation (commentary)
- Indigenous land rights have taken center stage at negotiations currently underway in Geneva for the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity.
- Karl Burkart, Deputy Director of One Earth, says this is a critically important development: “If we truly want to achieve the top-level goal of the UN Convention — to save biodiversity and reverse the extinction crisis — we must simultaneously secure the land rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities at scale. We cannot achieve one goal without achieving the other.”
- Burkart sees the new global biodiversity framework (GBF) as an opportunity to advance both: “In the new GBF, all Indigenous and community lands that provide natural habitat for species could and should be incorporated into government targets, provided those communities are given proper land tenure and territorial finance for their conservation efforts.”
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily 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.

Indigenous-led report warns against ‘simplistic take on conservation’
- To deal with climate change and biodiversity loss effectively and equitably, conservation needs to adopt a human rights-based approach, according to a new report co-authored by Indigenous and community organizations across Asia.
- Unlike spatial conservation targets such as “30 by 30,” a rights-based approach would recognize the ways in which Indigenous people lead local conservation efforts, and prioritize their tenure rights in measuring conservation success.
- Without tenure rights, strict spatial conservation targets could lead to human rights abuses, widespread evictions of Indigenous communities across Asia, and high resettlement costs, the report warned.
- Also without tenure rights, the inflow of money into nature-based solutions such as carbon offsets and REDD+ projects could also result in massive land grabs instead of benefiting local communities.

A conservation paradigm based on Indigenous values in DR Congo (commentary)
- Colonialism and the gazettement of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in eastern DRC led to the evictions of Batwa Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and a number of human rights abuses that continue today.
- To seek to address historical and contemporary injustices, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is emphasizing Indigenous values and entering a partnership with the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) to take actions that ensure that the rights of the Batwa peoples are respected and protected.
- This commentary is written by the Executive Director of Rights + Communities at the WCS, and a Congolese Lawyer and former Chairperson of the U.N. Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
- 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.

Indigenous hunter-gatherers in Cameroon diversify food sources in the face of change
- In southeastern Cameroon, zoning and settlement policies have forced the Indigenous Baka people to slowly transition away from their hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the rainforest, to one that relies more on farming and fishing in order to guarantee their food security.
- The community relies heavily on diverse food sources in and outside the forest in order to comprise a diet of about 60 animal species, 83 wild edible species, six species of fish, 32 crops and 28 varieties of plantain.
- According to Yon Fernández de Larrinoa, chief of the FAO’s Indigenous Peoples Unit, the Baka’s sustainable way of life should be considered by the government when implementing policies that will challenge the resilience of the group’s food system.
- This article is one of an eight-part series showcasing Indigenous food systems covered in the most comprehensive FAO report on the topic to date.

Ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin: Indigenous knowledge serves as a ‘connective tissue’ between nature and human well-being
- As a best-selling author, the co-founder of the award-winning Amazon Conservation Team, and an acclaimed public speaker, Mark Plotkin is one of the world’s most prominent rainforest ethnobotanists and conservationists.
- His experiences in Amazonian communities led Plotkin, along with Costa Rican conservationist Liliana Madrigal, to establish the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) in 1995. ACT took a distinctly different approach than most Western conservation groups at the time: It placed Indigenous communities at the center of its strategy.
- ACT’s approach has since been widely adopted by other organizations, and its philosophy as a whole is now more relevant than ever as the conservation sector wrestles with its colonial roots.
- Plotkin spoke of his work, trends in conservation, and a range of other topics in a January 2022 interview with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.

What went wrong with conservation at Kahuzi-Biega National Park and how to transform it (commentary)
- The Coercive Conservation paradigm prevents local communities from accessing their lands, leading to human rights abuses, corrupt resource extraction, and loss of habitat and wildlife.
- Kahuzi Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which expelled Indigenous Batwa people in 1975, is now overrun by refugees, militias, and mining, while ecoguards reportedly burn villages and kill indigenous people.
- We can transform conservation by supporting Protected Areas that integrate human well-being, are designed and managed by local communities, and are protected by local people with support from security forces, upon request.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Despite sanctions, U.S. companies still importing Myanmar teak, report says
- U.S. timber companies undercut sanctions to import nearly 1,600 metric tons of teak from Myanmar last year, according to a new report.
- Advocacy group Justice for Myanmar said in its report that firms have been buying timber from private companies acting as brokers in Myanmar, instead of directly from the state-owned Myanma Timber Enterprise, which is subject to U.S. sanctions.
- With MTE under military control, Myanmar’s timber auctions have become more opaque, making it difficult to take action against companies circumventing sanctions.

How can illegal timber trade in the Greater Mekong be stopped?
- Over the past decade, the European Union has been entering into voluntary partnership agreements (VPAs) with tropical timber-producing countries to fight forest crime.
- These bilateral trade agreements legally bind both sides to trade only in verified legal timber products.
- There is evidence VPAs help countries decrease illegal logging rates, especially illegal industrial timber destined for export markets.
- Within the Greater Mekong region, only Vietnam has signed a VPA.

How does political instability in the Mekong affect deforestation?
- Myanmar’s return to military dictatorship earlier this year has sparked worries among Indigenous communities of possible land grabs.
- It has also ignited concerns about a return to large-scale natural resource extraction, which has historically been an important source of funding for the junta.
- In the months since the coup, many of the country’s environmental and land rights activists have either been arrested or gone into hiding.
- The military has bombed forests and burned down Indigenous villages in Karen state, forcing minorities to flee to neighboring Thailand.

Congo Peatlands

In 2017 a team of Congolese and British scientists discover that a sprawling wetland known as the Cuvette Centrale spanning the border between the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) actually contains a massive amount of peat. Their research revealed that these peatlands are the largest and most intact across the world’s […]
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.

The past, present and future of the Congo peatlands: 10 takeaways from our series

This is the wrap-up article for our four-part series “The Congo Basin peatlands.” Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. In the first half of December, Mongabay published a four-part series on the peatlands of the Congo Basin. Only in 2017 did a team of Congolese and British scientists discover that a […]
Carbon and communities: The future of the Congo Basin peatlands
- Scientific mapping in 2017 revealed that the peatlands of the Cuvette Centrale in the Congo Basin are the largest and most intact in the world’s tropics.
- That initial work, first published in the journal Nature, was just the first step, scientists say, as work continues to understand how the peatlands formed, what threats they face from the climate and industrial uses like agriculture and logging, and how the communities of the region appear to be coexisting sustainably.
- Researchers say investing in studying and protecting the peatlands will benefit the global community as well as people living in the region because the Cuvette Centrale holds a vast repository of carbon.
- Congolese researchers and leaders say they are eager to safeguard the peatlands for the benefit of everyone, but they also say they need support from abroad to do so.

Climate efforts won’t succeed without secure community rights, says Nonette Royo
- Indigenous territories account for at least 36% of the world’s “intact forests” and Indigenous Peoples and local communities (ILPC) live in or manage about half of the planet’s lands, making these areas a critical imperative in efforts to combat climate change and species loss.
- Yet in many places, IPLCs lack formal recognition of their customary lands and resources, jeopardizing their basic human rights and heightening the risk that these areas could be damaged or destroyed. For these reasons, helping IPLCs secure land rights is increasingly seen as a central component of efforts to address climate change and achieve conservation goals.
- Nonette Royo, the executive director of the Tenure Facility, is one of the most prominent advocates for advancing the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and women. Royo spoke with Mongabay about progress and obstacles in the push to advance local peoples’ tenure rights as well as the Tenure Facility’s approaches.
- “Many models are now emerging to get these types of approaches, which require deep listening and letting communities lead the process, and adjusting or adapting their own agenda, and being willing to be transformed in the process,” Royo said. “This is most needed in the conservation space. This means respecting all rights, not just of people (as individuals or collective), but of their ways of tending with nature and co-beings with nature.”

Holding agriculture and logging at bay in the Congo peatlands
- The peatlands of the Congo Basin are perhaps the most intact in the tropics, but threats from logging, agriculture and extractive industries could cause their rapid degradation, scientists say.
- In 2021, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) announced that it was planning to end a moratorium on the issuance of logging concessions that had been in place for nearly two decades.
- The move raised concerns among conservation groups, who say the moratorium should remain in place to protect the DRC’s portion of the world’s second-largest rainforest.
- Today, timber concession boundaries overlap with the peatlands, and though some companies say they won’t cut trees growing on peat, environmental advocates say that any further issuance of logging concessions in the DRC would be irresponsible.

Layers of carbon: The Congo Basin peatlands and oil
- The peatlands of the Congo Basin may be sitting on top of a pool of oil, though exploration has yet to confirm just how big it may be.
- Conservationists and scientists argue that the carbon contained in this England-size area of peat, the largest in the tropics, makes keeping them intact more valuable, not to mention the habitat and resources they provide for the region’s wildlife and people.
- Researchers calculate that the peatlands contain 30 billion metric tons of carbon, or about the amount humans produce in three years.
- As the governments of the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo work to develop their economies, they, along with many policymakers worldwide, argue that the global community has a responsibility to help fund the protection of the peatlands to keep that climate-warming carbon locked away.

‘They will die’: Fears for the last Piripkura as Amazon invasion ramps up
- Overflight images show that outsiders have not just invaded the Piripkura Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon, but are also expanding their illegal cattle ranches in what’s supposed to be the protected land of one of the world’s most vulnerable uncontacted Indigenous groups.
- Deforestation inside the territory surged nearly a hundredfold in the 12 months since August 2020, which Indigenous rights activists attribute to anticipation among would-be invaders that a restriction ordinance banning outsiders won’t be renewed as it has every two years since 2008.
- The invaders are closing in on the parts of the territory inhabited by Pakyî and Tamandua, the last two known Piripkura individuals living in the territory; there may be another 13 there who have chosen to remain uncontacted.
- The Piripkura suffered from at least two massacres since their first contact with outsiders in the 1980s, and now face the risk of extermination again, activists warn.

Indigenous groups unveil plan to protect 80% of the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador
- A new plan called the Amazon Sacred Headwaters initiative proposes the protection of 80% of the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador by 2025, consisting of 35 million hectares (86 million acres) of rainforest.
- The Amazonian Indigenous organizations leading the plan aim to center Indigenous-led forest management and land tenure to protect endemic species and prevent approximately 2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.
- The proposal has received positive responses from Ecuadoran and Peruvian government officials, but faces a stumbling block in the fact that both countries rely heavily on extractive industries operating within the Amazon to help pay off foreign debt.

The ‘idea’: Uncovering the peatlands of the Congo Basin
- In 2017, a team of scientists from the U.K. and the Republic of Congo announced the discovery of a massive peatland the size of England in the Congo Basin.
- Sometimes called the Cuvette Centrale, this peatland covers 145,529 square kilometers (56,189 square miles) in the northern Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and holds about 20 times as much carbon as the U.S. releases from burning fossil fuels in a year.
- Today, the Congo Basin peatlands are relatively intact while supporting nearby human communities and a variety of wildlife species, but threats in the form of agriculture, oil and gas exploration and logging loom on the horizon.
- That has led scientists, conservationists and governments to look for ways to protect and better understand the peatlands for the benefit of the people and animals they support and the future of the global climate.

Is colonial history repeating itself with Sabah forest carbon deal? (commentary)
- To the surprise of Indigenous and local communities, a huge forest carbon conservation agreement was recently signed in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo.
- Granting rights to foreign entities on more than two million hectares of the state’s tropical forests for the next 100-200 years, civil society groups have called for more transparency.
- “Is history repeating itself? Are we not yet free or healed from our colonial and wartime histories?” wonders a Sabahan civil society leader who authored this opinion piece calling for more information, more time, and a say.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

Details emerge around closed-door carbon deal in Malaysian Borneo
- Leaders in Sabah have begun to reveal information about a nature conservation agreement signed in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo for the rights to carbon and other natural capital.
- The deal allegedly covers rights to more than 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of the state’s tropical forests for the next 100-200 years.
- Indigenous and civil society groups have called for more transparency.
- In response to the public reaction to news of the agreement, its primary proponent, Deputy Chief Minister Jeffrey Kitingan, held a public meeting but has declined to make the agreement public yet.

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.

Hundreds of NGOs sign open letter calling to halt “illegal activities” in DRC’s protected areas
- Over 200 Congolese and international NGOs have signed a widely circulated open letter ahead of COP26 calling on the DRC government to crack down on “illegal activities” in protected areas.
- The planned construction of a hydroelectric plant in Upemba National Park to supply electricity to mining companies is feared to pose a threat to the region’s biodiversity.
- In Virunga National Park, the proposed construction of a university is supported by the Tourism Minister and Minister of Education, with questions surrounding their political motives.
- The DRC’s resource-rich lands have often been a magnet to mining companies, to the detriment of its biodiversity and local communities.

Deforestation notches up along logging roads on PNG’s New Britain Island
- Recent satellite data has shown a marked increase in the loss of tree cover in Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain province.
- Many of the alerts were near new or existing logging roads, indicating that the forest loss may be due to timber harvesting.
- Oil palm production is also growing, altering the face of a province that had more than 98% of its primary forest remaining less than a decade ago.
- The surge in land use changes has affected not only the environment in East New Britain, but also the lives of the members of the communities who depend on it.

Green groups call for scrapping of $300m loan offer for Borneo road project
- The Asian Development Bank is considering a $300 million loan proposal from the Indonesian government to fund a road project in Borneo.
- The 280-kilometer (170-mile) project across North and East Kalimantan provinces are designed to boost economic growth and further the integration of the Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil industries.
- Environmental groups around the world have urged the ADB to impose stricter environmental and social requirements for the project to reduce its expected impacts on the environment and the Indigenous communities living in the region.
- Indigenous peoples like the Dayak rely on the forests staying intact, as do critically endangered species such as Bornean orangutans.

Deforestation threatens tree kangaroo habitat in Papua New Guinea
- A proposed conservation area in northwestern Papua New Guinea has experienced a substantial surge in deforestation-related alerts, according to satellite data from the University of Maryland.
- The still-unofficial Torricelli Mountain Range Conservation Area is home to critically endangered tree kangaroo species, along with a host of other biodiversity.
- In May 2021, communities voiced concern about road construction that was approaching the boundaries of the proposed conservation area and that the intended target may have been high-value timber species found within the region’s forests.
- Investment in local communities and the protection of the forests that these communities provide have led to an apparent rise in tree kangaroo populations, but logging and other potentially destructive land uses such as conversion to large-scale agriculture remain threats in the Torricellis and throughout Papua New Guinea.

Environmental activist ‘well-hated’ by Myanmar junta is latest to be arrested
- As demonstrations and deadly crackdowns continue in Myanmar, land and environmental defenders are increasingly under threat.
- On Sept. 6, environmental and democracy activist Kyaw Minn Htut became one of the latest political prisoners; authorities had detained his wife and 2-year-old son a day earlier.
- He had openly challenged the military and reported on illegal environmental activities, making him a “well-known and well-hated” target, fellow activists said.
- Some 20 environmental organizations across the world have signed a statement calling for Kyaw Minn Htut’s release.

Borneo’s bearded pigs and traditional hunters adapted to oil palms. Then came swine fever
- Oil palm expansion and urbanization have altered the traditional hunting of bearded pigs by the Indigenous Kadazandusun-Murut (KDM) community in Sabah, Malaysia, a new study has found.
- Researchers interviewed 38 hunters on changes in pig behavior and hunting practices before the African swine fever (ASF) epidemic hit Sabah in 2021.
- They found that even though pig hunting patterns have changed dramatically, the activity remains a cornerstone of KDM communal culture for food, sport, gift-giving, festivals and celebrations.
- As ASF devastates wild pig populations, the researchers’ findings highlight a need for long-term hunting management that conserves both the bearded pig and Indigenous cultural traditions.

