Impacts & Success Stories
A sampling of some of Mongabay’s successes.
Overcoming the fake news deluge: an opportunity to support Mongabay
The “spirit of giving” has arrived at Mongabay’s doorstep this holiday season! With gratitude Mongabay is pleased to announce that another donor has offered $10,000 for an end-of-year matching gift opportunity. All donations will be matched one to one until we reach our $10,000 goal – this offer ends the first week of January. By supporting Mongabay, one can reassert the importance of real journalism and analysis as a methodology for tackling pressing environmental issues. Rhett Butler, founder and CEO of Mongabay, believes the organization’s accurate reporting results partly...
Our achievements in 2015
2015 was a monumental year for Mongabay in terms of the organization’s growth, reach, and impact. Here are some brief highlights from 2015: MONGABAY Mongabay has been completely redesigned — you can see the new site at mongabay.com. Our full-time global team has grown from 4 to 11 since the beginning of the year, including an editor for our Spanish-language initiative – Mongabay Latin-America – which will formally launch in early 2016. By the end of next year, we hope to have daily Spanish news reporting in a dozen...
Success stories: supporting mainstream media coverage of environmental concerns
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 April 2013 a story in the Columbia Journalism Review described a “meltdown” in long-form reporting at major U.S. newspapers....
Success stories: exposing Borneo’s energy boondoggle
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, and the coral reefs of the Coral Triangle at risk. Through a series of in-depth articles, Mongabay raised the international profile of the issue, attracting the attention of Daniel Kammen, who was then a...
Success stories: profiling the pygmy sloth
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 September 2013, Mongabay was tipped off about an incident at Panama’s Isla Colón International Airport involving an attempt to export eight endangered pygmy sloths. Writer Tanya Dimitrova’s in-depth investigative work brought the story to the world’s attention, putting the practices of Dallas World Aquarium, a controversial...
Success stories: Exposing Madagascar’s rosewood trade
In 2009 a military coup in Madagascar triggered a collapse in governance that resulted in a sharp increase in illegal rosewood logging. The logging was particularly damaging because it was associated with a rise in commercial bushmeat hunting, violence against conservation workers and local community members, and encroachment into protected areas, including Madagascar’s most biodiverse forests located in the northeastern part of the island. Mongabay’s extensive reporting on the crisis, including investigative work that exposed some of the biggest players in the trade, provided information for NGOs, governments, and...
Success stories: Telling the tales behind the data
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 against deforestation as it happens, Global Forest Watch has the potential to democratize and revolutionize forest monitoring. As a heavy user of forest data for reporting on environmental issues, Mongabay saw Global Forest Watch...
Success stories: Mongabay-Indonesia
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 already one of the most popular environmental sites in Indonesia. By the end of the year, Mongabay-Indonesia journalists were regularly being invited to attend high-level press events and meetings with Indonesia’s largest newspapers, TV...
Success stories: popularizing conservation papers
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 publishing general interest summaries of each paper in four languages. Additionally, most TCS papers are covered by Mongabay.com, disseminating their findings to a much broader audience. As a result of these innovations, the average...