Quality journalism fuels dialogue between government, NGOs, communities, and lobbying groups as well as concerned citizens in an effort to find solutions to the environmental challenges we face now and in the years ahead. The process of educating these groups about the importance of conserving natural resources plays a major role in promoting advocacy and facilitating cooperation. However, the nuanced field of long-form environmental journalism is on the decline.
In 2009, Cynthia Ong, the Founder and Executive Director of LEAP, a Malaysian NGO, contacted Mongabay about a plan to build a coal plant in Sabah, on the tip of Malaysian Borneo. Ong had just started to mobilize local opposition to the plant, which put rainforests and mangroves, the livelihoods of local farmers and fishermen,
The pygmy sloth (Bradypus pygmaeus), a diminutive sloth species found only on Escudo de Veraguas Island off the coast of Panama, has been the subject of several Mongabay stories. But in 2013, one of our articles sparked an unexpected frenzy of attention.
In 2014 World Resources Institute (WRI) launched Global Forest Watch, a platform for monitoring and understanding the world’s forests using a variety of “big data”, ranging from satellite imagery to biodiversity databases to government concession listings. With its wealth of data, including near-real time forest loss alerts that can potentially enable authorities to take action
In 2012 Mongabay launched mongabay.co.id, an Indonesian language environmental news service, with a goal of increasing transparency and accountability in Indonesia’s forest sector, which has long been plagued by mismanagement, corruption, and underperformance. Mongabay hired a team of four Java-based staff in March 2012. Within a month, mongabay.co.id was live and by June it was
In 2008 Mongabay launched Tropical Conservation Science (TCS), an open-access academic journal that provides opportunities for scientists in developing countries to publish their research. TCS was unique at the time of its launch by requiring authors to explain the conservation implications of their paper (something that has since been adopted by several major journals) and