The women on the front lines of safeguarding the Amazon
- Indigenous women are important conservation leaders in the Amazon, and also recently played key roles in mobilizing responses to the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on isolated Indigenous communities.
- Mongabay’s special reporting project, “Amazon Women,” shares their victories, visions, and struggles via a wide-ranging series of reports, interviews, videos and podcasts.
- Here are some highlights from among the dozen-plus features of these inspiring women from across the Amazon Basin.

Highway cutting through Heart of Borneo poised to be ‘very, very bad’
- With Indonesia planning to shift its capital from Jakarta to the Bornean province of East Kalimantan, infrastructure development pressures on the island have intensified.
- Neighboring Malaysia is adding new stretches to the Pan Borneo Highway to capitalize on spillover economic benefits; within Indonesia, East Kalimantan’s developmental gains are also expected to trickle to other provinces through the transboundary highway.
- While the new roads could spur economic development in remote villages, they also carve into protected areas in the Heart of Borneo, opening them up for resource extraction.
- In particular, the roads could fast-track development of a new “oil palm belt,” with disastrous consequences for the wildlife and Indigenous peoples of Borneo, and for global climate, experts say.

The Kichwa woman fighting drug traffickers and loggers in the Peruvian Amazon
- Marisol García Apagüeño is the first woman to serve in the leadership of her Indigenous federation in the Peruvian Amazon, where she has made it her mission to support the struggle for the recognition and land titling of the Kichwa people.
- Drug traffickers and illegal loggers have encroached onto Indigenous lands and threatened community leaders, including García Apagüeño, for reporting the problems to the outside world.
- Indigenous leaders and legal experts say a key obstacle to driving out the criminal groups is the government’s failure to issue land titles to the Indigenous communities, which leaves them with no legal standing to complain about the invasions.
- García Apagüeño says the communities need government support and economic livelihood alternatives to avoid being co-opted by the loggers and traffickers.

EU sanctions no ‘silver bullet’ against Myanmar’s illegal timber trade, experts say
- The European Union has imposed sanctions on Myanma Timber Enterprise, a state-owned entity that regulates all harvesting and sales of Myanmar timber.
- The new sanctions mean it is now illegal for businesses in the EU to directly import any timber from Myanmar.
- While the sanctions send a strong political signal to the junta, experts say their actual impact on Myanmar’s illegal timber trade could be limited.
- Local activists are urging the international community to do more as globally significant tracts of forests in the country come under threat, with illicit logging financing the military’s repressive rule.

Road construction imperils tree kangaroo recovery in PNG
- The Torricelli Mountains of northwestern Papua New Guinea are home to a wide variety of wildlife, including three species of tree kangaroos.
- Recently, construction of a road that could potentially be used by loggers has pushed closer to the border of a proposed conservation area that, if gazetted, would be the country’s second-largest.
- The Tenkile Conservation Alliance, a Papua New Guinean NGO, has worked with communities for around two decades in the Torricellis with the goal of improving the lives of humans and wildlife living in the mountains.
- Now, the group’s leaders fear that the road could jeopardize a tenuous recovery by several of the area’s threatened tree kangaroo species.

Global demand for manganese puts Kayapó Indigenous land under pressure
- InfoAmazonia’s Amazônia Minada project has found an unusual rise in demand to mine for manganese last year in Brazil, one of the world’s top producers of the metal.
- Previously, only 1% of mining bids on Indigenous lands were for manganese; in 2020, it was with 15% of all requests, second only to gold.
- Some of the richest manganese deposits in the world are in southeast Pará state, overlapping with the territories of the Kayapó Indigenous people, which have been targeted the most by mining applications in general.
- Demand from Asia, particularly China, has increased the price of manganese, driving illegal mining; 300,000 tons of the ore were seized last year in Brazil, including from a company bidding to mine on Indigenous land.

Armed with data and smartphones, Amazon communities boost fight against deforestation
- Equipping Indigenous communities in the Amazon with remote-monitoring technology can reduce illegal deforestation, a new study has found.
- Between 2018 and 2019, researchers implemented technology-based forest-monitoring programs in 36 communities within the Peruvian Amazon.
- Compared with other communities where the program wasn’t implemented, those under the program saw 52% and 21% less deforestation in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
- The gains were concentrated in communities at highest risk of deforestation due to threats like logging and illegal mining.

The Brooklyn Bridge needs a makeover. Is rainforest lumber still in style?
- Last year, a proposal to replace the Brooklyn Bridge’s walkway with wooden planks sourced from a Guatemalan rainforest won a City Council-sponsored competition.
- The planks would come from Uaxactun, a community-managed forest concession in the remote northeastern jungles of Petén.
- Set up after Guatemala’s civil war, community concessions in Petén have achieved remarkably low rates of deforestation and have a high prevalence of wildlife.
- Some environmentalists in New York say the proposal is misguided, and that creating any demand for tropical hardwood is a mistake no matter where it’s sourced from.

‘Listening to communities must go beyond ticking compliance boxes’, says Peter Kallang, a Kenyah leader
- The Malaysian state of Sarawak was until recently home to some of the last nomadic peoples of Borneo, who roamed its wild and rich rainforests as they had done since time immemorial. Starting in the early 1980s, industrial logging companies moved deep into Sarawak’s hinterland, tearing down forests, forcing forest peoples from their traditional lands, and laying the groundwork for large-scale conversion of biodiverse ecosystems into monoculture plantations.
- Sarawak’s Indigenous peoples put up resistance against these state-backed incursions into their traditional territories. One of the most dramatic outcomes of these efforts came in 2016, when the Chief Minister of Sarawak cancelled the Baram mega-dam project.
- Peter Kallang, a member of the Kenyah people who runs the NGO SAVE Rivers, was one of the leaders of the Baram campaign, helping coordinate, organize, and mobilize Indigenous communities that would have been most impacted by the dam. Now Kallang, SAVE Rivers, and other groups are fighting to defend traditional Indigenous lands against logging by Samling, a Malaysian timber company.
- Kallang spoke about his background, Indigenous-led advocacy, the conservation sector’s shortcomings in recognizing Indigenous rights, and other topics during a June 2021 interview with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.

We need more rewilding and connections to nature, says Enrique Ortiz
- Enrique Ortiz is a Peruvian biologist who has been working in conservation in Latin America since the 1970s. Today he works at the Andes Amazon Fund, a philanthropic initiative that has helped establish 79 protected areas and get 18 Indigenous territories titled.
- Ortiz says the pandemic has been “terrible and tragic” for both people and the environment, with a rise in poverty, violence against environmental defenders, and environmental crime and degradation.
- But he also notes surprising resilience where communities and local governments have continued protecting wilderness despite COVID-19.
- Ortiz spoke about these issues and more during an April 2021 conversation with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.

Peru to establish rainforest reserve for isolated Indigenous peoples
- After nearly twenty years of discussion, the Peruvian government has moved to establish a new Indigenous reserve for “uncontacted peoples” deep in the Amazon rainforest.
- Yavarí Tapiche Indigenous Reserve, which covers 1.1 million hectares (2.7 million acres) in the department of Loreto on the Peru-Brazil border, is home to Matsés, Remo, and Marubo peoples, as well as other groups that have yet to be identified.
- Yavarí Tapiche will be established under Peru’s law governing territories for peoples in isolation and initial contact (PIACI).
- Yavarí Tapiche has been officially categorized as the first PIACI reserve in Loreto, but its protection plan still must be approved by the Ministry of Culture within 60 days.

Sea turtles under threat as Indian government weighs development in Andaman Islands
- Little Andaman Island is part of a rainforested archipelago far off India’s eastern coast in the Bay of Bengal.
- An Indian government think tank has proposed developing the island along with another in the archipelago. If implemented, experts say the plan would pose a threat to nesting sites of leatherback sea turtles, whose population globally is declining.
- The leatherback is the largest of all living turtles, and India and Sri Lanka are the only places in South Asia with large nesting populations.
- The island is also home to the Onge Indigenous tribe.

Nearly half the Amazon’s intact forest on Indigenous-held lands: Report
- A new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and the Fund for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (FILAC) draws on more than 300 studies from the last two decades to demonstrate the protection that Indigenous societies provide for forests in Latin America and the Caribbean.
- According to the team’s research, about 45% of the intact forests in the Amazon Basin are in Indigenous territories.
- The forests occupied by Indigenous communities in the region hold more carbon than all of the forests in either Indonesia or the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to the next two biggest swaths of tropical forest after Brazil.
- The report’s authors say investing in securing land rights for Indigenous communities is a cheap and effective way to address climate change, while also helping these communities recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

BlackRock must commit to Indigenous rights — not just climate change (commentary)
- BlackRock is an investment management firm reportedly with $8 trillion in assets. It is also well documented for its financing of large-scale mining, fossil fuel production and agribusiness projects across Latin America doing harm to Indigenous communities in Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Brazil and elsewhere.
- The company has recently become outspoken about its position to vigorously combat climate change. But even though the United Nations recognizes Indigenous peoples as the best stewards of the environment, guardians of their lands and defenders against climate change, BlackRock remains virtually silent on Indigenous issues.
- If the company’s climate change commitment is to be taken seriously by the world, then BlackRock needs to step up now and adopt an explicit “Forest and Indigenous Rights Policy.”
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Traditional healers are preserving their knowledge, and with it, the biodiversity of Brazil’s savanna
- The Brazilian savanna contains almost a third of Brazil’s biodiversity but less than 10% is officially protected and its native vegetation is threatened by a rapidly-advancing agricultural frontier.
- Much of the flora and fauna remain unknown to conventional science.
- A network of traditional healers is at the forefront of finding ways to protect, sustainably manage, and document the biodiversity based on their in-depth knowledge of medicinal plants.
- Experts say that finding ways to value the savanna more, such as through recognizing its immense botanical and pharmacological value, could aid in its conservation.

“Securing Indigenous guardianship of vital ecosystems”: Q&A with Nia Tero CEO Peter Seligmann
- One of the dominant trends in conservation over the past 20 years has been growing recognition of the contributions Indigenous peoples have made toward conservationists’ goals of protecting biodiversity, wild places, and ecosystem functions.
- This view is a departure from historical conservation approaches, which have tended to marginalize, undervalue, or even criminalize Indigenous peoples. The transition unfolding across conservation is an important development for the sector, but going from talking about change to actually implementing meaningful reforms will be a challenge.
- For these reasons, Peter Seligmann – one of the best-known and most influential figures in conservation – is an important figure to watch. In 2017 Seligmann launched a new organization called Nia Tero that puts Indigenous peoples at the center of its strategy: “For us, it was clear that humanity’s fate is directly dependent upon the ability of nations, and the public, to support Indigenous territorial rights and embrace Indigenous peoples’ belief in the reciprocal relationship between all beings and the Earth.“
- Seligmann spoke about Nia Tero’s ambitions in a February 2021 interview with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.

Indigenous community wins recognition of its land rights in Panama
- A ruling by Panama’s Supreme Court of Justice in November 2020 led to the official creation of a comarca, or protected Indigenous territory, for the Naso Tjër Di people in northern Panama.
- The 1,600-square-kilometer (620-square-mile) comarca is the result of a decades-long effort to secure the Naso’s land rights.
- Panama’s former president had vetoed legislation creating the comarca in 2018, which he said was unconstitutional because it overlapped with two established protected areas.
- Other Indigenous groups in Panama with longstanding comarcas still struggle to hold back outside incursions for projects such as dams and power transmission lines.

Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam: Greenwashing contested (commentary)
- The company responsible for Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam claimed in a letter to the New York Times that the company respects Indigenous peoples, the environment and international conventions.
- The Arara Indigenous people contest the company’s claims and call attention to a series of broken promises.
- The Belo Monte Dam is notorious for having violated international conventions and Brazilian laws regarding consultation of Indigenous peoples, and for its massive environmental and social impacts.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

In ‘dire’ plea, Brazil’s Amazonas state appeals for global COVID assistance
- In a letter describing pandemic conditions as “dire,” the government of Brazil’s Amazonas state is pleading for urgent medical assistance from the international community. The authenticated letter apparently bypassed the Bolsonaro administration which critics say has been ineffectual in dealing with COVID-19.
- Manaus, the Amazonas state capital, was overwhelmed by the coronavirus last April, but this second wave, according to state authorities is far worse, impacting not only the city, but increasingly, the state’s rainforest interior. The soaring number of cases and deaths statewide is yet to be fully tallied.
- According to authorities, medical facilities in Manaus and Amazonas are presently being utterly overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases, with hospitals and clinics lacking beds, oxygen and other vital resources, resulting in deaths. The disease’s rapid spread may be the result of the P.I. viral lineage variant newly detected in Brazil.
- “The situation is dire, and our fear is that the same situation we are seeing in the capital Manaus will reach the inland of Amazonas, the traditional and indigenous populations that are in situation of greater vulnerability,” said the letter sent to international NGOs. The international response isn’t yet known.

Brazil’s collapsing health service, new COVID variant, raise Indigenous risk
- The city of Manaus made world headlines last April when a first wave of the coronavirus swept through the city. Now that city, and the entire state of Amazonas, is being swept by a second wave of the pandemic, which is shaping up to be far worse than the first.
- Indigenous people are especially vulnerable, with their mortality rate from COVID-19 at least 16% higher than the Brazilian average. Now, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, located 852 kilometers (529 miles) from Manaus, near the Colombia-Venezuela frontier, is being heavily impacted.
- São Gabriel has a large Indigenous population, and while it escaped the worst of the first wave of the pandemic, its meagre health system resources are now being overwhelmed. The state of Amazonas lacks sufficient hospital beds, its ICUs are overrun, and medical facilities lack sufficient oxygen.
- Of extreme concern is a new Brazilian coronavirus variant called P.1, which recently appeared in Amazonas state. While more research is needed, one possibility is that P.I. is bypassing the human immune response triggered by the initial coronavirus lineage that ravaged Manaus last year. This means people could be reinfected.

How the pandemic impacted rainforests in 2020: a year in review
- 2020 was supposed to be a make-or-break year for tropical forests. It was the year when global leaders were scheduled to come together to assess the past decade’s progress and set the climate and biodiversity agendas for the next decade. These included emissions reductions targets, government procurement policies and corporate zero-deforestation commitments, and goals to set aside protected areas and restore degraded lands.
- COVID-19 upended everything: Nowhere — not even tropical rainforests — escaped the effects of the global pandemic. Conservation was particularly hard in tropical countries.
- 2019’s worst trends for forests mostly continued through the pandemic including widespread forest fires, rising commodity prices, increasing repression and violence against environmental defenders, and new laws and policies in Brazil and Indonesia that undermine forest conservation.
- We don’t yet have numbers on the degree to which the pandemic affected deforestation, because it generally takes several months to process that data. That being said, there are reasons to suspect that 2020’s forest loss will again be substantial.

Ribeirinhos win right to waterside Amazon homeland lost to Belo Monte dam
- Some 40,000 people — mostly peasant farmers, fisherfolk, traditional families (living from the collection of forest products), Indigenous people, and ribeirinhos — were evicted to make way for the Belo Monte dam, constructed between June 2011 and November 2019.
- The ribeirinhos (traditional riverine people) were not politically well organized at the time, and along with many others, were forced out of their traditional riverside homes and livelihoods. Most moved into urban housing developments away from the Xingu River, where they were forced to pay rent and acclimate themselves to urban life.
- But over the years the ribeirinhos gained political savvy. Negotiating with Norte Energia, the consortium that built and runs Belo Monte, they gained the right to establish a collectively owned Ribeirinho Territory beside the Belo Monte reservoir.
- Under the agreement, 315 families are each to be provided with 14 hectares (34 acres) for individual use. Added to that are areas for collective use and a forest reserve — a combined total of 20,341 hectares (50,263 acres). However, with the deal now seemingly sealed, Norte Energia has backpedaled, wanting to propose a different agreement.

