Is El Salvador preparing to reverse its landmark mining ban?

MEXICO CITY — It was considered a major environmental victory, back in 2017, when El Salvador’s government announced it would be the first country in the world to issue a total ban on metal mining. For a half-century, the industry had been dumping waste and toxic chemicals into local rivers. Prioritizing clean drinking water was […]

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Venezuela’s Yapacana National Park suffering increasing mining deforestation: report

Illegal gold mining is accelerating deforestation in one of Venezuela’s most threatened national parks, a new report from Amazon Conservation revealed. Satellite imagery analyzed by the NGO shows that thousands of excavators, bulldozers and other illegal mining equipment are clearing the rainforest in the southwestern part of Yapacana National Park, located in the Venezuelan state […]

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Mongabay’s top Amazon stories from 2021

Fire line moves through a degraded forest area in an undesignated public forest area in Porto Velho, Rondônia on July 29, 2021. Photo © Christian Braga / GreenpeaceThe 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 […]

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New restoration “Playbook” calls for political, economic, and social change

Toco toucan (Ramphastos toco). Photo credit: Rhett A. ButlerInternational 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, […]

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