When around 70,000 Indigenous Maasai were expelled from their lands in northern Tanzania in 2022, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. For years, the Tanzanian government has systematically attacked Maasai communities, imprisoning Maasai leaders and land defenders on trumped-up charges, confiscating livestock, using lethal violence, and claiming that the Maasai’s pastoralist lifestyle is causing environmental degradation—a lifestyle that has shaped and sustained the land that the Maasai have lived on for centuries. This rise in criminalization, especially in the face of mining, development, and conse ..read more

In eastern Sierra Leone, straddling the border of Liberia, lies Gola Rainforest National Park, one of the last remaining intact tracts of the tropical Upper Guinean forests in West Africa. Towering trees with massive buttress roots create a dense, emerald-hued canopy where monkeys hoot, malimbes chatter and hornbills flutter between the branches with their high-pitched honks and impressive wingspans. Along the park’s fringes, 122 communities own small patches of the jungle within the four-kilometer-wide (2.5-mile) buffer zone. In the past, people here relied on these community forests to harve ..read more

Indigenous organizations from Peru and Brazil are joining forces to push their respective governments to safeguard a 16-million-hectare (39.5-million-acre) territorial corridor in the Amazon that stretches from the Tapiche River in Peru to the Yavarí River in Brazil. The 15 Indigenous organizations, which include the Indigenous Peoples of the Eastern Amazon (ORPIO) from Peru and the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javarí Valley from Brazil, plan to create a binational commission to define cross-border policies for the protection of peoples in isolation and initial contact (PIACI) who live i ..read more

Concrete forms the backbone of modern economies and societies: Roads, runways, homes, hospitals, banks, skyscrapers, sewers — just about any infrastructure you can imagine — depend on it. And as the global population grows, with rural people rushing to mega-cities for work, much more will be produced and poured. Consequently, concrete is one of the most widely used materials on Earth, with its outdated linear “take-make-waste” production model making it one of the most environmentally harmful. Manufacturing fresh concrete requires huge sums of extracted material, sucks up colossal amounts of w ..read more

BLANTYRE — Police and wildlife department officials in Malawi have arrested two men suspected of having killed an elephant in Kasungu National Park in the country’s west. In July 2022, 263 elephants were translocated to the park, which forms part of a transfrontier conservation area covering 32,000 square kilometers (12,400 square miles) across Malawi and Zambia. Parks authorities in the two countries, working alongside the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), have invested $8.5 million since 2017 to secure what was previously a hotspot for poaching and illegal wildlife trafficking. P ..read more

The US food and drink giant PepsiCo has been linked through its supply chain to Amazon deforestation and the invasion of Indigenous lands in Peru, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), Mongabay and Peruvian outlet Ojo Público can reveal. For at least three years, PepsiCo’s Peruvian suppliers have been sourcing palm oil from deforested territory claimed by the Shipibo-Konibo people in Ucayali, eastern Peru. The company, which manufactures snacks including Cheetos and Gatorade, runs a factory in Mexico that buys Peruvian palm oil after it has been processed at a Mexican refinery. That r ..read more

How do you identify sick oaks? For a long time, detecting unhealthy oaks and identifying the disease afflicting them required a lot of manual labor. Scientists often looked out of airplanes or walked through forests in a bid to detect and find visible symptoms. Even then, one couldn’t really be sure. New research attempts to find a solution to this long-standing problem. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describes how a team of scientists used remote sensing, spectroscopy and machine learning to not only identify unhealthy oaks before visua ..read more

When he was a teenager at the end of the 1980s, Evanildo Sena would come back from a day of fishing dragging 5 or 6 tons of fish with his canoe at a time — a task for which he needed the help of one or two buddies. But things have changed radically since those days on the Arraial do Cabo coast in the state of Rio de Janeiro, the fisherman says. “Back then, I would catch 300 or 400 kilos (660 or 880 pounds) of swordfish every time I went out. Now they have practically disappeared from our region,” he says. In the old days, swordfish were caught one at a time with a hook. Today, Sena fishes anyt ..read more

Indigenous peoples and local communities are already feeling the impacts of climate change, according to firsthand accounts documented in a new study. The authors of the paper, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, say the data provide evidence that climate change impacts on Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) are tangible, widespread and affect multiple elements of their ecosystems. “There is the idea existing in the scientific community that local knowledge is not a valid source of knowledge, and the study aims to bridge this gap,” says Victoria R ..read more

Clothing giants H&M and Zara have been linked to large-scale illegal deforestation, land-grabbing, violence and corruption in the Brazilian Cerrado, according to an investigation by Earthsight. Using satellite images, court rulings, shipment records and by attending undercover global trade shows, the U.K. NGO tracked nearly a million tons of tainted cotton going from companies in western Bahia, in the Cerrado, in supply chains serving H&M and Inditex, Zara’s holding company. The two companies in focus, SLC Agrícola and Grupo Horita (Horita Group), have a long history of illegal defores ..read more