Historical analysis: The Amazon’s mineral wealth — curse or blessing?
- Mining of gold and other precious metals in the Amazon fueled the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, while bringing misery and death to unknown hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people and African slaves, forced to work the mines.
- Modern industrial mining came to the Brazilian Amazon in the late 1940s as transnational firms began digging up and processing manganese, iron, bauxite, zinc, and other ores. Like the earlier iterations of mining, transnational firms, investors, and nations profited hugely, while local people saw little benefit.
- Brazil offered massive subsidies and tax incentives to attract transnational mining companies, and built giant public works projects, including mega-dams, transmission lines, and roads to provide energy and other services to the mines. Though the government offered little to disrupted traditional communities.
- All this came with extraordinary socio-environmental costs, as Brazilian Amazon deforestation soared, land and waterways were polluted, and Indigenous and riverine peoples were deprived of their traditional ways of life and lands, and suffered major public health repercussions. This mining trend continues today.

In an oil spill’s aftermath in Peru, new voices lead an Indigenous fight for justice
- The women formed three organizations that have been crucial over the past six years in pushing for improvements to public health, the environment, and economic stability.
- Through the consolidated and strengthened organizations, the women of Cuninico have worked to successfully reclaim crucial community rights.
- Among their victories is a pending court order for the government to remediate the 2014 oil spill and commit to basic community services.

Nazareth Cabrera fights for Colombia’s Indigenous Uitoto with the strength of her words
- She was instrumental in blocking the entry of mining companies into the community, and also advocates for social causes such as the rights of women and children.
- Those who know this powerhouse 52-year-old woman say she is among the “grains of sand” that contribute to the collective process of caring for the Amazon.

In the Colombian Amazon, a leader trains her people to save the forest
- María Clemencia Herrera Nemerayema is the founder of the School of Political Education in the Colombian Amazon, which trains Indigenous people to protect their territory; her dream is to establish an intercultural university in the heart of the jungle.
- This year, the Indigenous leader won the Bartolomé de las Casas Prize from the Spanish Foreign Ministry for her work in defending Indigenous territories, based on restoring local cultures and sustainably using Amazonian resources.
- She has been working for more than 30 years to empower Amazonian women through education.
- One of the organizations she founded is Mujer, Tejer y Saberes (Women, Weaving and Knowledge), in which displaced Indigenous women based in Bogotá put their knowledge into practice to generate an income.

‘She goes and helps’: Noemí Gualinga, Ecuador’s mother of the jungle
- Her sister, Patricia, and daughters, Nina and Helena, are much more recognizable as defenders of the rights of the Indigenous Kichwa people of Sarayaku, in the Ecuadoran Amazon.
- But within her community, there’s almost universal recognition that Noemí Gualinga is the one person everyone can turn to for help.
- Known as the “mother of the jungle,” she’s been particularly busy this year, helping her community deal with the double blow of the COVID-19 pandemic and a major flood.

Brazil sees record number of bids to mine illegally on Indigenous lands
- An exclusive investigation shows Brazil’s mining regulator continues to entertain requests to mine in Indigenous territories, which is prohibited under the country’s Constitution.
- There have been 145 such applications filed this year, the highest number in 24 years, spurred by President Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric and a bill now before Congress that would permit mining on Indigenous lands.
- Prosecutors and judges say that by maintaining these unconstitutional mining applications on file and not immediately rejecting them, the mining regulator is granting them a semblance of legitimacy.
- Mining represents a real threat to the Brazilian Amazon, where the protected status of Indigenous territories is the main reason the forests they contain remain standing.

Peruvian Indigenous groups thwart oil drilling in their territory — for now
- An immense oil concession known as Lot 64 overlaps with much of the Indigenous Achuar Nation’s 8,020-square-kilometer (3,100-square-mile) homeland, as well as a portion of the neighboring territory of the Wampis people.
- The Achuar and the Wampis say they do not consent to drilling for oil on Lot 64, and thus, any exploitation of the lot would be illegitimate under Peruvian law.
- They argue that drilling for oil and transporting it to the coast would almost certainly contaminate rivers vital to their existence in this corner of the Amazon.
- In July, the private company that had a 75% stake in the concession withdrew from its contract, but the Indigenous communities see this as a temporary victory, as the government-backed oil company, Petroperu, has indicated it will seek a new partner to tap into Lot 64’s reserves.

New Latin American treaty could help protect women conservation leaders — and all environment defenders
- On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we once again highlight the work of women leaders in Amazon conservation, and look at an international agreement that could help protect environmental defenders in Latin America — one of the most dangerous places in the world to be an environmental activist, especially as a woman.
- We speak with Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and executive director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network, or WECAN International, who tells us about some of the most inspiring women she’s worked with who are fighting to protect their communities and their forests in the Amazon, and discusses the groundbreaking Escazu Agreement, which would help protect defenders of the environment across Latin America.
- We also speak with Nicolas Bustamante Hernandez, a contributor to Mongabay who recently profiled an ornithologist and activist in Colombia named Yehimi Fajardo. Bustamente Hernandez tells us how, via the Alas Association she helped establish, Fajardo’s work has led hundreds of Indigenous children in Colombia’s Putumayo department to become avid birders, able to recognize the songs of birds in the region and to more fully appreciate the important role birds play in the local ecosystem.

2020 fires endangering uncontacted Amazon Indigenous groups
- Amazon fires this year are seriously threatening Indigenous territories in which isolated uncontacted Indigenous groups make their homes. Brazil has an estimated 100+ isolated Indigenous groups living within its borders, more than any other Amazonian nation.
- Particularly threatened by fires in 2020 are the isolated Ãwa people who live on Bananal Island in Tocantins state; the uncontacted Awá inhabiting the Arariboia Indigenous Reserve in Maranhão state; and uncontacted groups in the Uru Eu Wau Wau Indigenous territory in Rondônia and Ituna Itatá Indigenous territory in Pará, the Brazilian state with the highest deforestation and land conflicts rates.
- All of these Indigenous territories are under intense pressure from land grabbers, illegal loggers and ranchers, with many of this year’s fires thought to have been set intentionally as a means of converting protected rainforest to pasture and cropland.
- Meanwhile, the Jair Bolsonaro government has hobbled IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, defunding it and preventing it from fighting fires, causing one critic to accuse the administration of having “waged war against Indigenous peoples” and of “an ongoing genocide.”

Bushmeat hunting: The greatest threat to Africa’s wildlife?
- Protected area managers in many countries across Africa say that bushmeat hunting is the biggest threat they face.
- Bushmeat hunting is a complex issue that is closely linked to development and is influenced by a diverse range of factors that vary from place to place.
- Zoonotic diseases have become an issue of global concern amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with the bushmeat trade seen as a possible source of new infections.
- Despite its perceived threat to African wildlife, there’s not as much research being funded to look into the bushmeat trade as there is for higher-profile threats such as ivory and rhino horn poaching.

Camila Chindoy, the Indigenous daughter poised to lead her Amazon community
- Her mother previously served as governor of the reserve; if Chindoy is elected, community leaders and supporters say, it will be thanks to her selfless commitment to bettering the lives of the residents while being a responsible steward of the environment.
- Chindoy currently leads the reserve’s team in charge of implementing a territorial environmental management plan, a road map for the sustainable use of resources in the reserve.
- If elected, the 25-year-old would be one of the youngest matriarchs of her reserve.

‘Digital land grab’ deprives traditional LatAm peoples of ancestral lands: Report
- South American nations, including Brazil and Colombia, are increasingly using georeferencing technology for registering land ownership.
- However, if this high-tech digital technique is not backed up by traditional ground truthing surveys, it can be used by landgrabbers and agribusiness companies to fraudulently obtain deeds depriving traditional communities of their collective ancestral lands, according to a new report.
- The georeferenced process is being partly funded by the World Bank, which has provided US $45.5 million for digital registration of private rural properties in Brazil. Georeferencing is allowing the international financial sector to play a key role in converting large tracts of rainforest and savanna into agribusiness lands.
- To prevent this form of land theft, prospective landowners’ claims need to be independently verified via a centralized governmental land registration system organized to resolve land conflicts and to detect and eliminate local and regional corruption.

Colombia, ethnobotany, and America’s decline: An interview with Wade Davis
- Wade Davis is a celebrated anthropologist, ethnobotanist, photographer, and author who has written thought-provoking accounts of indigenous cultures around the world. Through his writing, Davis has documented the disappearance of indigenous languages and cultures, the loss of which is outpacing the destruction of the world’s rainforests.
- Davis’s newest book, Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia, traces the path of the Magdalena River as a vehicle to tell the story of Colombia, including the nation’s tumultuous recent past, the tenuous peace of its present, and its future promise. Colombia holds a special place for Davis: it trails only Brazil in terms of biodiversity, is geographically and culturally diverse, and has gone to great lengths to recognize indigenous rights and protect its forests.
- Davis’s research into Colombia, indigenous cultures, and other societies has given him an unusually broad perspective with which to evaluate recent developments in the United States, which he compared to a collapsing empire in a commentary he authored in August for Rolling Stone.
- Davis talked about his career path, his new book, and the decline of America in an October 2020 interview with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.

Mining covers more than 20% of Indigenous territory in the Amazon
- A new report from the World Resources Institute and the Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network reveals that mining has impacted more than 20% of the Amazon’s Indigenous territory.
- The analysis shows that deforestation rates are as much as three times higher on Indigenous lands with mining compared to those without.
- The study’s authors suggest that improved law enforcement, greater investment in Indigenous communities and stricter environmental protections are necessary to combat the surge of mining in the Amazon.

Protect Indigenous People’s rights to avoid a sixth extinction (commentary)
- In this commentary, David Wilkie, Susan Lieberman, and James Watson from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) argue that protecting Indigenous Peoples’ traditional land rights is one of the most effective strategies for preventing the Sixth Mass Extinction.
- “Most of humanity have been grossly negligent in our use of the Earth,” they write. “Wise stewardship of natural resources by Indigenous Peoples within their traditional territories has had a profoundly positive impact on the conservation of plant and animal species on land and in rivers, lakes, and coastal waters.”
- “The decisions Indigenous Peoples have made over generations have done more to protect the planet’s species and ecological systems than all the protected areas established and managed by individual countries combined. The majority of our planet’s last wild, ecologically intact places on land exist because Indigenous Peoples rely on them for their wellbeing and cultural sense of self.”
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Exploring the history of the Amazon and its peoples: an interview with John Hemming
- Dr. John Hemming is a legendary author and historian who has spent the past six decades documenting the history of Indigenous cultures and exploration in the Amazon.
- Hemming has traveled in the remotest parts of the Amazon, visiting 45 tribes and being present with Brazilian ethnographers at the time of four first contacts. Of the course of his career Hemming has authored more than two dozen books from the definitive history of the Spanish conquistadors’ conquest of Peru to a 2,100-page, three-volume chronicle of 500 years of Indigenous peoples and exploration in the Amazon.
- Hemming’s latest book, People of the Rainforest: The Villas Boas Brothers, Explorers and Humanitarians of the Amazon, tells the remarkable story of the Villas Boas brothers, middle-class Brazilians from São Paulo who would go on to become arguably the largest driving force for the conservation of the Amazon rainforest and recognition of the rights of its Indigenous peoples.
- Hemming spoke about his work and the legacy of the Villas Boas brothers in a September 2020 interview with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.

Rieli Franciscato died protecting isolated indigenous peoples in the Amazon (commentary)
- Rieli Franciscato of the Brazilian government’s Indigenous affairs agency FUNAI was killed last week on the edge of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous territory in Rondonia.
- Franciscato, 56, was a sertanista, a “field person” who works in the most remote parts of the Brazilian Amazon. Franciscato specifically worked to protect the rights and territory of Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in the Amazon rainforest. These peoples are sometimes referred to as “uncontacted tribes” in the press.
- In this commentary, Enrique Ortiz, Senior Program Director at the Andes Amazon Fund, writes that Franciscato “died in the hands of those he loved” and notes his death was probably at least part to blame on outsiders who have been invading Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau lands and threatening the tribe. “One can imagine that the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau can see the advances into their territory as a threat to their survival,” he writes.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Mercury from gold mining contaminates Amazon communities’ staple fish
- The four species of fish most commonly consumed by Indigenous and riverine people in the Brazilian state of Amapá contain the highest concentrations of mercury.
- In some species, researchers found levels of mercury four times in excess of World Health Organization recommendations.
- The mercury comes from gold-mining activity, where it’s used to separate gold from ore before being burned off and washed into the rivers.
- The health impacts of mercury contamination are well-documented, and include damage to the central nervous system, potentially resulting in learning disabilities for children and tremors and difficulty walking for adults.

In the Amazon, women are key to forest conservation
- Women are a driving force in the movement to protect the Amazon rainforest, the largest rainforest in the world.
- Joining us on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast is environmental journalist Sarah Sax, who recently wrote about the Women Warriors of the Forest, an all-female Indigenous group that is employing new tactics and building new alliances to protect the forests they call home.
- We also interview Dr. Dolors Armenteras, who is a pioneer in the use of remote sensing to monitor Amazon forests and biodiversity, and has been named one of the most influential scientists studying forest fires.
- Despite her pedigree, Armenteras has faced discrimination as a woman scientist, and discusses how she is supporting the next generation of women scientists to help them overcome such biases.

Ex-Wall Street ‘quant’ wields data to replant charred Madagascar rainforests
- After retiring early from a career as a quantitative analyst for stock portfolios worth billions of dollars, Matt Hill started a nonprofit to restore rainforest in eastern Madagascar.
- Applying the data skills he honed in his former career, Hill is working out better ways to regrow rainforest burned accidentally or for agriculture.
- Although few projects have adopted that kind of approach, it is gaining approval among reforestation experts internationally.
- They say reforestation can have far greater success if practitioners develop an evidence base to guide which tree species to plant, where and when to plant them, and how to grow them.

Latin America unites to fight global inequalities in new regional pact
- More than 2,800 environmentalists, academics, lawyers, activists, and community leaders from Mexico to Argentina have already signed the pact.
- The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated inequality in Latin America, where five of the top 10 countries with the highest transmission rates in the world are located. The ILO estimates more than 41 million people will lose their jobs in the region, while the U.N. has warned that extreme poverty will surpass 83 million people, and deforestation has increased, putting ecosystems and Indigenous communities in jeopardy.
- Some of the proposals in the pact include cancellation of external debt, offering universal basic income, creating solidarity-based tax reform, building post-extractivist economies, and prioritizing food sovereignty and local health care systems, among others.

‘It’s taking away our wise men’: COVID-19 hits Peru’s Indigenous people hard
- The Ombudsperson’s Office reports that 19 health centers in the Amazonian provinces of Condorcanqui and Bagua, with almost 100,000 inhabitants, have closed as the pandemic takes hold.
- Many of the dead in the Indigenous communities are tribal elders, considered the “spiritual guides” of the communities’ struggle for rights and justice.
- Indigenous leaders accuse the government of neglect in its handling of the pandemic response, especially with regard to Peru’s Amazonian communities.

