Mongabay
The challenges of campaigning against wildlife trafficking in Vietnam
In late January, WildAid and the Ho Chi Minh City-based Center of Hands-on Actions and Networking for Growth and Environment (CHANGE) launched a graphic anti-wildlife trafficking campaign focused on three animals: pangolins, elephants and rhinos. In a bold move, the organizers brought a group of bloodied, weakened statues ...
Michael Tatarski
Survey: Less coal, more solar, say citizens of Belt & Road countries
Citizens of countries participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, strongly prefer clean energy over the coal projects that have become Beijing’s calling card, a new survey shows. The findings, from a multi-country survey, commissioned by environmental group E3G, were published ahead of an international forum hosted in ...
Hans Nicholas Jong
Controversial aquaculture projects threaten Myanmar’s remaining mangroves
Most of the waterways surrounding the islands of the Mergui archipelago in the Andaman Sea are lined with mangroves, and the one leading into the island of Kala from the east was no different. But as our speedboat rounded a corner, we came up against ...
Wudan Yan
Current threats and future hopes for the greater Mekong’s mangroves
Critical to the health of rivers, shorelines and forests globally, today only 150,000 square kilometers (57,900 square miles) of mangroves remain, down from 320,000 square kilometers (123,550 square miles) 50 years ago. Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar are home to the largest mangrove forests in the Greater ...
How wasps saved Asia’s forests
In our recent study, we combined field observations and satellite imagery to show how the tiny pest-killing lopezi wasp (Anagyrus lopezi) helped combat deforestation in Thailand, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam by controlling a pest that was devastating cassava crops across the region. Keep reading ...
Meet the winners of the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize
The Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s most prestigious award for grassroots environmental activism, has announced seven winners this year. Six of the winners are women. Dubbed the Green Nobel Prize, the annual award honors grassroots environmental heroes from Europe, Asia, North America, Central and South ...
Mongabay Reporter
App combines computer vision and crowdsourcing to explore Earth’s biodiversity, one photo at a time
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was developed in large part from the observations and collections of plants, animals and fossils that he made in the Galapagos islands and other stops during his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. However, Darwin was an amateur ...
Colleen O'Brien
Re-peeling the effects of degradation: low-tech application of orange crop waste shows potential to restore tropical forests
Researchers have come upon a new low-tech tropical forest restoration strategy, beginning with agricultural waste. They studied the effects on soil and forest health of the purposeful deposition of tons of processed orange peels and pulp on centuries-old rangeland remaining inside Guanacaste National Park in ...
Good quality monitoring surveys key to wildlife conservation: new study
A biodiversity crisis is looming upon us. We are now in the middle of a “sixth great extinction” of animal species, scientists warn, with loss of species about 1,000 times higher than it would have been without human impact.Nearly every country in the world has ...
HydroCalculator: new, free, online tool helps citizens assess dams
Mega-dam construction is booming around the world, with promoters hyping hydropower as a green, renewable source of energy and a means of curbing climate change. But as these dams are built in the Amazon, Mekong and elsewhere, they’re doing great environmental and social damage and ...