Mongabay

The Tanintharyi Region in southern Myanmar is a beautiful and rich expanse of rainforest, ocean, and mangroves where we still have wild tigers and elephants, and where the forest provides all that we need in life. It is my home land. Our Indigenous communities depend ...

As demonstrations and deadly crackdowns continue to roil Myanmar following the military coup in February, land and environmental defenders are increasingly under threat. In the seven months since protests erupted, the junta’s clampdown on dissent has caused more than 1,000 deaths. Nearly 8,000 people have been arrested, ...

In the green and dimly lit mangrove forests of West Papua in Indonesia, towering Rhizophora trees loom more than 40 meters (130 feet) overhead into the canopy, their tangled roots taller than a human. Oceans away in the Caribbean, mangroves of the same genus reach a maximum ...

In the wake of the Feb. 1 military coup, Myanmar’s new regime leaders escalated their forceful crackdown on nationwide protests with sweeping restrictions on the media, severely curtailing independent journalism in particular. Authorities have stripped at least seven local media outlets of their licenses, enforced strict ...

Carved out of the of the narrow isthmus that connects the Malay Peninsula to the rest of mainland Southeast Asia, Myanmar’s southern Tanintharyi region rises from the Andaman Sea in the west to the forested Tenasserim Hills that border Thailand in the east. While much of ...

The Lower Sesan 2 hydroelectric scheme was completed in northeast Cambodia in 2018. The reservoir flooded 300 square kilometers (116 square miles) upstream of the confluence of the Sesan and Srepok rivers, two tributaries of the Mekong. Villages, places of worship, ancestral burial grounds and ...

More than a month has passed since the Cambodia branch of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced it would be ending its assistance to Cambodian government entities through the USAID Greening Prey Lang project and the future of the 431,683-hectare wildlife sanctuary ...

A long-running territorial standoff over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea has seen vessels dumping enough raw sewage to threaten the marine ecosystem there — and the degradation is extensive enough to be seen from space. On July 12, U.S.-based geospatial tech company Simularity ...

Technology isn’t always a practical solution for Indigenous communities fighting for their land rights. Some technology requires internet access, which often isn’t available in remote areas. And some technology can be needlessly complicated and expensive, alienating some community members. The Earth Defenders Toolkit is working to help overcome ...

Almost two decades ago, Myanmar’s largest coal-fired power plant was built as a joint venture by a group of military-affiliated businessmen and the China National Heavy Machinery Corporation. Since then, it has disrupted the socioeconomic lives of the Pa’O and Taungyo people who are Indigenous ...