Amazon ‘women warriors’ show gender equality, forest conservation go hand in hand
- Recognition of the role that Indigenous land plays in forest protection, biodiversity conservation and environmental health has been growing, but less attention has been paid to the role of women.
- An increasing body of research and experts are calling for a greater recognition of the link between gender equality and environmental protection.
- Examples like the Guajajara “women warriors” in the Brazilian Amazon show how greater inclusion of women can benefit conservation goals.

COVID is killing Indigenous leaders (commentary)
- Jose de los Santos Sauna Limaco, a political leader of the Kogi peoples of the Sierra Nevada of Colombia, died last week of COVID-19. He was 44.
- Santos Sauna is one of several indigenous leaders who’ve fallen during the pandemic. Mark Plotkin, an ethnobotanist who founded the Amazon Conservation Team, says the world is a poorer place with the loss of people like Santos Sauna.
- “Not only have the Kogis lost a great, wise and inspiring leader, but so has the entire world,” Plotkin writes. “Those of us who were blessed enough to know him will mourn him forever.”
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Why I stand for my tribe’s forest: It gives us food, culture, and life (commentary)
- For the occasion of International Indigenous Peoples Day August 9, 2020, Arkilaus Kladit, a member of the Knasaimos-Tehit people in South Sorong Regency in West Papua Province, Indonesia, writes about the importance of his tribe’s customary forests.
- Arkilaus, who is a member of the Knasaimos Indigenous Peoples Council, describes his tribe’s long struggle to secure recognition of his tribe’s customary lands by the Indonesian government.
- Arkilaus explains how the Knasaimos-Tehit people are dependent on forests for food, community resilience, and cultural significance.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

In Colombia, a protected park is buffeted by social, environmental conflicts
- When Serranía de Las Quinchas Regional Natural Park was established in Colombia in 2008, thousands of campesinos were already living there on land previously dominated by paramilitaries.
- Many productive activities have been restricted and residents are requesting state support.
- There have been reports that the army is eradicating illicit coca crops while disregarding health and safety protocols put in place to combat COVID-19.
- Residents of the park say they have no means of making a living and are worried about illegal logging, land ownership and oil infrastructure in the area.

In Bogotá, communities weave an unlikely wetland success story
- Around 27 years ago, a community on the northwest border of Bogotá launched a concerted campaign to defend the Conejera wetland against a city and business sector that saw it as disposable.
- The success of their efforts launched a long-standing community movement of wetland defenders in an otherwise urbanized city, where 98% of its original wetlands have been wiped out.
- Today the Colombian capital’s 15 official wetlands are home to dozens of endemic species, including 202 species of birds, and take up about 727 hectares (1,800 acres).

Deaths of Yanomami babies from COVID-19 bring anguish to mothers
- Three indigenous babies from the Yanomami Indigenous group who died with suspected COVID-19 infection were buried in a cemetery in the city of Boa Vista, in Brazil’s Roraima state, far from their villages.
- Their mothers don’t speak Portuguese and likely had no understanding of what would happen to their children’s bodies.
- It is a Yanomami tradition to cremate their dead, and the ritual can take more than a year to complete.
- Indigenous people are now reluctant to seek medical treatment for fear that their bodies will not be returned to the community if they die. A local NGO says the handling of the case shows continued disrespect for Indigenous culture.

Photos: In southern Papua, navigating an alien world built on palm oil
- In June 2019, photographer Albertus Vembrianto spent three weeks on assignment in the southern lowlands of Papua, Indonesia’s easternmost province, for Mongabay and The Gecko Project. He traveled through the villages of Indigenous Papuans whose land had been taken over by palm oil conglomerates.
- A decade ago, the Indonesian government promoted investment by plantation firms in this region with a vision of turning it into a major agribusiness hub. Today, Indonesia is the world’s top producer of palm oil, but many Papuans have lost their land and are struggling to acclimatize to a very new world, with their traditional food sources dwindling.
- Albertus’s photos were featured in an investigation into the operations of one of the these companies, the Korindo Group, recently published by The Gecko Project and Mongabay in collaboration with the Korean Center for Investigative Journalism-Newstapa and 101 East, Al Jazeera’s Asia-Pacific current affairs program.
- In this photo essay, Albertus, who is Indonesian, writes about his experience reporting in Papua.

Environmental defenders voice concerns as COVID-19 crisis deepens
- The Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA) has collected firsthand testimonies from women who are environmental defenders.
- In the recordings, they share their perspectives on family life, their conservation work, criminal and corporate abuse of the environment, and life at home in the time of COVID-19.
- Local groups are trying to respond to food shortages and lack of personal protective equipment, while also trying to mitigate loss of livelihoods.

The Consultant: Why did a palm oil conglomerate pay $22m to an unnamed ‘expert’ in Papua?
- In a year-long investigation with The Gecko Project, the Korean Center for Investigative Journalism-Newstapa and Al Jazeera, Mongabay traced a $22 million “consultancy” payment connected to a major land deal in Indonesia’s Papua province.
- It took us from South Korea and Singapore to the heart of the largest rainforest left in Asia, to find out how the payment helped make the Korindo Group one of the largest oil palm producers in the region.
- Photography by Albertus Vembrianto.

Using photography and indigenous art to help Amazon communities during COVID
- Xapiri, a Cusco-based art gallery and media production studio, is working to raise awareness of the situation and funds to help indigenous peoples navigate the COVID crisis. In response to the pandemic, Xapiri has jettisoned its plans to visit indigenous partners in the field and instead focused on online fundraising campaigns.
- In a June 2020 interview with Mongabay, Jack Wheeler, Xapiri’s founder and director, spoke about his group’s work, the transition to a COVID world, and why now is a more important time than ever to support indigenous communities.

For Amazon indigenous facing COVID-19, distance to ICU beds poses dire threat
- Remote indigenous communities deep in the Brazilian Amazon lack access to the ICU beds and pulmonary ventilators that have become essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new mapping initiative shows.
- More than half of the 3,141 villages analyzed are more than 200 kilometers (120 miles) from an ICU bed, and 10% of these villages are more than 700 km (435 mi) away.
- A case in point: The Yanomami people of Maturacá village would need to travel three hours by plane to a health facility that has a ventilator; in some of the most distant villages, travel by river can take more than a week.
- Even when they reach a health facility, there are fewer than 5,000 ventilators across Brazil’s entire Amazon region, and more than half of municipalities — home to more than 8 million inhabitants, including 203,000 indigenous people — don’t have one at all.

In Colombia’s La Guajira, the native Wayuu are forgotten in the dust
- Synonymous in Colombia with extreme poverty and abandonment, the peninsula of La Guajira faces drought and coal dust pollution from one the world’s biggest coal mines.
- One of the main gateways for Venezuelan migrants, La Guajira’s desert is a chaotic border where smugglers operate in the open, international aid is weak, and there is little to offer to either the indigenous population or those arriving from Venezuela.
- The workers at the Cerrejón coal mine have demanded better working conditions, but measures to prevent COVID-19 have put a planned strike on hold and threaten La Guajira’s inhabitants and the Wayuu, the biggest indigenous nation in Colombia.

Seed by seed, a women’s collective helps reforest Brazil’s Xingu River Basin
- Members of the Yarang Women’s Movement in Brazil have collected 3.2 tons of seeds over the past decade.
- The native seeds are sold to rural landowners and organizations to help replenish forests that have been degraded.
- The Yarang Women’s Movement is part of a seed network collective responsible for replanting nearly 6,000 hectares (14,800 acres) of land in Brazil’s Xingu River Basin.
- Unpredictable changes in weather patterns have made the seed-collecting process more challenging in recent years.

Amazon indigenous leader: Our survival is at stake. You can help (commentary)
- Beto Marubo, a representative of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley, warns that indigenous peoples in the Amazon face existential threats from rising deforestation, anti-environment and anti-indigenous policies from the Bolsonaro administration, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Marubo, whose indigenous name is Wino Këyashëni, is calling upon the outside world to pressure the Bolsonaro administration to protect indigenous peoples’ rights, lands, and livelihoods.
- He’s asking for (1) the Brazilian government to evict land invaders from indigenous territories, (2) restrictions on outsiders’ access to indigenous lands, and (3) logistical and medical support.
- This article is a commentary and does not necessarily reflect the views of Mongabay.

Indonesian environmental poet and Dayak leader Yohanes Terang, 1956-2020
- Biologist Erik Meijaard of Borneo Futures writes an homage to Yohanes Terang, a Dayak poet, who died May 6 in Ketapang District at the age of 63.
- Terang took up social and environmental activism long before it became a mainstream concern in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.
- Terang wrote poetry in Indonesian about the relationship between people and nature, and the challenges currently faced by both humanity and nature.
- This obituary is a commentary.

Yehimi Fajardo: A voice for the birds of Putumayo
- She has made censuses of the birds of her department and established bird-watching routes.
- Around 500 hundred people have attended the association’s courses and workshops.

The mining map: Who’s eyeing the gold on Brazil’s indigenous lands?
- Miners have their eyes on reserves that have been officially demarcated for 15 years and are inhabited by isolated indigenous peoples.
- Applications to mine on indigenous lands in the Amazon have increased by 91% under the Bolsonaro administration.
- The majority of applications to mine on indigenous lands are for areas in Pará, Mato Grosso, and Roraima.
- Among the applicants are mining giant Anglo American, small-scale cooperatives whose members are embroiled in a range of environmental violations, and even a São Paulo-based architect.

Everything you need to know about the Amazon rainforest: an interview with Mark Plotkin
- As Earth’s largest rainforest, the Amazon is the planet’s single greatest repository of biodiversity, houses the largest number of uncontacted indigenous tribes, and is home to the world’s mightiest river. Yet the Amazon faces a range of dire threats.
- A new book, The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know succinctly summarizes these issues but also adds important context, color, and factoids on why we should care about the fate of the Amazon.
- The book is written by Mark Plotkin, one of the world’s most foremost experts on ethnobotany and the co-founder of the Amazon Conservation Team, a non-profit that works with indigenous communities to conserve rainforests in the Amazon and northern Colombia.
- Plotkin talked about his new book during a May 2020 interview with Mongabay’s founder Rhett A. Butler.

South American indigenous peoples close territories in response to COVID-19
- Last month, indigenous leaders in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador began to restrict access of non-residents to their communities.
- Also in March, Colombia confirmed the first two COVID-19 cases from among members of indigenous communities. The two individuals belong to the Yukpa tribe, a community of about 250 people in the north of Santander, on Venezuela’s border.
- An indigenous leader in Peru who tested positive for COVID-19 has been the target of attacks on social networks.
- The National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia (ONIC) has asked the authorities to provide support to the community, which has been forced into crowded conditions and cordoned off by the police.

Using satellites to alert an Amazonian indigenous community of coca encroachment (insider)
- In early March 2020, Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler visited the tri-border area of Peru, Colombia and Brazil and used the opportunity to explore a cluster of potential deforestation hotspots detected by Global Forest Watch’s GLAD alert system.
- According to Global Forest Watch, the patches were small and dispersed. Therefore Butler expected to find small-scale clearing for subsistence or local agriculture. But he was in for a bit of a surprise: forest within an indigenous reserve was being cleared for coca, unbeknown to the local community.
- Given the sensitivity and the potential security implications of the issue, Mongabay won’t be disclosing the name of the community or the location of the coca fields.
- This post is insider content, which is available to paying subscribers.

Gold mining threatens indigenous forests in the Brazilian Amazon
- MAAP, a program of the organization Amazon Conservation, has documented more than 102 square kilometers (40 square miles) of mining-linked deforestation in the indigenous reserves of Kayapó, Munduruku and Yanomami in Brazil. Mongabay had exclusive access to the report prior to its release.
- Though mining is still illegal in indigenous reserves under Brazilian law, President Jair Bolsonaro has introduced a bill awaiting a vote in Congress that would to allow mining, oil and gas extraction and other uses of these lands.
- Human rights groups like Survival International hold Bolsonaro and his policies responsible for the loss of forest, as well as mercury pollution, societal disruption and the introduction of diseases such as malaria and potentially COVID-19 that result from mining.
- The groups say Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, in favor of developing the Amazon, has emboldened would-be miners.

Abraham Khouw, the professor who joined the Save Aru movement
- Professor Abraham Khouw is one of dozens of academics in the Indonesian city of Ambon who lent his expertise to the Save Aru movement in the mid-2010s.
- The movement formed after a company called the Menara Group got permits to clear nearly two-thirds of the Aru Islands’ rainforest for a giant sugar plantation.
- The academics lent extra firepower to the fight against the plantation, which was mainly driven by local indigenous communities.

Mika Ganobal, the civil servant who risked his job to save his homeland
- Several years ago, a plantation company nearly broke ground on a plan to clear more than half of the rainforest in Indonesia's Aru Islands.
- Local residents organized against the project. One of the leaders of the effort to stop it was a local bureaucrat named Mika Ganobal.
- Watch our video profile of Mika below.

Indigenous artists from the Amazon use art for environmental advocacy
- Visual artist Denilson Baniwa and singer Djuena Tikuna are taking the Amazon to galleries and stages around the world, sharing the rainforest’s socio-environmental diversity and bringing up questions about its future.
- Denilson, born in a village in the Middle Rio Negro region, mixes elements of Baniwa indigenous cosmology and contemporary aesthetics to create paintings, photographs and performances denouncing violence against indigenous Brazilian peoples.
- Djuena, born in the far western tip of the state of Amazonas, uses the Tikuna language as an instrument of resistance: in 2017, she became the first indigenous vocalist in history to sing at the Teatro Amazonas, Manaus’s legendary symbol of Amazonia’s elite.

2019: The year rainforests burned
- 2019 closed out a “lost decade” for the world’s tropical forests, with surging deforestation from Brazil to the Congo Basin, environmental policy roll-backs, assaults on environmental defenders, abandoned conservation commitments, and fires burning through rainforests on four continents.
- The following review covers some of the biggest rainforest storylines for the year.

Deforestation for potential rubber plantation raises concerns in Papua New Guinea
- The project, ostensibly for a 125-square-kilometer (48-square-mile) rubber plantation, began in mid-2018.
- Satellite imagery shows that Maxland, working with a local landowner company, has built logging roads and deforested patches of the Great Central Forest on Manus Island.
- Like Papua New Guinea as a whole, Manus is home to a wide variety of unique wildlife — just one aspect of the forest on which human communities have depended for thousands of years.
- Government forestry and environment officials were aware of the importance of the forest and a local forest management committee protested the project before it began, but it’s been allowed to continue anyway.

Women from the Xingu Territory unite against threats from Bolsonaro administration
- In May 2019, some 200 representatives from 16 different ethnicities gathered for the first women’s summit in the Xingu Indigenous Territory’s in the state of Mato Grosso. Feeling under threat from policies regarding native peoples under the Jair Bolsonaro administration and tired of their community roles being restricted to domestic tasks, the women met to discuss ways to occupy leadership roles alongside men and, in doing so, gain strength to protect their territory.
- Even though many men in the Xingu still disapprove of female empowerment, the event itself already led to changes in local gender relationships: During the summit, some domestic partners took responsibility for household tasks and childcare while the women were away. In the village where the event was held, the men took over traditional female jobs like collecting food, fishing and cooking for the hundreds of women present.
- This is a particularly delicate time in the region: 147 square kilometers (57.8 square miles) of the forest were destroyed in the Xingu Socio-environmental Biodiversity Corridor between July and August 2019 — 172% more than occurred during the same period last year. A mosaic composed of 21 indigenous reserves and nine conservation units, the corridor is home to one of Earth’s largest concentrations of environmental diversity.

