Public Health
New report pieces together toll of environmental damage in Venezuela in 2021
While trying to put together a review of what happened to Venezuela’s environment in 2021, conservationists ran into a problem. The government publishes virtually no statistics on things like deforestation, infrastructure or mining, and it often actively blocks researchers from investigating threats to local ecosystems. Last year, the government appeared to lean more heavily on […]
WWF report calls forests a vital public health solution
During the pandemic, as researchers looked to wet markets and the animal trade in search of the source of COVID-19, there was a renewed concern for how the natural world might be impacting public health. An increasing number of experts and government officials pointed to agriculture, urbanization and other forms of land use change as […]
Mongabay’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 […]