By Jonathan Watts 2 February 2018 (The Guardian) – The slaughter of people defending their land or environment continued unabated in 2017, with new research showing almost four people a week were killed worldwide in struggles against mines, plantations, poachers and infrastructure projects.The toll of 197 in 2017 – which has risen fourfold since it […]
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, 31 January 2018 (AP) – Soldiers in northeastern Cambodia, an area where illicit logging and smuggling are rife, killed a forest protection ranger, a military police officer and a conservation worker in apparent retaliation for their seizure of equipment from illegal loggers, officials said Wednesday. Keo Sopheak, a senior environmental official in […]
5 February 2018 (BBC News) – One of the world’s leading investigators into the illegal trade in ivory and rhino horn has been killed in Kenya. Esmond Bradley Martin, 75, was found with a stab wound to his neck at home in the capital Nairobi on Sunday. The former UN special envoy for rhino conservation […]
By Laura Zuckerman; Editing by Steve Gorman and Sandra Maler 23 January 2018 (Reuters) – Eastern cougars that once prowled North America from Michigan to South Carolina were officially declared extinct and removed from the U.S. endangered species list on Monday, eight decades after the last confirmed sighting of the wild feline predator. The large […]
By Jonathan Watts 20 January 2018 Mananhão, Brazil (The Guardian) – Sairá Ka’apor patrolled one of the most murderous frontiers in the world, a remote and largely lawless region of the Brazilian Amazon where his indigenous community has fought for generations to protect their forest land.Armed with clubs, bows and arrows, GPS trackers and crude […]
20 January 2018 (BBC News) – Thai police have arrested a man alleged to be the head of Asia’s biggest illegal wildlife trading networks. Boonchai Bach, a 40-year-old Thai of Vietnamese origin, was detained in a town on the border with Laos. He faces up to four years in jail for smuggling protected animal parts […]
Bonn, Germany, 13 November 2017 (IUCN) – The number of natural World Heritage sites threatened by climate change has grown from 35 to 62 in just three years, with climate change being the fastest growing threat they face, according to a report released today by IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Nature, at the UN […]
By Christopher Ingraham 17 November 2017 (The Washington Post) – Supporters of trophy hunting say that permit fees from the practice, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars in the case of large game like elephants, can be put toward conservation efforts that help bolster the populations of endangered animals.In part, that’s […]
By Jeffery Gettleman 4 November 2017 MBANDAKA, Democratic Republic of Congo (The New York Times) – The sting began, as so many things do these days, on social media. Daniel Stiles, a self-styled ape trafficking detective in Kenya, had been scouring Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp for weeks, looking for pictures of gorillas, chimps or orangutans. […]
5 October 2017 (Telesur) – Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council, CIMI, says at least 118 Indigenous people were killed in the country last year. “One of the focal points of the political setbacks that are pounding most of Brazilians has been the appropriation of the ancestral lands belonging to indigenous peoples,” stated the organization. The 2016 […]