Tropical forests’ lost decade: the 2010s
- The 2010s opened as a moment of optimism for tropical forests. The world looked like it was on track to significantly reduce tropical deforestation by 2020.
- By the end of the 2019 however, it was clear that progress on protecting tropical forests stalled in the 2010s. The decade closed with rising deforestation and increased incidence of fire in tropical forests.
- According to the U.N., in 2015 global forest cover fell below four billion hectares of forest for the first time in human history.

Beyond strikes: For these youths, climate activism starts at home
- In Asia, environmental youth activism has expanded beyond climate strikes and into action, advocacy and education.
- In Thailand, Pornchita Fahpratanprai and her community are battling to stop the construction of a new coal mine project.
- In Malaysia, Ili Nadiah Dzulfakar is improving climate literacy among the public, while Pradeep Karuturi is educating schoolchildren across India about climate change.

Illegal logging persists in Cambodia’s Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary: Report
- Cambodia’s Prey Lang forest was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 2016, but illegal land clearing within the protected area continues, a new report has found.
- Members of the Cambodian Youth Network (CYN), who recently patrolled 1,761 hectares (4,352 acres) of forest in Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, found that several hundred hectares of dense, evergreen forest had been cleared, and hundreds of trees had been marked for logging in the near future.
- CYN worries that if the clearing continues, the government could grant economic land concessions on those lands in the future.
- CYN has called on the Cambodian government to crack down on the illegal encroachment and stop any more forest from being cleared.

Carbon emissions from loss of intact tropical forest a ‘ticking time bomb’
- When undisturbed tropical forests are lost the long-term impact on carbon emissions is dramatically higher than earlier estimates suggest, according to a new study.
- Between 2000 and 2013, about 7 percent of the world’s intact tropical forests were destroyed, leading not just to direct carbon emissions but also “hidden” emissions from logging, fragmentation and wildlife loss.
- Another key difference between the old and new estimates is that the latter take into account the diminished carbon sequestration potential of these forests.
- The authors write that the indigenous communities who live in and protect about 35 percent of these forests will have a bigger role to play in the fight against climate change.

10 takeaways from Indonesia’s grassroots #SaveAru success
- The Save Aru campaign is one of Indonesia’s most successful grassroots movements in recent years.
- The people of Indonesia’s Aru Islands managed to defeat a plan to turn more than half of their archipelago into a massive sugar plantation.
- This month, Mongabay and The Gecko Project published a narrative article about the movement. Here are 10 takeaways from the article.

Saving Aru: The epic battle to save the islands that inspired the theory of evolution
- In the mid-1800s, the extraordinary biodiversity of the Aru Islands helped inspire the theory of evolution by natural selection.
- Several years ago, however, a corrupt politician granted a single company permission to convert most of the islands’ rainforests into a vast sugar plantation.
- The people of Aru fought back. Today, the story of their grassroots campaign resonates across the world as a growing global movement seeks to force governments to act on climate change.

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.

Interfaith leaders step up to protect the world’s ‘sacred’ rainforests
- In June 2017 — in response to the planetary climate crisis — Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist religious leaders joined hands with indigenous peoples from five tropical countries to form the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (IRI) — devoted to protecting the world’s last great rainforests.
- Since then, IRI has worked to engage congregations of all faiths around the globe in an effort to, through political pressure, protect the rainforests of Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Colombia and Peru — accounting for 70 percent of the world’s tropical forests.
- During Climate Week at the United Nations in New York City starting September 22, IRI will unveil its Faiths for Forests Declaration and action agenda, jumpstarting its global campaign to harness faith-based leadership and the faithful in recognizing tropical forests as “sacred” and humanity’s obligation to provide stewardship to these great bastions of biodiversity.
- IRI recognizes the staggering scope of the challenges that lay ahead — to create and energize a worldwide interfaith movement that will successfully pressure national governments to act on climate — national governments that have long backed industrial agribusiness, mining and timber extraction within the world’s last great rainforests.

Worldwide deforestation rising despite bold commitments, report finds
- In 2014, the New York Declaration on Forests set out bold commitments to stem deforestation, cutting it in half by 2020 and ending it entirely by 2030, along with global forest restoration targets.
- But a new assessment finds that, globally, the loss of forests is on the rise, at rates that are around 40 percent higher than five years ago when the agreement was signed.
- The report’s authors say that, despite the “sobering” findings, the assessment should serve as a call to action that more needs to be done to address deforestation and forest degradation.

The Pan Borneo Highway could divide threatened wildlife populations
- Crews are set to begin construction on a stretch of Malaysia’s Pan Borneo Highway in eastern Sabah state, involving the widening of the road from two lanes to four.
- The new divided highway will cross the Kinabatangan River and pass through a critical wildlife sanctuary that’s home to orangutans, elephants and proboscis monkeys, along with other wildlife species already hemmed in by the region’s oil palm plantations.
- Planners and politicians hope the road will stimulate local economies and bring in more tourists.
- Conservationists and scientists, however, are concerned that the highway could further section off animal populations and damage the current tourism infrastructure, unless certain mitigation measures are introduced.

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.

The Pan Borneo Highway brings wildlife threats to nat’l park doorstep
- The southern terminus of the Pan Borneo Highway in Malaysia extends to the edge of Tanjung Datu National Park in Sarawak.
- The highway’s proponents say the road is already bringing more tourists who are eager to see the park’s wildlife to the adjacent communities, helping to boost the local economy.
- But one of the world’s rarest primates, the Bornean banded langur, resides in the park, raising concerns in the conservation community that increased access could bring poachers into the park.

On Peru’s border, the Tikuna tribe takes on illegal coca growers
- Members of the Tikuna indigenous people in Peru’s border region with Colombia and Brazil have chosen to guard their forests against the rapid expansion of illegal coca crops, the plant from which cocaine is derived.
- Equipped with GPS-enabled cellphones and satellite maps, they confront loggers and drug traffickers who have threatened them with death.
- The community wants the government to do more to help them, including assisting in their transition to growing food crops from which they can make a legitimate living.

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.

Travelogue: Visiting an indigenous rainforest tribe in Borneo (Insider)
- Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler writes about his visit to Sungai Utik, a Penan Iban community in Indonesian Borneo last month.
- Rhett visited Sungai Utik to see how the community has protected their customary forest from logging and deforestation.
- Sungai Utik was recognized for their efforts with the prestigious U.N. Equator Prize last month.
- This post is insider content, which is available to paying subscribers.

In Nigeria, a highway threatens community and conservation interests
- Activists and affected communities in Nigeria’s Cross River state continue to protest plans to build a major highway cutting through farmland and forest that’s home to threatened species such as the Cross River gorilla.
- The federal government ordered a slew of measures to minimize the impact of the project, but two years later it remains unclear whether the developers have complied, even as they resume work.
- Environmentalists warn of a “Pandora’s box” of problems ushered in by the construction of the highway, including illegal deforestation, poaching, land grabs, micro-climate change, erosion, biodiversity loss and encroachment into protected areas.
- They’ve called on the state government to pursue alternatives to the new highway, including investing in upgrading existing road networks.

Lost in translation: Green regulations backfire without local context
- Strong green regulations modeled on those in industrialized countries don’t always have the intended effects of reducing conflict and environmental degradation, new research shows.
- These rules can place onerous burdens on small-scale producers that ultimately force them to go around the regulations, at times leading to more conflict and harm to the environment.
- The study’s author argues that regulations should be flexible enough to accommodate small-scale producers and the unique challenges they face.

Indigenous Iban community defends rainforests, but awaits lands rights recognition
- Over the past half century the rainforests of Borneo have been logged, strip-mined, burned, and converted for monoculture plantations. The forests that local people primarily relied upon for sustenance are now felled to feed commodities into the global market.
- But the Dayak Iban of Sungai Utik community in Indonesian Borneo has managed to fend off loggers and land invaders from their forest home.
- Sungai Utik’s efforts to sustainably manage its community forest in the face of large-scale deforestation and cultural loss across Borneo have won it accolades, including the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Equator Prize last month.
- During a June 2019 visit, Mongabay spoke with Apay Janggut, or “Bandi”, the head of the Sungai Utik longhouse about his community’s traditional practices, resistance to loggers, and efforts to adapt to issues facing indigenous peoples around the world.

Venezuela’s isolated indigenous groups under siege from miners, disease and guerrillas
- The Hoti, Yanomami and Piaroa, isolated indigenous groups in Venezuela, are under threat on several fronts.
- Mining, legal and illegal, is disturbing their lands. Some have been forced to labor in the mining industry and others have decided to leave their territories and go deeper into the forest.
- The measles epidemic that has erupted in Venezuela has decimated the Yanomami, and the government has failed to set up health services in their territories.
- The arrival of guerrilla groups like the ELN and FARC dissidents are a constant threat to isolated indigenous peoples.

Logging road construction has surged in the Congo Basin since 2003
- Logging road networks have expanded widely in the Congo Basin since 2003, according to a new study.
- The authors calculated that the length of logging roads doubled within concessions and rose by 40 percent outside of concessions in that time period, growing by 87,000 kilometers (54,000 miles).
- Combined with rising deforestation in the region since 2000, the increase in roads is concerning because road building is often followed by a pulse of settlement leading to deforestation, hunting and mining in forest ecosystems.

Out on a limb: Unlikely collaboration boosts orangutans in Borneo
- Logging and hunting have decimated a population of Bornean orangutans in Bukit Baka Bukit Raya National Park in Indonesia.
- Help has recently come from a pair of unlikely allies: an animal welfare group and a human health care nonprofit.
- Cross-disciplinary collaboration to meet the needs of ecosystems and humans is becoming an important tool for overcoming seemingly intractable obstacles in conservation.

‘We come from the earth’: Q&A with Goldman Prize winner Alfred Brownell
- In the early 2000s, Liberia’s government signed contracts worth tens of billions of dollars with resource extraction companies from across the world.
- ‘There was nobody in the government who really understood what value the forest has to the communities there,’ Brownell told Mongabay
- He argues that it’s time to invest in innovation and business models created by communities, to engage in extractive processes in forests without destroying them.

Gold, wood, religion: Threats to Colombia’s isolated indigenous peoples
- The Yurí and the Passé are the two indigenous tribes identified as living in a natural state in the Colombian Amazon. There are indications that some 15 other such tribes exist in the region.
- Mercury from illegal gold mining contaminates the rivers surrounding the protected area where the Yurí and the Passé live in isolation.
- In addition to the contamination, mafia groups and attempts by evangelists at making contact threaten the isolated tribes.

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.

’Green’ bonds finance industrial tree plantations in Brazil
- The Environmental Paper Network (EPN), a group of some 140 NGOs with the goal of making the pulp and paper industry more sustainable, released a briefing contending that green or climate bonds issued by Fibria, a pulp and paper company, went to maintaining and expanding plantations of eucalyptus trees.
- The report suggests that the Brazilian company inflated the amount of carbon that new planting would store.
- The author of the briefing also questions the environmental benefits of maintaining industrial monocultures of eucalyptus, a tree that requires a lot of water along with herbicides, pesticides and fertilizer that can impact local ecosystems and human communities.

Social media enables the illegal wildlife pet trade in Malaysia
- Conservationists say that prosecuting wildlife traffickers in Malaysia for trading in protected species isn’t easy, as traders have several loopholes to aid their efforts.
- One wildlife trafficker known as Kejora Pets has been operating in Peninsular Malaysia for years, selling “cute” pets to individuals through social media.
- Malaysia’s wildlife act doesn’t address the posting of protected animals for sale on social media, and operators like Kejora Pets appear to avoid ever being in possession of protected animals, allowing them to skirt statutes aimed at catching illicit traders.
- Proposed changes to Malaysia’s wildlife act could offer some relief to besieged populations of protected species by making it easier to prosecute online trafficking of protected animals.

Mercury poisoning chief among health problems facing Peru’s uncontacted tribes
- In Peru, about 5,000 indigenous people belonging to 18 different ethnic groups live in isolation, and many more live in a state of initial contact with the outside world.
- One of the most urgent problems facing these communities is mercury contamination, which affects dozens of members of the Nahua indigenous community.
- The Nahua live in the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti Territorial Reserve. They have access to a medical post, but it lacks necessary resources and permanent staff.

Historic win by Ecuador’s Waorani could re-shape extraction activities
- The Waorani indigenous community in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest filed a lawsuit against three government bodies earlier this year for conducting a faulty consultation process in 2012 that resulted in putting their territory up for an international oil auction.
- A regional court tribunal ruled in favor of the community, saying the 2012 consultation process violated the community’s rights.
- The ruling is historic, as it gives communities an extra legal tool to demand their right to self-determination and opens the door to reshape the country’s free, prior and informed consent laws.

’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.

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.

In the Solomon Islands, making amends in the name of conservation
- The Kwaio people of the Solomon Islands have been working with scientists to protect their homeland from resource extraction and development.
- But violent clashes in 1927 between the Kwaio and the colonial government created a rift between members of this tribe and the outside world.
- To heal those old wounds and continue with their conservation work, a trio of scientists joined the Kwaio in a sacred reconciliation ceremony in July 2018.
- Kwaio leaders say that the ceremony opened the door to a more peaceful future for their people.

DRC’s Virunga to welcome visitors again after 8-month closure
- Escalating violence in mid-2018, resulting in the deaths of seven park rangers, forced the closure of Virunga National Park to visitors.
- The park is known for its diverse wildlife, especially its mountain gorillas, as well as its active volcano, but its location in eastern DRC is one of the most volatile regions on earth.
- After assessing the security of the park, officials will reopen stable areas for visitors on Feb. 15 interested in trekking to see the gorillas and to visit the rim of the volcano.

Short film celebrates community forest titles in DRC
- In 2018, the DRC government approved a plan for communities to gain legal control over their local forests.
- The Rainforest Foundation UK and its partners in the DRC have been working with 10 participating villages to help community members understand their legal rights to manage local forests.
- RFUK and its partners maintain that, in addition to the benefits the communities may derive, local management of forests could help halt deforestation, keeping billions of tons of carbon locked away in the fight to slow global climate change.

Butterfly business: Insect farmers help conserve East African forests
- As many as 1,200 people living around the forests of coastal Kenya and Tanzania have turned to butterfly farming to make a living. Many of them were once loggers who now defend the forest.
- Three butterfly-farming initiatives aim to conserve forests while generating sustainable incomes for local communities by raising and selling pupae to research institutes and butterfly houses in Europe and Turkey.
- The most successful of the initiatives is helping to conserve the 420 square-kilometer (162 square-mile) Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve in Kilifi county, Kenya, the last large remnant of a forest that once stretched from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique.
- By contrast, the two Tanzanian projects are currently challenged by a government ban on wildlife exports.

What’s in a name? The role of defining ‘wilderness’ in conservation
- In a recent opinion piece published in the journal Nature, several ecologists question recent efforts to delineate areas of wilderness and intactness around the world to define conservation targets.
- They argue that it would be better to build broadly supported consensus that includes the perspectives of local and indigenous communities.
- But the leader of a team that recently mapped out the remaining wilderness on land and in the ocean said that identifying these areas and developing new targets that incorporate their conservation is critical because current international agreements do not prioritize their protection.

Conservation groups press world leaders to protect 30% of the planet
- Thirteen nature conservation organizations are urging world leaders to back a plan to protect 30 percent of the world’s surface and oceans by 2030.
- Recent research has shown that less than a quarter of the world’s wilderness still remains.
- The group released a statement as negotiators were meeting in Japan to begin drafting a plan to meet that goal.

