Environment
As blackouts loom, Indonesia’s energy crisis highlights its addiction to coal
JAKARTA — An abrupt ban on coal exports by the Indonesian government for the whole month of January, on fears of a domestic supply shortage, should be a wake-up call to hasten the country’s transition away from the fossil fuel, experts say. In announcing the ban on Jan. 1, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral […]
Read MoreNot your ordinary houseplant: World’s tallest begonia found in Tibet
When researchers found a begonia plant twice as tall as a person, they knew they had something extraordinary. Of the more than 2,000 known begonia species, most are the size of large herbs or small shrubs. In late 2020, during surveys in Mêdog county in southern Tibet, Daike Tian and his colleagues from the Shanghai […]
Read MoreProposal could redefine palm oil-driven deforestation as reforestation in Indonesia
JAKARTA — Across large swaths of Indonesia, forests have been cleared to make way for oil palms, making the plantation industry one of the leading drivers of deforestation in the country. But this inconvenient truth may soon be masked by a sleight being peddled by the country’s leading forestry university to reclassify oil palms as […]
Read MoreCommunity control of forests hasn’t slowed deforestation, Indonesia study finds
JAKARTA — A “social forestry” program administered by the Indonesian government to grant land rights to communities has not been effective in preventing deforestation, and in some cases has even seen the problem get worse, a new study shows. The program is one of the largest socioenvironmental experiments of its kind, aiming to reallocate 12.7 […]
Read MoreFarmers in Brazil’s Cerrado cotton on to the benefits of agroecology
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 46 cotton-farming families in Brazil’s Minas Gerais began practicing agroecology, a sustainable farming approach that works with nature.
Read MoreAs its topsoil washes away, the Corn Belt is losing yields — and carbon
Chances are, if you live in North America, you’ve eaten corn from the Corn Belt, a region in the United States Midwest that produces 75% of U.S. corn. Scientists have found that around 35% of the region has lost its most fertile A-horizon soil, more commonly known as topsoil, since European colonization in the 1800s, […]
Read MoreMongabay’s 10 hardest-hitting investigations of 2021
In 2021, Mongabay’s investigative journalism set out to hold powerful figures accountable for deforestation and pollution, and the mistreatment of vulnerable communities trying to protect local ecosystems. Using data-driven analysis and video, its reporters found new and interesting ways to attract readers all over the world. They analyzed census data to better understand how Indigenous […]
Read MoreMongabay’s top Amazon stories from 2021
The world’s greatest tropical rainforest continued to come under pressure in 2021, due largely to the policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Deforestation rates hit a 15-year-high, while fires flared up again, combining to turn Brazil’s portion of the Amazon into a net carbon source for the first time ever. But the rainforest as a […]
Read MoreIndonesia’s new epicenter of forest fires shifts away from Sumatra and Borneo
JAKARTA — Indonesia’s land and forest fires burned a greater area this year than in 2020, with most of the fires occurring in West Nusa Tenggara and East Nusa Tenggara, two provinces that were until recently not major sites of burning. As of the end of November, fires had burned 353,222 hectares (872,831 acres) of […]
Read More‘Land mafia’ makes its mark in a Sumatran village’s fight against oil palm firm
JAKARTA — In 2020, residents of Suka Mukti village in southern Sumatra paid 10 million rupiah each, about $700, to a government agency to obtain titles to their land — a process that is officially supposed to be free. This year, the same agency declared the certificates illegal because, it says, the land falls inside […]
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