africa

MANAKAMBAHINY ATSINANANA, Madagascar — To make a simple phone call here requires walking for at least an hour, over deforested foothills, through a small village and across a river to reach a mountain peak where cell service is available. This trek is among the duties of a dozen teenagers working on a farm in this […]

A major fire has burned more than 1,000 hectares, or nearly 2,500 acres, of grassland in the Guassa Community Conservation Area of Ethiopia. While any long-term impacts are yet to be assessed, the fire — which coincided with a local battle in Ethiopia’s ongoing civil war — is the most severe damage in 40 years […]

This is the wrap-up article for our four-part series “The Congo Basin peatlands.” Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. In the first half of December, Mongabay published a four-part series on the peatlands of the Congo Basin. Only in 2017 did a team of Congolese and British scientists discover that a […]

This is the fourth article in our four-part series “The Congo Basin peatlands.” Read Part One, Part Two and Part Three. The muddy cores that Ian Lawson and his colleagues pull from the swampy peatlands of the Congo Basin might not look like much at first glance. Layers of clay and silt are interspersed here […]

Years before the obsession with wild-borne pathogens latching onto humans gripped the world, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka was already dealing with disease spillovers. Except, she worried about humans infecting gorillas in her native Uganda. “Disease transmission goes in both directions,” says Kalema-Zikusoka, a trained wildlife veterinarian. It demonstrates, albeit narrowly, an idea gaining currency in the COVID-19 […]

This is the third article in our four-part series “The Congo Basin peatlands.” Read Part One and Part Two. The logging concession moratorium signed in 2002 was supposed to shore up protections for forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Faced with widespread corruption in the timber sector, the country’s leaders agreed to stop awarding […]

This is the second article in our four-part series “The Congo Basin peatlands.” Read Part One. The announcement came in mid-2019: A pool of oil lay deep beneath a swampy section of the northern Republic of Congo that could nearly quadruple the country’s output. It just seemed to be waiting there for the oil-rich country […]

When BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig flooded the Gulf of Mexico with 4 million barrels of oil in 2010, the catastrophe was headline news across the world for months. A new study of satellite images taken between 2002 and 2012 suggests that it may have been dwarfed by the amount of oil spilled into […]

Crude oil from a blowout has been pouring into creeks in the Niger Delta since Nov. 5, with the well’s owner, Nigerian energy firm Aiteo, unable to contain the spill and specialists called in to help. The blowout, at a non-producing well in the Santa Barbara field in Bayelsa state, has caused extensive pollution of […]

On Nov. 2, a group of 12 donors, including the European Commission, United Kingdom, United States and the Bezos Earth Fund, collectively pledged at least $1.5 billion in financing toward protection and sustainable management of the Congo Basin forests over the next four years. The pledge is part of a broader $12 billion commitment agreed […]