Brazil’s Pará state has now protected almost all of its Amazonian coastline after establishing two new conservation units that make up the world’s largest and most conserved belt of mangroves. The environmental victory came after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed the decree for the two reserves on March 21, placing an additional 74,700 hectares (184,600 acres) of mangrove ecosystems under federal protection. “It’s another win for us to protect this mangrove here in the Amazon,” Sandra Regina Pereira Gonçalves, fisherwoman and national director and regional coordinator of the National ..read more

The Philippines’ southern region of Mindanao has a history of war and armed conflict going back more than 400 years. The contemporary conflict’s origin in this region of 26.3 million people is complex, stemming from decades-long disputes between military forces and Moro separatist groups. More recently, clashes have erupted anew due in part to longstanding issues over land and resource control, complicated by political rivalries and clan feuds. The warfare in Mindanao has resulted in the deaths and displacement of thousands of people. However, the extent to which this sociopolitical turmoil af ..read more

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has rolled out what it calls a “biodiversity management master plan” amid mounting criticism of the environmental and social threats posed by the construction of the country’s new capital city in the Bornean forest. The plan, published March 26, sets out a number of action plans to preserve wildlife habitat, protect species and restore damaged ecosystems in the new capital, known as Nusantara, through to 2029. The ultimate goal is to ensure 65% of the area of the new capital is tropical rainforest, by designating protected areas and rehabilitating degraded l ..read more

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