Wildlife rangers in DRC park report waning motivation, job satisfaction
- Surveys of more than 60 rangers in Kahuzi-Biega National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo cite poor salaries, few chances for advancement, and security concerns as reasons for their low satisfaction with their jobs.
- The authors of the study, published in the journal Oryx, believe that the rangers’ discontentment leads to waning motivation in protecting the park and its wildlife, which includes the critically endangered Grauer’s gorilla.
- Improved conditions, in the form of better salaries, opportunities for promotion, and better support from the judicial and legal authorities, could translate into improved protections for the park, the researchers write.

Bans on the bird trade in South America yield mixed results
- After decades of rampant exports, several South American countries banned the international trade of wild-caught birds.
- In some cases, in concert with conservation, the bans have helped bird populations recover, leading several countries to invest in birdwatching tourism.
- However, the bans have also led to a significant illegal trade on the continent and a shift of the economic benefits from the wild bird trade to other countries.

Liberia’s community forestry becoming a front for deforestation: Report
- A report released by Global Witness late last year alleges that Liberia’s forestry laws are being “hijacked” by logging companies.
- These logging companies can potentially put vast areas of Liberia’s remaining rainforests at risk of large-scale deforestation.
- There’s historical precedent for the concerns under the current law: in 2012, Liberia was rocked by a scandal over permits meant to enable private landowners to enter into logging agreements with outside parties.

Solomon Islands province bans logging in bid to protect environment
- The leaders of Central Island province, part of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, have decided not to issue new business licenses to logging and mining companies following a local petition and recent reports detailing the lack of sustainability and legality in the country’s logging sector.
- Local and international organizations have blamed unsustainable and corrupt logging practices for destroying the islands’ sensitive habitats and creating civil strife among the people who live there.
- Provincial governments in the Solomon Islands lack the power to block logging outright, leading Central Island province to take the licensing approach to stop new operations.

The man who made Ecuador’s wooden Tigua masks famous
- The 73-year-old artisan, woodworker, and painter takes his inspiration from Andean life for his artwork and colorful wooden masks.
- Long a part of traditional indigenous culture, popular use of the masks has declined over time but the art of the craft remains very much alive.

‘Ecosystem guardians’ remain passionate despite dicey conditions
- A recent investigation conducted by several conservation groups has found that working conditions for wildlife rangers in Central America are difficult and in some cases dangerous.
- Most of the rangers surveyed reported facing life-threatening situations during the course of their duties.
- However, these ‘ecosystem guardians’ also remain passionate about their role in protecting Central America’s natural treasures.

Karen indigenous communities in Myanmar have officially launched the Salween Peace Park
- Last month, indigenous Karen communities, the Salween Peace Park Committee, and the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) officially launched the Salween Peace Park in the Mutraw District of Myanmar’s Kayin State.
- A three-day event in mid-December 2018 that featured traditional Karen ceremonies and performances was held to mark the ratification of Salween Peace Park’s charter, which was developed by Karen communities to embody their “aspirations for genuine peace and self-determination, environmental integrity and cultural preservation,” according to a statement.
- The Salween Peace Park encompasses 5,485 square kilometers (nearly 1.4 million acres) of the Salween River Basin, including more than 340 villages, 139 demarcated Kaw, 27 community forests, four forest reserves, and three wildlife sanctuaries.

Rapid population drop weakened the Grauer’s gorilla gene pool
- The loss of 80 percent of all Grauer’s, or eastern lowland, gorillas in the past two decades has led to a severe reduction in the subspecies’ genetic diversity, new research has found.
- That slide could make it more difficult for the fewer than 4,000 remaining Grauer’s gorillas to adapt to changes in their environment.
- Scientists look for signs of hope in the animal’s sister subspecies, the mountain gorilla, which, studies suggest, has adapted to its own low levels of genetic diversity.

Indigenous peoples denounce ongoing land rights violations in Ecuador
- Indigenous leaders in Ecuador say that a lack of progress toward addressing key issues stands in the way of their fundamental territorial rights.
- Concerns include resource extraction projects initiated without proper prior consent and consultation, as well as the activation of several mining and oil concessions in Ecuador.
- The outcry comes at a time when indigenous peoples are increasingly being recognized as key partners in ensuring the protection of the world’s tropical forests.

Dam drove ‘collapse’ of rainforest bird populations in Thailand
- A 165-square-kilometer (64-square-mile) reservoir in the lowland rainforest of Thailand has led to the “collapse” of the region’s bird populations, according to recent research.
- Built in 1986, the Ratchaprapha dam altered the habitat and led to deforestation, resulting in the decline of many species and the local extinction of perhaps five.
- The authors of the study say their findings highlight concerns about whether hydroelectric dams “are worth the environmental costs.”

Stop importing illegal timber, PNG activists tell China at APEC Summit
- Environmental and community groups from Papua New Guinea issued a letter for Chinese President Xi Jinping during the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in the capital, Port Moresby.
- In the letter, the authors asked that China, the destination for the bulk of PNG’s timber exports, regulate imports to discourage the illegality that plagues PNG’s forestry sector.
- They highlight the negative effects that rampant logging has had on the country’s ecosystems and forest-dependent communities.

Honduras aims to save vital wildlife corridor from deforestation
- Honduras has pledged to remove livestock from the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site that’s home to jaguars, tapirs and macaws.
- The reserve is found in the Moskitia region’s rainforests, around 30 percent of which have been cleared in the past 15 years, largely due to cattle and livestock ranching.
- Conservation groups hailed the move as one that would benefit both Honduras and the world because of the region’s biodiversity and carbon stocks.

The last trees of the Amazon
- Illegally-sourced timber from Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia are incorporated into the international market with falsified official documents that are almost never verified.
- Timber traffickers are now pursuing new species of trees, but the countries’ governments do very little to protect the species.

Roads divide opinions along with forests, study finds
- A team of researchers found that support for new road construction was split among indigenous communities living in Malaysia.
- In general, people living in communities near an existing highway were more likely to support roads than those living in villages farther away from the highway.
- The authors write that the findings lend support to the need for comprehensive social impact assessments before and during the construction of new roads.

Chinese demand wiping out forests in the Solomon Islands: New report
- Logging companies are harvesting timber from the forests of the Solomon Islands at about 19 times the sustainable rate, according to an analysis by the watchdog NGO Global Witness.
- More than 80 percent of the Solomons’ log exports go to China.
- Global Witness is calling on China to build on its efforts to develop its “Green Supply Chain” by requiring companies to verify that the timber they import comes from sustainable and legal sources.

In a first, DRC communities gain legal rights to forests
- Provincial authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo have approved forest concessions for five communities.
- Following the implementation of a new community forest strategy in June, this is the first time the government has given communities control of forests.
- Sustainable use of the forest is seen by conservation and development organizations as a way to both combat rural poverty and fight deforestation.

Land rights, forests, food systems central to limiting global warming: report
- In the wake of the dire, just released UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, a climate advocacy group known as CLARA (Climate, Land, Ambition and Rights Alliance) has published a separate report proposing that the world’s nations put far more effort into land sector measures to store carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
- They suggest that these nature-oriented, land-based approaches could be far more effective, and more rapidly implemented, than relying on costly or largely untested high tech solutions such as bioenergy, carbon capture-and-storage, and geoengineering.
- Among the approaches CLARA proposes are the establishment of far stronger land rights for indigenous peoples (who are among the world’s best forest stewards), as well as a serious reduction in deforestation and the restoration of forest ecosystems worldwide.
- The CLARA report also calls for the transformation of agriculture (less tilling, less fertilizers, more support for small farms), and a global revolution in dietary habits, including a reduction in meat consumption and less food waste.

Fire fundamentally alters carbon dynamics in the Amazon
- With higher temperatures and increasingly severe droughts resulting from climate change, fires are becoming a more frequent phenomenon in the Amazon.
- New research finds that fires fundamentally change the structure of the forest, leading it to stockpile less carbon even decades after a burn.
- The research also shows that the burning of dead organic matter in the understory can release far more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought.

To conserve West Papua, start with land rights (commentary)
- West Papua Province in Indonesia retains over 90 per cent of its forest cover, as well as some of the world’s most biologically diverse marine areas.
- The drive to become a conservation province, however, runs the risk of repeating past mistakes that have disadvantaged indigenous communities and left their customary land rights unrecognized.
- We recommend that the recognition of customary land and resource rights should be prioritized, followed by strengthening the management capacity of customary institutions while improving the markets and value for forest-maintaining community enterprise, as we illustrate with the District of Fakfak.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Kenya’s Mijikenda people revive sacred homesteads to protect the forest
- Kenya’s Mijikenda indigenous people have long revered and protected the forests surrounding their ancestral homesteads, known as kayas, which dot the country’s southeastern coast.
- Today, the 45 kayas and their surrounding forests face many threats. Illegal logging, mining, agricultural encroachment, land grabbing, and a spate of murders targeting the very elders who protect them have all worn away at the kayas’ biological and cultural integrity.
- In response, the Mijikenda, with the help of outside NGOs, have launched new efforts to protect the kaya forests, starting with an effort to revitalize their traditional culture among the younger generation.

How land is stolen in Colombia
- Mongabay learned that the Superintendent of Notary and Registry has a record of empty lands being used illegally in seven Colombian departments.
- The illegally-used land is in the departments of Norte de Santander, Antioquia, Meta, Caquetá, Casanare, Cesar, and Vichada.
- The land makes up a total of 762,807 hectares (almost 1,885,000 acres).

Drone used to confirm existence of uncontacted Amazon tribe (video)
- The Brazilian government used a drone to help confirm the presence of an uncontacted indigenous group deep in the Amazon rainforest.
- FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, undertook an expedition to an area near the Brazilian border with Peru to confirm the presence of voluntarily isolated peoples along the Juruazinho River.
- To confirm the presence of the group without encroaching on their territory, FUNAI flew a drone over the forest and photographed huts and crops amid a section of felled trees.
- The drone also filmed two individuals walking, one of whom was carrying a spear or pole.

In Brazil, a forest community helps seed new trees far and wide
- Brazil’s Atlantic Forest is dotted with quilombos, communities originally founded by former slaves, some of which have been around for more than 300 years.
- Following the example of indigenous communities in the Xingu area of Mato Grosso state, quilombos in São Paulo state’s Vale do Ribeira region are collecting and selling seeds as a source of income.
- They ship the seeds by mail, in mixed batches called muvuca, to landowners who use them to reforest degraded lands through direct seeding.
- The project has not only helped financially empower the quilombos, but also raised the communities’ understanding and appreciation for the native trees and plants of their land.

Recovering conservationist: Q&A with orangutan ecologist June Mary Rubis
- The rainforest in the Malaysian state of Sarawak is one of last remaining habitats of the nearly extinct Bornean orangutan.
- Orangutan conservation efforts have made the region a top priority for protecting the iconic species, but Malaysian conservationist June Mary Rubis says these efforts often sideline the indigenous peoples who live along with the great apes.
- Mongabay spoke with Rubis after she gave the keynote speech at the recent conference of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, in which she reflected on mainstream conservation narratives, politics, and power relations around orangutan conservation in Sarawak and elsewhere in Borneo.
- Rubis says she believes indigenous knowledge is crucial for the success of conservation and community development in orangutan landscapes.

‘High risk’ that China’s timber from PNG is illegal: New report
- China, as the main destination for Papua New Guinea’s timber, could help tackle illegality in PNG’s forestry sector with stricter enforcement, according to a new report from the watchdog NGO Global Witness.
- The report contends that companies operating in Papua New Guinea continue to harvest timber unsustainably, often in violation of the laws of a country that is 70 percent forest.
- Global Witness calls for a moratorium on logging operations and a review of permits to harvest timber.
- The organization also argues that Chinese companies should increase their own due diligence to avoid purchasing illegally sourced timber.

Indigenous peoples control one-quarter of world’s land surface, two-thirds of that land is ‘essentially natural’
- A new study makes a significant contribution to the growing body of research showing that recognizing the land rights of and partnering with indigenous peoples can greatly benefit conservation efforts.
- An international team of researchers produced a map of the terrestrial lands managed or owned by indigenous peoples across the globe, which in turn allowed them to assess “the extent to which Indigenous Peoples’ stewardship and global conservation values intersect.”
- The researchers determined that indigenous peoples have ownership and use or management rights over more than a quarter of the world’s land surface — close to 38 million square kilometers or 14.6 million square miles — spread across 87 countries and overlapping with about 40 percent of all terrestrial protected areas on Earth.

Smartphone app helps indigenous communities fight deforestation
- Using a system called ForestLink developed by Rainforest Foundation UK, members of the Masenawa community documented the presence of an illegal gold mining camp in the Madre de Dios region of Peru.
- The police then responded by destroying the mining equipment at the camp and arresting five people suspected of participating in illegal mining.
- The biodiverse Madre de Dios region of the Amazon has been besieged by illegal gold mining, which has caused widespread deforestation.

DRC adopts a strategy that will bolster community forestry, conservation group says
- A new community forestry strategy in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) could help provide Congolese communities with a say in the management of the country’s forests.
- A group of local and international organizations, government agencies and community groups developed the strategy to strengthen the capacity of provincial authorities and ensure that the country’s community forestry laws do in fact include and benefit communities.
- The plan calls for an “experimental phase” over the next five years to gradually provide access to areas of the roughly 700,000 square kilometers (more than 270,000 square miles) of available forest through community management permits.

In Peru, coca puts one of the world’s best coffee crops at risk
- Of the more than 8,400 hectares (nearly 21,000 acres) of coffee planted, only 2,330 hectares (about 5,700 acres) remain in operation.
- A buffer zone around Bahuaja-Sonene National Park has been impacted: Drug trafficking has expanded into the protected area, damaging more than 400 hectares (over 980 acres) of important biological corridors.
- Coffee production of the area’s central coffee cooperative, Cecovasa, has dropped from 8.5 million pounds to 600,000 pounds, jeopardizing the group’s survival.

Field Museum honors Peruvian organization for its conservation work with indigenous groups
- The Instituto del Bien Común, a Peruvian organization that works with indigenous communities, has received this year’s Parker/Gentry award for conservation from the Field Museum of Chicago.
- The organization has mapped more than 7,000 indigenous territories in Peru, which serve as a baseline for the Peruvian government on indigenous land.
- The group was also involved in the effort to designate Yaguas National Park, the country’s newest protected area, in January this year.

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.

Hunters are wiping out hornbills in Ghana’s forests
- According to a new study, Ghana is losing hornbill species to “uncontrolled” hunting, mostly for meat, from its forested parks and reserves.
- The researchers found that the five largest species of hornbills in the Bia Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, have disappeared in recent decades.
- The authors of the paper suggest that increased enforcement will help protect threatened hornbills, as well as other wildlife species, in areas under intense pressure from humans.

Colombia’s supreme court orders government to stop Amazon deforestation
- Colombia’s supreme court granted protections, filed by 25 children and other young people, that affirm that deforestation in the Colombian Amazon violates their rights to health and life.
- In the ruling, the supreme court ordered the president of Colombia and environmental authorities to create an action plan to protect this important natural area.
- This article is a journalistic collaboration between Mongabay Latam and Semana Sostenible of Colombia.

For the Caiçaras, environmental laws in Brazil at odds with tradition
- The origin of the Caiçaras trace back to the early mixture of indigenous tribes, European settlers and African slaves in Brazil.
- For the last 300 years the Caiçaras subsisted on fishing and farming in one of the best conserved stretches of Atlantic Forest.
- Confined between the Atlantic Ocean and the Serra do Mar mountain range, Caiçaras lived in relative isolation until the 1970s, when the creation of the BR-101 road opened the doors to mass tourism.
- In just the last few decades, real estate speculation and the enforcement of strict environmental laws have threatened the Caiçara’s traditional way of life.

