Environmental headlines

Whale sharks are capable long-distance swimmers, but it turns out that a lot of them are also homebodies. A new study published Aug. 9 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress…

KUCHING, Malaysia — For more than a decade, June Mary Rubis has worked on orangutan conservation in Borneo. The critically endangered apes face a bleak future there, hammered by habitat…

Mangroves are carbon warriors. These salt-tolerant forests of trees and shrubs are known to lock away far greater amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide than any other terrestrial forests, forming some…

For decades, researchers studying the global fishing industry had to cope with minimal data about what goes on out at sea. The ocean’s surface is so vast that most of…

Recent research found that, despite having expanded into 90 percent of the world’s oceans, the industrial fishing fleets of the top 20 fishing countries in the world are catching less…

Plants and animals in the tropics are disproportionately threatened by a range of dangers, including habitat loss, overexploitation, and climate change, warn researchers writing in the journal Nature. Conducting an…

Brazil’s rural poor were once well served by social programs that offered urgently needed income, food, water and hope. But those programs have seen recent deep cuts, hurting rural communities.

“We stayed quiet for a while because after the customary fine they never came back," said Markus, deputy head of the village council in Ongko Asa, a traditional Dayak village…

A bill, which experts say could pass, would set a 5-year deadline for land dispute resolution in protected areas. If not resolved by then, a conserved area’s protected status could be revoked.

While it might lack the coordinated attacks that lions or wolves can mount against their prey, a species of coral has shown that it, too, can pull together a collaborative…

JAKARTA — Songbird owners in Indonesia are up in arms over the recent inclusion of hundreds of bird species in the national list of protected animals. The owners plan to…

More than 90 institutional investors managing more than $6.7 trillion in assets have called on the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil to strengthen its standards, including by banning deforestation. The…

As development in Thailand is increasing, so is deforestation. Acres of forests are cleared for contract farming, habitats are torn down to make room for new factories, and soil is…

Report details soy supply chains, shows that just six traders control most of Brazil’s deforestation risk. Report is product of Trase, a powerful new Internet tracking tool.

Pesky itchiness caused by parasitic worms may have driven one of Madagascar’s lemur species to come up with a natural remedy. New research, published July 30 in the journal Primates,…

Laos will suspend new hydropower projects and carry out safety inspections of all existing dams, the government announced last week. The Aug. 7 decision came in the aftermath of the…

In 2016, a group of researchers set out to explore Serra da Neve Inselberg, an isolated mountain and Angola’s second-highest peak, in search of frogs and toads. Now, they have described…

A top official is out of his post as head of Sabah's forestry department, which oversees forests in the Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. According to press reports,…

Male elephants wander. As they mature and prepare to breed, they roam great distances in search of estrous females. These movements are key to elephant population dynamics: by breeding with…

Ecuador’s oil palm industry has taken what many see as another step forward by committing to a jurisdictional RSPO system as a way to transform the entire sector by making it…