Environmental Policy
With States Leading on Climate Policy, New Tools Peer Into Lobbying ‘Black Box’
Researchers at Brown University hope to turn climate action defeat into a win for state government transparency. Brown’s Climate and Development Lab this month unveiled HowDoTheyLobby.org, a new searchable online database of influence-peddling in state capitals. A first-of-its-kind tool, it allows users to dig into who’s pushing and who’s opposing legislation in 17 states. The […]
Read MoreIn Liberia, a former mining activist gets the bully pulpit
It’s been about a decade since Foday Fahnbulleh was arrested. Along with other students and workers from his home in Bong Mines about an hour’s drive north of Monrovia, he’d been staging protests at the gates of a Chinese mining company. China Union, they said, wasn’t living up to the promises it had made in […]
Death threats and friction with military force Guatemalan rangers to flee
Northern Guatemala is covered in more than 3,000 square miles of rainforest. Some parts of it have been burned down by cattle ranchers and drug traffickers. Other parts remain pristine, with unexcavated Mayan pyramids hidden deep under the foliage. For the park rangers who work there, patrolling such a huge area can be dangerous and […]
Mongabay reporter sued in what appears to be a pattern of legal intimidation by Peruvian cacao company
In November 2020, Peruvian cacao company Tamshi filed a lawsuit against Mongabay Latam staff reporter Yvette Sierra Praeli for “aggravated defamation” over her reporting of a government investigation into the firm’s activities in the Peruvian Amazon. While the case was formally dismissed by a Peruvian court last month, it wasn’t the first time that Tamshi […]
New restoration “Playbook” calls for political, economic, and social change
International forest and climate experts have released a “playbook” for ecosystem restoration with a set of 10 principles that they say, if followed, could be a game-changer. The Political Ecology Playbook, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, recognizes that issues such as climate change and forest loss are not just biophysical and environmental problems, […]
Scientists urge Biden to remove logging, fossil fuels, biomass from budget bills
More than 100 scientists have issued a letter urging U.S. President Biden and Congress to remove provisions promoting logging, forest biomass and fossil fuels from the multitrillion-dollar infrastructure and reconciliation (Build Back Better) bills.