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The trillions of pieces of plastic currently roving through the global ocean are known to be an assault on life. Turtles get tangled up in discarded plastic fishing nets. Whales open their mouths to eat and unwittingly fill their stomachs with shopping bags. Filter-feeding fish and other organisms gobble up tiny plastic particles, poisoning themselves

A new map finds that roughly a third of U.S. mature forests are on federal lands, which President Biden appears eager to protect to store carbon. But much mature forest is also privately held, especially in the Southeast, and is at risk.

From oil to diamonds, offshore prospecting looms over South African fishing town DORINGBAAI, South Africa — On Sept. 23 and 24, 150 women in the small fishing town of Doringbaai, on South Africa’s west coast, held an event to protest the threat that offshore exploration for oil, gas, minerals and even diamonds poses to their

For decades, satellite images have clearly captured how rampant deforestation is destroying the Amazon rainforest. But what about the trees that remain standing? What do their dimensions tell us about our planet’s future? Quite a lot, in fact. Since 2018, a first-of-its-kind mission by NASA has deployed lasers mounted aboard the International Space Station to

The July 2021 rupture of a tailings dam at a diamond mine in Angola killed off much of the aquatic life in the Lova, Tshikapa and Kasai rivers. Twelve people are known to have died after exposure to the polluted water. A new report by the International Peace Information Service (IPIS), an independent research institute,

The Uinta Basin, named after the Ute Tribe, is located in Northeast Utah and Western Colorado, about 200 miles from Salt Lake City. Streams from the Uinta mountains roll through the basin into a tributary of the Colorado River – supplying 40 million people with water throughout the drought-ridden West. Plants that cannot be found

Across the entire 847 million hectares of Amazonian territory, some 26% of its forests are showing evidence of deforestation and degradation — 20% have suffered irreversible loss and 6% are highly degraded. The tipping point for the Amazon is no longer a distant scenario, but a present reality in some parts of the region. Of

Dutch biologist Erik Meijaard isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers. In the past 15 years, he’s published some 120 opinion pieces in Indonesian newspapers, many of them critical about the state of conservation in the biodiversity-rich country. But even Meijaard didn’t expect his latest article, which challenged government claims that orangutans in the Southeast Asian nation

Indonesian palm oil workers and labor rights activists are looking to press their advantage following the success of four labor rights appeal cases heard in Indonesia’s Supreme Court last year. The appeals found PT London Sumatra (Lonsum) — a subsidiary of the palm oil giant Indofood, Indonesia’s largest food manufacturer — in breach of 10

The East African Court of Justice (EACJ) has ruled in favor of the Tanzanian government after a five-year legal battle between evicted Maasai communities and the state. According to the court, evidence to plead the communities’ case was insufficient and contradictory. The ruling comes as a blow to Indigenous, environmental and human rights organizations who

In the months leading up to Sri Lanka’s presidential election in November 2019, leading candidate Gotabaya Rajapaksa spoke about the need for leaders to implement policies without arguing about the law. It was important simply for politicians to understand national needs and to address them through national policies. He was speaking before a gathering of

In 2006 and 2010, Congolese researcher Raoul Monsembula collected catfish and other species from the rivers in Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Then he hopped on a plane to New York City so colleagues could analyze them in their lab. More than 10 years later, Monsembula learned that he’d actually

A 2020 move to open a futures water market on the Chicago exchange has resulted in a heated conflict between those who say monetizing is a positive step, and those who see speculation as bad for the environment and traditional peoples.

After a 19-year process, uncontacted and recently contacted Indigenous peoples living in the Napo-Tigre region of the Peruvian Amazon have had their existence officially recognized. With an extensive anthropological study and a presidential decree supporting evidence of their presence in the area, the communities are now one step closer to being protected through the creation

A thick dark stain spreads near the Piedra Negra ravine, a source of water for the Kichwa community of 12 de Octubre in Loreto. The Indigenous community members say that they do not need to see the stain to know that they are facing a new oil spill. All they need to do is smell

Follow any river to its upper reaches and you will encounter the headwaters, the flowing streams that join to carry water, nutrients and life to downstream ecosystems and economies. Troubles here, at the river’s origins, quite literally trickle down. Headwaters are complex and notoriously difficult to study, but given their vital role, understanding where and

Solving human-wildlife conflict is a complex issue and a pressing concern for a wide variety of endangered species, none more so than the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). People living around Vietnam’s Dong Nai Biosphere Reserve, however, want to foster coexistence with elephants, not conflict. That’s according to a new study published in the journal Global

Although Bangladesh’s waterways carry tremendous economic and geostrategic significance for both Bangladesh and India, environmental management issues have rendered most of these routes useless. Bangladesh and India signed a protocol for using the waterways to carry goods in 1972. However, only three of the designated 11 routes are in regular use at present, as most

In the Andean region the ageless story of Juan Oso, a half-human and half-bear character, has been heard throughout generations. It is said that Juan lived all sad and alone in a dark cave, until the day he met and fell in love with a shepherdess of the paramos, the alpine seasonally flooded grassland found

Deforestation proponents in Brazil routinely argue that cutting down the Amazon is an effective way to alleviate poverty. For example, the Bolsonaro administration’s official statement to the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference asserted that “where there is a lot of forest there is also a lot of poverty”, implying that forest cover is inversely