Papuan chef Charles Toto serves up sustainability and environmental protection in a platter
- Charles Toto is the founder of the Jungle Chef Community, a network of enthusiasts from across the Indonesian region of Papua who promote sustainable living and environmental protection through local cuisine.
- Toto came up with the idea after seeing foreign documentary makers and tour groups embarking on weeks-long treks in the Papuan wilderness with nothing more than instant and canned food.
- Over the years, he has learned to make the best use of the ingredients served up by the forest and the sea, and has taken his unique mission to culinary shows across Indonesia and abroad.
- But for Toto and his group, the opening up of Papua’s forests to palm oil and other commercial operators, aided by a government-backed infrastructure push, threatens the region’s natural wealth and heritage.

Island logging must go beyond current ‘best practices’ to avoid erosion: New study
- In a new study, a team of ecologists modeled what would happen if companies were allowed to log the forests of Kolombangara Island under several management scenarios, including those designed to minimize soil erosion and protect water quality.
- As the model simulated higher proportions of land clearance, the most stringent methods couldn’t stop the soil erosion that would foul clean water and agricultural land for the island’s people, as well as the habitats of local aquatic plants and animals.
- The Kolombangara Island Biodiversity Conservation Association is spearheading an effort to get intact forests at elevations higher than 400 meters (1,310 feet) designated as a national park on the island.

Greenpeace International ends its Forest Stewardship Council membership
- Greenpeace International announced on March 26 that it would not renew its membership with the FSC.
- The environmental organization says the FSC is not meeting its aims of protecting forests and ensuring that human rights are respected.
- Greenpeace and the FSC both say they intend to continue to engage with each other, despite the end of a long formal relationship.

How to build a Guardian: students learn about making technology work in the field
- Students in several science and tech schools in California are learning to design and build Guardians, acoustic monitoring devices to help protect rainforests from illegal logging while keeping a record of the sounds made by forest wildlife.
- Led by the non-profit Rainforest Connection, the students are constructing the Guardians from old, recycled smartphones armed with solar power and Google’s open source machine learning framework, TensorFlow, which transforms them into field-tough listening tools.
- The program also addresses the challenges of designing and developing technology for humid, rugged, remote field conditions typical of indigenous reserves and protected areas.

Indigenous Amazonian women demand end to extraction
- After long journeys by foot and bus, the women gathered in Ecuador’s capitol Quito to protest last week and call for a meeting with Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno.
- After several days of protest, Moreno agreed to a meeting with the group today.
- Amazonian leaders say they plan to discuss their mandate, particularly the sexual exploitation and harassment they face due to extractive activities in the Amazon and the loss of economic opportunity.

More than 40 percent of Madagascar’s freshwater life sliding toward extinction, IUCN finds
- In an assessment of 653 freshwater plant and animal species living on Madagascar and nearby islands, biologists found that 43 percent are threatened with extinction or there isn’t enough information to assess how well they’re doing.
- Nearly 80 percent of endemic plants examined in the study face extinction.
- The team lists unsustainable farming practices, deforestation, dam construction, mining and the overuse of natural resources, such as overfishing, as causes for the widespread declines.

Sarawak’s Penan now have detailed maps of their ancestral homeland
- Some 63 Penan communities came together to create 23 maps of their territory in central Borneo over the past 15 years.
- For three days in late November 2017, the Penan of the region celebrated the completion of the maps.
- The Penan now believe they are armed with the information that will help them hold on to their land in the face of pressure from outside timber and industrial agriculture interests.

Report finds projects in DRC ‘REDD+ laboratory’ fall short of development, conservation goals
- The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) released a new report that found that 20 REDD+ projects in a province in DRC aren’t set to address forest conservation and economic development — the primary goals of the strategy.
- The Paris Agreement explicitly mentions the role of REDD+ projects, which channel funds from wealthy countries to heavily forested ones, in keeping the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius this century.
- RRI is asking REDD+ donors to pause funding of projects in DRC until coordinators develop a more participatory approach that includes communities and indigenous groups.

Camera traps nab crop-raiding animals near farms in the Amazon
- A team of scientists from the U.K. and Brazil used an array of 132 camera traps to snap more than 60,000 photographs around 47 farming communities in the Amazon.
- They also conducted 157 interviews with local farmers about the animals that they found most frequently in their fields.
- The researchers found that the animals that were most destructive to crops were also among the ones nabbed most frequently by their cameras.

Two dozen Latin American countries sign agreement to protect environmental defenders
- The Principle 10 treaty deals mainly with the defense of environmentalists, promoting transparency in public access to environmental information, and shoring up environmental democracy and justice.
- The principles were approved on March 4 in the so-called Escazú Agreement in Costa Rica, by 24 countries from around Latin America and the Caribbean. It must now be ratified by the member countries.
- Environmental activists have hailed it as a massive step forward in the protection of environmental defenders, in a region where such advocates face the greatest threats to their lives.

Jaguar numbers rising at field sites, WCS says
- WCS reports that jaguar numbers have risen by almost 8 percent a year between 2002 and 2016 at study sites in Central and South America.
- The sites cover around 400,000 square kilometers (154,440 square miles) of jaguar habitat.
- Despite the promising findings, WCS scientists caution that habitat destruction, hunting in response to livestock killings, and poaching for their body parts remain critical threats to jaguars.

‘It’s our home’: Pygmies fight for recognition as forest protectors in new film
- A recent short film, Pygmy Peoples of the DRC: A Rising Movement, tracks the push for the recognition of indigenous land rights in the DRC.
- The film catalogs the importance of the forest to pygmy groups, as well as their role as stewards of the forest.
- A raft of recent research has shown that indigenous groups around the world often do a better job of protecting forests than parks and reserves.

‘Eye of Papua’ shines a light on environmental, indigenous issues in Indonesia’s last frontier
- For decades the Papua region in Indonesia has remained the country’s least-understood, least-developed and most-impoverished area, amid a lack of transparency fueled by a strong security presence.
- Activists hope their new website, Mata Papua, or Eye of Papua, will fill the information void with reports, data and maps about indigenous welfare and the proliferation of mines, logging leases and plantations in one of the world’s last great spans of tropical forest.
- Companies, with the encouragement of the government, are fast carving up Papua’s land, after having nearly depleted the forests of Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo.

Former Mongabay intern, now pop star, launches Amazon-friendly perfume
- Heather D’Angelo, a member of the pop band Au Revoir Simone, just introduced her fragrance line, Carta.
- Inspired by her love of mixing scents and conserving tropical rainforests, D’Angelo created an Amazon-friendly and inspired scent.
- The former tropical ecologist hopes to create an example for conservation success with her Peru-based NGO partner, Camino Verde.

In rural Indonesia, women spearhead the fight to protect nature
- This past July, some 50 environmental defenders, most of them women, from across Indonesia’s rural areas gathered for a discussion at an Islamic boarding school in West Java.
- The event highlighted women’s increasingly leading role in the grassroots movement to protect the country’s indigenous cultures, its natural resources and its long-held, but now threatened, traditional wisdoms and customs that champion sustainable development.
- Researchers say these women are at the leading edge of a new wave to defend and protect their homeland.

For Papuan villagers practicing conservation, a bid to formalize the familiar
- Indigenous Papuans of Saubeba village last month gave their support for a government-backed program to designate Tambrauw district, rich in biodiversity, a conservation zone.
- The villagers already practice sustainable management of the district’s lush forests and its resources, on which their lives depend.
- The discussion also sought to find solutions for land conflicts that often put legally vulnerable ethnic groups in peril as Tambrauw district pushes for the passage of an indigenous rights bill.
- One anticipated outcome of all this is the prospect of developing an ecotourism industry centered on the region’s natural riches, including its birds-of-paradise.

Forced out or killed: rare chimps go missing from Cameroon mountain forest
- The Endangered Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti) is the least numerous subspecies of chimpanzee, with a total population almost certainly less than 9,000, and probably less than 6,000 individuals.
- The estimated population is far smaller in Cameroon, where just four known populations number some 250 individuals, all located in the Northwest region.
- One of those groups, known as “The Great Apes of Tubah” was until recently found in the unprotected Kejom-Keku Mountain Forest.
- But the chimps haven’t been seen in three years, and conservationists fear they’ve been killed or forced to move on. A new road into the Kejom-Keku area has resulted in the loss of half its forest, as herders, farmers, loggers and poachers move in.

Culture keeps cattle ranching going in the Brazilian Amazon
- A recent study finds that financial incentives to move people away from cattle ranching don’t address cultural and logistical hurdles to changing course.
- Even though ranchers could earn four times as much per hectare farming soy or up to 12 times as much from fruit and vegetable farming, many stick with cattle as a result of cultural values.
- Ranchers, along with small-scale farmers, could benefit from targeted infrastructure investments to provide them with easier access to markets, according to the study.
- The researchers argue that their findings point to the need for policies that take these obstacles into account.

Parks and reserves ‘significant’ force for slowing climate change
- Protecting tropical forests between 2000 and 2012 amounted to a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to a 29 percent cut in deforestation rates.
- The authors used statistical models to estimate the amount of CO2 that would have been released if currently protected areas in South America, Asia and Africa had instead been cleared.
- The researchers argue that their findings bolster the conservation case for safeguarding tropical forests.

Two scientists and a NASA astronaut just biked across the Brazilian Amazon and want to tell you about it
- On Sept 26, two scientists and a NASA astronaut completed TransAmazon +25, a bike trek across the Brazilian Amazon.
- What makes this trip particularly interesting is that one of the cyclists, Osvaldo Stella, a mechanical engineer with the non-profit Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) in Brazil who works with small-scale farmers and other landowners to preserve and restore forests, did the same ride 25 years ago.
- Stella was accompanied on the journey by Paulo Moutinho, a co-founder and senior scientist at IPAM and a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Woods Hole Research Center in the USA; as well as Chris Cassidy, an astronaut with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Navy SEAL.
- “Gold mining, deforestation, and pastures covered many of the areas that were covered with forest 25 years ago,” Stella told Mongabay. ”The cities are larger but have not changed much in their overall appearance. One more sign that the current economic model generates much impact to the environment but little improvement in the quality of life of the people.”

FSC mulls rule change to allow certification for recent deforesters
- Motion 7 passed at the FSC General Assembly meeting in Vancouver on Oct. 13, indicating that the organization will pursue a change to its rules allowing companies that have converted forests to plantations since 1994 to go for certification.
- Current rules do not allow FSC certification for any companies that have cleared forested land since 1994.
- Proponents of a rule change say it would allow more companies to be held to FSC standards and could result in the restoration or conservation of ‘millions of hectares’ in compensation for recent deforestation.
- Opponents argue that FSC is bending to industry demands and that a rule change will increase the pressure for land conversion on communities and biodiversity.

New study: Risky roads cause more than just environmental harm
- Globally, 25 million kilometers (15.5 million miles) of paved roads are planned for construction by 2050.
- A new study, published Monday in the journal Current Biology, examines the environmental, socio-political and economic risks that accompany road building, particularly in the developing world.
- The authors argue for a more deliberate process to select sites for roads that will produce the most economic benefit while minimizing damage to the environment.

Belo Monte dam-opposing Brazilian activist wins prestigious environmental award
- Brazilian environmental and human rights activist Antônia Melo da Silva received the Alexander Soros Foundation Award earlier this month in recognition of her work organizing opposition to the Belo Monte dam and other infrastructure projects in the Amazon.
- Melo founded the “Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre” two decades ago in order to bring together the numerous people, communities, and organizations in the Altamira region of Brazil who oppose the Belo Monte hydroelectric project on the Xingu River.
- Alex Soros, founder of the Alexander Soros Foundation, said of Melo: “She will not be deterred. She will not stop fighting. She will never give up. And she deserves recognition and appreciation for her work.”

Leading US plywood firm linked to alleged destruction, rights violations in Malaysia
- An investigation has found that Liberty Woods, the top importer of plywood in the US, buys wood from a Malaysian company that has faced numerous allegations of environmentally unsustainable logging and indigenous rights violations.
- Environmental NGOs have accused the timber industry in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, of clearing too much forest too quickly, polluting streams and rivers and failing to obtain consent to log from local communities.
- Satellite imagery analysis in 2013 showed that, between 2000 and 2012, Malaysia had the world’s highest deforestation rate.
- In Sarawak, where logging company Shin Yang is based, only 5 percent of forests remain relatively untouched.

Birdwatching poised to take flight in Colombia, study reveals
- A new study identifies 67 communities with high potential for developing birdwatching ecotourism in Colombia.
- The country is home to more than 1,900 bird species, including 443 rare birds ‘highly valued by bird watchers.’
- The authors present ecotourism as an alternative to mining and logging as rural communities look for ways to develop economically after a decades-long conflict.

Liberian park protects Critically Endangered western chimpanzees
- The establishment of Grebo-Krahn National Park in southeastern Liberia was approved by the country’s legislature in August 2017.
- The 961-square-kilometer (371-square-mile) park is home to an estimated 300 western chimpanzees.
- There are about 35,000 Critically Endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) left in the wild, and Liberia is home to 7,000 of them.

Legendary musician Bruce Cockburn on music, activism, and hope
- Music has a unique ability to inspire awareness and action about important issues — and we’re excited to welcome a living legend onto the program to discuss that very topic.
- Bruce Cockburn, well known for his outspoken support of environmental and humanitarian causes, appears on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast.
- Our second guest is Amanda Lollar, founder and president of Bat World Sanctuary, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Texas.
- All that plus the top news!

Deforestation from gold mining in Peru continues, despite gov’t crackdowns
- A team of scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science found that, between 1999 and 2016, gold mining expansion cost the region 4,437 hectares (10,964 acres) of forest loss per year.
- Miners were working an area in 2016 that was 40 percent larger than it was in 2012.
- The findings, along analyses by ecologists at the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, indicate that increased enforcement by the Peruvian government has slowed the rate of deforestation.

Amazonian city drags down fish stocks in 1,000-kilometer shadow
- A study of tambaqui, a popular table fish, in the Brazilian Amazon found that fish caught near the city of Manaus are half the size of those upriver.
- Boats that buy the fish have brought the demand into the forest surrounding the city, and with holds full of ice, they’re able to travel further to bring tambaqui back to Manaus’ markets.
- The fishers living in the relatively pristine forest along the Purus River reported that tambaquie are smaller and harder to catch than they were previously, a trend extended 1,000 kilometers from Manaus, the researchers found.

Conserving the World’s Remaining Intact Forests (commentary)
- Intact forests are among the few places on earth where native trees and animals can fulfill their ecological roles outside the influence of industrial humankind.
- Some interpret “intact” to mean absent the influence of people, but people have lived within forests the world over for millennia and we are only beginning to understand how they have – and continue to – influence them.
- We cannot solve our most pressing environmental and development problems by compromising the few areas that remain whole.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

African great ape bushmeat crisis intensifies; few solutions in sight
- Gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos are all Critically Endangered or Endangered, and continue to decline toward extinction due to habitat loss and degradation, disease, and illegal hunting.
- Great ape poaching, which supplies growing urban and rural bushmeat markets, is now at crisis levels across Central Africa, and despite conservationists’ efforts, is showing no sign of slowing down.
- Vast networks of logging roads, modern weapons, cell phones, cheap motorized transportation, and high demand for wild meat in urban centers is driving the booming bushmeat market.
- Africa’s great ape sanctuaries rescue some survivors, and active outreach to local communities offer a partial solution. Educational programs for children and adults, teaching the value of great apes, are seen as essential.

