LAMONGAN, Indonesia — The Brondong Fisheries Port in Indonesia’s East Java province was busy on a Friday morning in February as workers worked as swiftly as possible to unload the catches. Among the landed crates of fish, there were sharks and rays that appeared to be different types. Rizal, one of the many fish buyers […]
This story is the third article of a three-part Mongabay mini-series exploring the link between Cambodia’s garment factories and illegal logging. Read Part One and Part Two. KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia — The lamp dangled precariously under the wooden stilted home. Hooked up to a car battery, it was all that illuminated Saroeun* as the fire […]
This story is the second article of a three-part Mongabay mini-series exploring the link between Cambodia’s garment factories and illegal logging. Read Part One and Part Three. KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia — “Going into the forest is dangerous, some people die when trees fall on them, but they are desperate,” said Saroeun*, a logger who makes […]
This story is the first article of a three-part Mongabay mini-series exploring the link between Cambodia’s garment factories and illegal logging. Read Part Two and Part Three. KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia — The roar of the engine cut through the 5 a.m. gloom one morning in December 2022 as Saroeun* and his cousin Sovann* pulled away […]
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn was a fellow. *Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from the authorities. KOH KONG, Cambodia — “I think there’s a 30% chance we’ll have trouble with the police,” said Ly Chandaravuth, an environmental activist with […]
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn was a fellow. *Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from the authorities. KOH KONG, Cambodia — In April 2022, the sound of a sawmill cut through the murky dawn that was steaming over Cambodia’s western […]
ALTO ACARÁ, Brazil — With trembling hands, Raimundo Serrão lights candles for his grandmother at the Livramento Cemetery’s cross on the Day of the Dead because he couldn’t find her grave. Serrão and others in the area say one of the country’s leading palm oil exporters has buried it under palm crops. “They have planted […]
Lucía lives in Peru, in one of more than 50 indigenous communities along the Putumayo, an Amazonian river that marks the border between Peru and Colombia. She has a banana plantation on the Colombian side of the river, which she has not visited in months out of fear of Los Sinaloa, an armed group of […]
When Adhi Tayuh Braka joined one of China’s largest fishing fleets in 2018, he planned to catch tuna, knuckle down and save money to get married. To pass the time, he photographed his co-workers, their equipment and the fish they pulled out of the western Pacific Ocean. Maybe he’d have some pictures to show his […]
This is the second in a two-part series originally published in Spanish on Mongabay Latam. You can read the first part here. An investigation recently published by Mongabay Latam and Bloomberg Línea seeks to answer the question: Why would a foreign boat request to fly the Panamanian flag? Numerous experts, scientific publications and reports point […]
This is the first in a two-part series originally published in Spanish on Mongabay Latam. You can read the second part here. The crystal-clear waters of the oceans surrounding Panama hold wealth beyond the abundance of fish. Legal gaps and flexibility in some of the regulations governing fishing activity have become the ideal bait, attracting companies […]
ISANGI, Congo — In a secluded corner of the Congo, machetes in hand, scientists make their way through the Yangambi Man and Biosphere Reserve, using shallow streams as natural paths to move faster through the wilderness. Some of them are plotting routes for a large-scale biodiversity survey. Others are climbing a metallic structure the size […]
BASOKO, Congo — In Yaliwasa, northern DRC, logs from 200-year-old hardwood trees lie rotting deep into the world’s second largest rainforest. They were cut in a hurry to be exported to global processing hubs in Asia, then redistributed to luxury markets in China and beyond. Instead, the precious wood is sprouting orange fungi and crumbles […]
PHNOM PENH — The early onset of Cambodia’s wet season had seen the rain fall thick over Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, turning freshly cut paths through the forest into a near-impassible slick of churned-up mud. But the torrential weather had done little to deter local loggers, who rode out of the beleaguered protected area carrying […]
KISANGANI, Congo — A major European logging firm may have illegally converted more than a dozen of its timber concessions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo into so-called conservation concessions, a new investigation can reveal. After harvesting the most valuable timber from the 15 concessions — covering an area the size of Belgium — […]
This story won an Excellence in Investigative Reporting award from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) in 2022. (Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia | 阅读中文版 | 日本語で読む) When Sepri was growing up, life in his village began to deteriorate. In the 1990s, the village, Serdang Menang, in the south of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island, was centered […]
In Brazil's biggest city, descendants of the original inhabitants live in invisibility and struggle to keep their traditions despite São Paulo’s celebrated cultural diversity
A Portuguese language version of this report is published on Mongabay Brasil TOMÉ-AÇU, Brazil — Guided by an Indigenous leader, we drove down dusty roads in the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Reserve, a “green island” encircled by oil palm plantations in the Brazilian Amazon. Uniform rows of oil palms cover huge swaths of land here in the northeast […]
Almost a fifth of Brazil’s soy and grains already flow down Amazonia’s rivers. Now a boom in private river port construction, with little government oversight, further threatens the region’s waterways.
TIKTIK KAANU, Nicaragua — Eduardo Solano did not say much on the way home. He bought some oranges from a fruit vendor at a makeshift dock in Bluefields, the capital of Nicaragua’s South Caribbean Autonomous Region, and settled in for the three-hour boat journey that would get him most of the way home to Tiktik […]
