21 August 2019 (BBC News) – Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has seen a record number of fires this year, new space agency data suggests. The National Institute for Space Research (INPE) said its satellite data showed an 84% increase on the same period in 2018. It comes weeks after President Jair Bolsonaro sacked the head of the […]
By Adam Voiland 16 August 2019 (NASA) – In the Amazon rainforest, fire season has arrived. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso on August 11 and August 13, 2019. In the Amazon region, fires are rare for much […]
By Olivia Prentzel 18 July 2019 (National Geographic) – For every lion in the wild, there are 14 African elephants, and there are 15 Western lowland gorillas. There are more rhinos than lions, too. The iconic species has disappeared from 94 percent of its historic range, which once included almost the entire African continent but […]
WASHINGTON, 11 July 2019 (Center for Biological Diversity) – Highlighting the need for global action to fight giraffes’ silent extinction, a body of scientific experts today declared giraffes in Kenya and Tanzania — called Masai giraffes — endangered. Masai giraffes, one of nine giraffe subspecies, had long been considered a key population for the species. But […]
3 July 2019 (Folha de São Paulo) – Deforestation in the Amazon in June was about 57% higher than in the same month last year, according to DETER, the deforestation alert system of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). [Translation by Google.] The data from last month, for the time being, only go until […]
By Hannah Beech 29 June 2019 BUNGA TANJUNG, Indonesia (The New York Times) – The men came at Hope and her baby with spears and guns. But she would not leave. There was no place for her to go. When the air-gun pellets pierced Hope’s eyes, blinding her, she felt her way up the tree […]
11 June 2019 (Mexico News Daily) — An environmental activist from Tabasco who worked to preserve the habitat of howler monkeys was found dead yesterday in Chiapas. The body of José Luis Álvarez Flores was found in Calatraba, a community in the municipality of Palenque. The 64-year-old was reportedly shot at least five times. Álvarez […]
By Sue Branford and Thais Borges 10 June 2019 (Mongabay) – The Brazilian government’s environmental agency, IBAMA, has so far this year imposed the lowest number of fines for illegal deforestation in at least 11 years, while the country’s other leading environmental agency and its federal parks’ protector, ICMBio (the Chico Mendes Institute), did not […]
By Zamlha Tempa Gyaltsen 4 April 2019 (Central Tibetan Administration) – China’s latest white paper on Tibet, once again highlights Beijing’s absolute lack of understanding of Tibet’s History and its unwillingness to read beyond government documents. The paper “Democratic Reform in Tibet – Sixty Years On,” was released on 27 March 2019 to mark the […]
By by Andrea Nicolau, Andi Thomas, and Leah Kucera 18 April 2019 (NASA) – Considered a hotspot for biodiversity, the Madre de Dios region of southeastern Peru is an exceptionally fertile landscape. Standing at the edge of the Amazon basin, Madre de Dios has a rich concentration of endemic species—plants and animals that are found nowhere […]