Warnings and protests mark Brazilian President Temer’s trip to Norway
- Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon from 2015 to 2016 jumped 29 percent over the previous year, the highest rate of loss recorded since 2008.
- In a letter sent to Brazilian Minister of Environment Jose Sarney Filho, Norway’s Environment Minister, Vidar Helgesen, noted the “worrying upward trend” in deforestation since 2015 and warned that “Even a fairly modest further increase” in deforestation would mean that no further payments from Norway to Brazil would be forthcoming.
- A number of Norwegian environmental and rights-based organizations, including Greenpeace, Norwegian Church Aid, Norwegian Solidarity Committee for Latin America, and Rainforest Foundation Norway, say they are planning a protest in front of the Prime Minister’s residence in Oslo on Friday.

Religious leaders: Rainforest protection a ‘moral imperative’
- The three-day event, held in Oslo, Norway, includes discussions between NGOs, government agencies, universities, indigenous groups and major religions.
- The event marks the launch of the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, which seeks to build on the moral case for rainforest protection with tangible metrics and goals.
- Indigenous and religious leaders from 21 countries attended the event, organized by the UN Development Programme, Rainforest Foundation Norway and Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative.

‘Communities should be involved from the beginning’: Kalimantan villagers demand development plans respect their needs
- The government in Central Kalimantan’s West Kotawaringan Regency plans to construct a reservoir adjacent to Lake Gatal.
- Many in Rungun Village, a fishing community that relies on the lake, fear the project will leave them without a source of income.
- The project also threatens to flood fields, houses and sacred sites, community members say.

Over the bridge: The battle for the future of the Kinabatangan
- Proponents of the project contend that a bridge and associated paved road to Sukau would have helped the town grow and improve the standard of living for its residents.
- Environmental groups argue that the region’s unrealized potential for high-end nature tourism could bring similar economic benefits without disturbing local populations of elephants, orangutans and other struggling wildlife.
- The mid-April cancellation of the bridge was heralded as a success for rainforest conservation, but bigger questions loom about the future of local communities, the sanctuary and its wildlife.

Cross River superhighway changes course in Nigeria
- The 260-kilometer (162-mile) highway is slated to have six lanes and would have run through the center of Cross River National Park as originally designed.
- The region is a biodiversity hotspot and home to forest elephants, drills, Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees and Cross River gorillas.
- The proposal shifts the route to the west, out of the center of the national park, which garnered praise from the Wildlife Conservation Society.
- The route still appears to cut through forested areas and protected lands.

Women could be a key to great ape conservation in the Congo
- The Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education Center (GRACE), Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), and Coopera are all organizations working with women in and around the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help advance great ape conservation through education, empowerment, healthcare and food security access.
- Some examples: BCI helps fund pilot micro-credit projects for women who want to launch business enterprises, including soap and garment making. GRACE employs women as surrogate mothers for newly orphaned gorillas during an initial 30-day quarantine period.
- GRACE also provides women and their families with bushmeat alternatives by teaching them to care for and breed alternative protein sources. Coopera helps provide alternative food sources through ECOLO-FEMMES, an organization that trains women in livestock breeding and agriculture to reduce great ape hunting in Kahuzi-Biega National Park.
- Coopera, working with Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots, engages young rape victims in tree planting to provide food sources to wild chimpanzees. JGI’s women’s programs in Uganda and Tanzania keep girls in school through peer support, scholarship programs and sanitary supply access. Educated women have smaller families, reducing stress on the environment.

No safe forest left: 250 captive orphan chimps stuck in sanctuaries
- Cameroon currently has more than 250 rescued chimpanzees living in three chimp wildlife sanctuaries. Attempts to find forests into which to release them — safe from the bushmeat and pet trade, and not already occupied by other chimpanzee populations — have failed so far.
- The intensification of logging, mining and agribusiness, plus new roads into remote areas, along with a growing rural human population, are putting intense pressure on un-conserved forests as well as protected lands.
- Unless habitat loss, poaching and trafficking are controlled in Cameroon, reintroduction of captive chimpanzees may not be achievable. Some conservationists argue, however, that reintroduction of captive animals is needed to enhance genetic resilience in wild populations.
- If current rates of decline are not curbed, primatologists estimate that chimpanzees could be gone from Cameroon’s forests within 15 to 20 years.

Ebo forest great apes threatened by stalled Cameroon national park
- Cameroon’s Ebo forest is home to key populations of tool-wielding Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees, along with an unspecified subspecies of gorilla, drills, Preuss’s Red Colobus, forest elephants, and a great deal more biodiversity.
- The forest is vulnerable, unprotected due to a drawn-out fight to secure its status as a national park. Logging and hunting threaten Ebo’s biodiversity. The Cameroonian palm oil company Azur recently began planting a 123,000 hectare plantation on its boundary.
- The Ebo Forest Research Project (EFRP) has been working successfully to change the habits of local people who have long subsisted on the forest’s natural resources — turning hunters into great ape guardians. But without the establishment of the national park and full legal protection and enforcement, everyone’s efforts may be in vain.

Paying for healthcare with trees: win-win for orangutans and communities
- In 2016, the Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) was declared Critically Endangered by the IUCN. Orangutan habitat is fast disappearing due to deforestation caused by industrial agriculture, forest fires, slash and burn agriculture, and logging.
- One of the most important remaining P. pygmaeus populations, with roughly 2,000 individuals, is in Indonesia’s Gunung Palung National Park. Alam Sehat Lestari (Healthy Nature Everlasting, or ASRI) is partnering with U.S. NGO Health in Harmony and effectively reducing illegal logging in the park via a unique healthcare offering.
- When communities were asked what was needed to stop them from logging conserved forest, the people answered: affordable healthcare and organic farming. Expensive medical costs were forcing people to log to pay medical bills, while unsustainable agricultural practices depleted the soil, necessitating the use of costly fertilizers.
- The two NGOs opened an affordable health clinic, and later a hospital, offering discounted medical service to communities that stop logging. Forest guardians, recruited in every village, encourage people to curb deforestation. They also monitor illegal activity and reforestation, while offering training in organic farming methods. And the program works!

From conflict to communities: Forests in Liberia
- Liberia holds 40 percent of West Africa’s Upper Guinean rainforest.
- National and international organizations have worked with communities and the country’s leadership to clean up the corruption that many say has pervaded outside investments in timber and commercial agriculture.
- Currently, the Land Rights Act, which would give communities more control over their forests, awaits approval, but its progress has been paralyzed, in part by this year’s elections.

Forests provide a nutritional boon to some communities, research shows
- The new study, across 24 countries, shows a wide range in the variability of how communities use forests for food.
- The nutrients provided by wild fruits, vegetables, game and fish are critical to the nutritional health of some communities and should play a role in decisions about land usage.
- Land-use decisions should factor in the importance of forest foods to some communities, say the authors.

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.

The Republic of Congo: on the cusp of forest conservation
- The Republic of Congo’s high forest cover and low annual deforestation rates of just over 0.05 percent have led to the country being named as a priority country by the UN’s REDD+ program.
- The country has numerous protected areas and has signed agreements to certify the sustainability and legality of its timber industry.
- Skeptics caution that more needs to be done to address corruption and protect the country’s forests, a third of which are still relatively untouched.

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.

Proposed Trump policy threatens Critically Endangered Grauer’s gorilla
- The largest great ape, Grauer’s gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) has nearly disappeared in the past two decades. Numbers have plummeted by 77 percent; perhaps 3,800 remain. This animal, dubbed “the forgotten gorilla” because it was so little studied and was absent from most zoos, is in serious danger of extinction.
- Their slaughter was precipitated by the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s bloody civil war and by mining for coltan and tin ore, “conflict minerals” used in cell phones, laptops and other electronics. Gorillas are heavily poached by armed militias, miners, and less often, by refugees: the animals are being eaten nearly to extinction.
- The gorillas could suffer greater harm from warlords and miners if President Trump signs a proposed presidential memorandum leaked to Reuters. It would allow US companies to buy conflict minerals freely without public disclosure, likely increasing mining in the Congo basin — and poaching.
- Trump’s plan would nullify the current US Conflict Mineral Rule, passed with bipartisan support in 2010 and enacted as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Dodd Frank Act. Meanwhile, conservationists are hopeful that the Grauer’s gorilla can be saved — but only with a DRC and planet-wide response.

NGO takes action to save great apes in Cameroon’s Lebialem Highlands
- The Lebialem Highlands, in Cameroon’s southwest, is a rugged mountainous and plateaued region still inhabited by the Critically Endangered Cross River gorilla, the Endangered Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee and the Vulnerable African forest elephant.
- While the Cameroon government has taken action by protecting swathes of forest in the region, they admit to being unable to fully protect this habitat from incursions by surrounding communities, who go to the protected lands to farm, harvest bushmeat, hunt, log and mine.
- The Environment and Rural Development Foundation (ERuDeF), an NGO, has stepped in to help protect Highlands conserved areas — including the Tofala Hills Wildlife Sanctuary and the still to be created Mak-Betchou Wildlife Sanctuary.
- Supported by the Rainforest Trust-USA, ERuDeF is also working to improve local village economies and livelihoods in order to take pressure off of wildlife.

Indigenous traditional knowledge revival helps conserve great apes
- Deforestation and hunting continue to put Africa’s great apes at risk. National parks and other top down strategies have met with limited success. Many conservationists are trying alternative strategies, especially harnessing the power of indigenous taboos and other traditional knowledge to motivate local communities to protect great apes.
- In remote parts of Africa, taboos against hunting have long helped conserve gorilla populations. However, those ancient traditions are being weakened by globalization, modernization and Christianity, with anti-hunting taboos and other traditional beliefs being abandoned at a time when they are most needed to conserve great apes.
- Primatologist Denis Ndeloh Etiendem suggests a unique approach to reviving indigenous taboos and traditional beliefs — the creation of videos and films in which these beliefs are presented as a prime reason for conserving wildlife. He also urges that African environmental and general educational curricula focus not on endangered dolphins or whales, but on wildlife found in interior Africa.
- Development specialist Dominique Bikaba emphasizes the importance of moving away from top down federal management, and to local management of community forests by indigenous communities, whose leaders mesh traditional beliefs with modern conservation strategies. Prime examples are successes seen at Burhinyi Community Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Trade in skulls, body parts severely threatens Cameroon’s great apes
- Primatologists in Cameroon have been heartened in recent years by the discoveries of new great ape populations scattered around the country. Unfortunately for these gorillas and chimpanzees, their numbers are being rapidly diminished by deforestation and human exploitation.
- Cameroon’s gorillas and chimps have long fallen victim to the bushmeat trade, but they are now being hunted vigorously to feed a national and international illegal trade in skulls and other body parts which are being exported to Nigeria, other West African coastal states, and especially to the US and China, either as trophies or for use in traditional medicine.
- Great ape trafficking operations in Cameroon are starting to resemble the ivory trade: International trafficking networks are financing hunters, providing them with motorbikes and sophisticated weapons. A spreading network of logging and agribusiness roads and a porous border between Cameroon and Nigeria are further facilitating the trade.
- The seriousness of this poaching hits home when one considers that during a four-month period in 2015, anti-poaching and anti-trafficking squads in Cameroon arrested 22 dealers and seized 16 great ape limbs, 24 gorilla heads and 34 chimpanzee skulls in separate operations around the country. Law enforcement is likely only detecting 10 percent of the trade.

Pileated gibbons poached as bushmeat to feed illegal rosewood loggers
- There were 14,000 Pileated gibbons (Hylobates pileatus) in southeast Thailand in 2005, the last time a census survey was done. No one knows what those numbers look like today. The animals are falling victim to illegal hunting, which is the most serious threat to wildlife across Southeast Asia according to a recent study.
- The gibbons are especially being poached as bushmeat in Thap Lan National Park by poachers who feed on them when they venture deep into the forest to cut Endangered rosewood trees. ‘Hongmu’ (red wood) timber imports from the Mekong region to China between 2000 and 2014 were valued at nearly US $2.4 billion.
- Underfunded and under-equipped Thai park rangers regularly engage in firefights with the armed loggers, but it is believed that gibbon numbers continue to fall, as the animals are easily spotted when they sing, and are shot out of the trees.
- “In the past we used to hear [the gibbons singing] a lot, but now we don’t hear them so much. I think it’s people going into the forest to log that is affecting them,” said Surat Monyupanao, head ranger at Thap Lan National Park.

Great apes and greater challenges: Trafficking in Cameroon
- Cameroon is home to four great ape species and sub-species: the Western Lowland gorilla, Cross River gorilla, Central chimpanzee and Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee. Scientists still don’t fully understand these species and the secrets they may hold, especially for medical science, but those secrets will be lost if the animals are not conserved.
- A thriving trade in ape skulls, bushmeat, and live animal trafficking is threatening to wipe out ape populations already stressed by habitat loss and fragmentation. The Last Great Ape Organization (LAGA) is an NGO that is tackling the traffickers behind the African trade, but they are up against widespread government corruption that is hindering their efforts.
- While confiscations of trafficked great apes is important, estimates put the total of traded animals being detected by law enforcement along trafficking routes at a mere 10 percent. That’s why many conservationists argue that trafficking needs to be stopped not at national borders and airports, but nipped in the bud at the source, in the wild.

Local NGOs: Ecosystem services, not orangutans, key to saving Leuser
- Sumatra’s Leuser ecosystem covers 2.6 million hectares, encompasses two mountain ranges, three lakes, nine river systems and three national parks. It boasts 10,000 species of plant and 200 species of mammal — dozens found nowhere else on earth. Of the 6,000 orangutans left in Sumatra, 90 percent live in Leuser.
- But the region has been under siege by the government of Aceh, which has repeatedly tried to sell off concessions to oil palm companies that encroach on the borders of conserved lands.
- While international environmental NGOs have focused on saving Leuser’s orangutans, local NGOs have had far more success focusing on the US $23 billion in ecosystem services provided by the preserve — including flood prevention, water supply, agro-ecology, tourism, fire prevention, carbon sequestration, and more.
- Many rural Sumatrans see orangutans not as important endangered species to be protected, but rather as garden and farm pests. Local organizers like Rudi Putra and T.M. Zulfikar are building a homegrown Sumatran conservation movement that relies heavily on litigation over the potential loss of Leuser’s ecosystem services.

The year in tropical rainforests: 2016
- After 2015’s radical advancements in transparency around tropical forests between improved forest cover monitoring systems and corporate policies on commodity sourcing, progress slowed in 2016 with no major updates on tropical forest cover, resistance from several governments in releasing forest data, and some notable backtracking on zero deforestation commitments.
- But even without the pan-tropical updates, we know that deforestation increased sharply in the Brazilian Amazon, which accounts for the world’s largest area of tropical forest.
- Low commodity prices may have bought some relief for forests.

Raging Amazon forest fires threaten uncontacted indigenous tribe
- Small groups of Guajajara Indians, the Awá’s neighbors in the Amazon, reportedly battled the blaze for days without the assistance of government agents until Brazil’s Environment Ministry launched a fire-fighting operation two weeks ago.
- Some 50 percent of the forest cover in the territory was destroyed by forest fires started by loggers in late 2015, and the Environment Ministry has warned that the situation is “even worse this year.”
- Despite illegal loggers having destroyed more than 30 percent of the forest in Awá territory, the land contains some of the eastern Amazon’s last remaining patches of rainforest.

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