By Mongabay.com Forest clearing detected by Brazil’s deforestation alert system fell to the lowest level in nearly five years, according to data released last week by the country’s space agency, INPE. INPE’s satellite-based tracking system recorded deforestation of 162 square kilometers in March, bringing the total loss over the past twelve months to 4,816 square kilometers, the lowest annual level registered since May 2019. This 12-month tally is down 53% relative to this time last year. The deforestation alert system run by Imazon, an independent Brazilian NGO, reports an even larger decline...
Mongabay
By Spoorthy Raman 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 communit...
Mongabay
By Aimee Gabay 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 (PI...
Mongabay
By Sean Mowbray 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 Consequently, concrete is one of the most widely used materials on Earth, with its outdated linear “take-make-waste” production model making it one of the most environmentally harmful.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 colos...
Mongabay
By Charles Mpaka 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 wildli...
Mongabay
By Andrew WasleyAramís CastroElisângela Mendonça 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...
Mongabay
By Letícia Klein 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,...
Mongabay
By Sonam Lama Hyolmo 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,” say...
Mongabay
By Aimee Gabay Plans to relocate an Indigenous community from a tiny Caribbean island off Panama to the country’s mainland to escape rising seas have been delayed due to administrative issues, previous COVID-19-related complications, and poor budgeting. Residents say the government has failed to integrate traditional and local knowledge in the relocation and site development plans. President Laurentino Cortizo told residents of the Indigenous Guna that the new site would be completed by Sept. 25, 2023. But no one has been given keys yet and the site has no basic services, such as water or sewa...
Mongabay
By Aimee Gabay The mood is tense. After months of delays, the EU will soon vote on a long-awaited piece of legislation that will require European companies to integrate environmental and human rights due diligence into their corporate policies and risk management systems. This directive, known as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), is one among various regulatory frameworks that state and corporate actors have been hesitant to adopt in recent years to reach climate and biodiversity goals. According to industry experts, this is due to standards being “impractical” or t...
Mongabay
To continue enjoying content, please agree to our Terms of Use for Users that includes our collection and use of your browsing data, which is incorporated into our Privacy Policy.