If you’re in the United States, your meal might come with a side of deforestation.  The US imported palm oil, cattle products, soybeans, cocoa, rubber, coffee and corn linked to an estimated 122,800 hectares (303,445 acres) of tropical deforestation between October 2021 and November 2023 — an area the size of the city of Los Angeles, according to a new report provided by the NGO Trase for Global Witness. More than a third (33.8%) of the deforestation was linked to oil palm imports, primarily from Indonesia. Cattle products, sourced mainly from Brazil, Australia and Mexico, were the second ..read more

JAKARTA — Fear among Indonesia’s ruling class of losing control of natural resources to Indigenous people is why the country’s parliament continues to delay passing a long-awaited bill on Indigenous rights, according to activists. The bill was proposed in 2012 and has been placed on parliament’s list of national priority legislation every year since 2014, but never passed since. A lawmaker on the legislation committee discussing the bill now says that’s because it keeps being blocked by two of the biggest parties in parliament. Luluk Nur Hamidah said her committee had as early as 2020 submitte ..read more

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government is resuming a controversial policy of exporting lobster larvae — the latest chapter in an eight-year saga that began over concerns for wild lobster stocks and led to a fisheries minister being jailed for corruption. The country’s current fisheries minister, Sakti Wahyu Trenggono, said recently that the decision to reinstate the export policy was to capitalize on the global multimillion-dollar lobster trade. The government initially banned exports of lobster larvae in 2016 to prevent the overharvesting of wild stocks from the country’s rich waters. For now, e ..read more

The “People of the Sun,” as the Xokleng Indigenous people of Brazil call themselves, are no strangers to conflict and violence. In the early 20th century, as the southern region of the country was colonized by newly arrived Germans and Italians, bugreiro militias hired by the imperial government decimated an estimated two-thirds of their population. “There are accounts of bugreiros killing pregnant women and throwing babies and children up in the air to be impaled,” Brasílio Priprá, a 65-year-old Xokleng authority, told Mongabay at the Free Land Camp (Acampamento Terra Livre, ATL), the largest ..read more

Illegal trafficking of shark fins and bodies from Ecuador to Peru has gone on for years. On Feb. 6, Ecuador announced measures to restrict fishing of these animals. The announcement came in response to an ultimatum given in November 2023 by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) demanding the country take measures to guarantee sustainable shark fishing. This followed CITES’ findings of a series of irregularities in shark trading, primarily discrepancies in the import and export numbers of fins reported by Ecuador and Peru. Ecuador had until ..read more

CÁCERES, Brazil — Fisher and bait seller Enilza Silva, 52, is a daughter of Pantanal fishers. When she was younger, Silva tried to keep a job in the municipality of Cáceres, in Mato Grosso state, but the river always called her back. She decided to return to the banks of the Paraguay River to live among fish, tuiuiú birds (Jabiru mycteria), alligators and jaguars. Silva has been fishing for 15 years and is worried about the approval of a new bill that banned commercial fishing in Mato Grosso on Jan. 1 for five years. Authored by the state’s governor, Mauro Mendes, the law, known in Brazil as C ..read more

Drax, a major global manufacturer of wood pellets for bioenergy, has joined a California nonprofit in a controversial plan to build two industrial-scale wood pellet plants in the state. The two mills combined will be capable of making and exporting 1 million tons of pellets annually, primarily for Asian markets. The proposed California siting of two large biomass mills would mark a major expansion of the industry outside of the U.S. Southeast, where most pellet making is currently centered. The project has raised red flags with forest advocates. Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR), a state-f ..read more

Bangladesh plans to phase out diesel-powered irrigation pumps for solar ones to cut carbon emissions, but the country’s farmers have expressed concern about the availability of power during bad weather and the uncertainty of costs. The initiative is touted as ensuring the South Asian country will generate an additional 480 gigawatt-hours of clean energy annually, and is part of the government’s commitments to cut emissions under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Diesel-run irrigation pumps account for about 1.6% of Bangladesh’s total greenhouse gas emissions; the government has a goal of cutti ..read more

Streets lie deserted. Gardens have overgrown homes. Doors and windows are bricked up. The Bebedouro neighborhood in Maceió, in Brazil’s northeastern coastal state of Alagoas, is a shadow of its former self. And soon not even that. Every building there is numbered. As soon as a property has been fenced off by iron sheets, the bulldozers will appear to flatten the land. Large parts of the historical area have already been turned into an anonymous plain. Bebedouro is one of Maceió’s suburbs where officially nobody can live anymore. Following heavy rains in February 2018, large cracks appeared in ..read more

Some $5 million worth of timber exported from the Democratic Republic of Congo to China in the second half of 2022 was felled illegally, according to a watchdog report. The timber was exported by Congo King Baisheng Forestry Development, known variously as Cokibafode or CKBFD in short, which in April 2022 was found by DRC authorities to have been awarded concessions in violation of local law. U.K.-based advocacy group Global Witness traced some of the wood to these disputed concessions. It also gathered evidence that the company has been logging without regard to forest management plans, echoi ..read more