Impacts & Success Stories
A sampling of some of Mongabay’s successes.
Mongabay team wins top environmental journalism prizes
A Mongabay writer and a Mongabay editor each recently took the top two awards in the Outstanding Explanatory Reporting category in the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) 19th Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment. Jeremy Hance won second place for his series “The Great Insect Dying” which chronicles the global decline of insects in extraordinary detail, laying out why and where these invertebrates are disappearing, and most importantly, how many we have lost: “Unlike previous reporting on this topic, Hance pays particular attention to the understudied insect populations of diverse tropical rainforests,”...
Mongabay and The Gecko Project win award for Indonesia coverage
Mongabay and its “Indonesia for Sale” series partner The Gecko Project were honored with a Fetisov Journalism Award last month for an investigative report produced in collaboration with Indonesia’s Tempo magazine and Malaysiakini. “The secret deal to destroy paradise” is the third installment of the in-depth series on the opaque deals underpinning Indonesia’s deforestation and land rights crisis. The report was the second prize winner in the “Excellence in Environmental Journalism” category and details a plan to create the world’s largest oil palm plantation on the island of New Guinea. A previous...
Mongabay feature published in ‘best science and nature writing’ anthology
Mongabay is pleased to announce that senior correspondent Jeremy Hance’s feature, The great rhino U-turn, has been published in ‘The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019,” a highly regarded annual anthology that celebrates the best writing from the genre. This marks the first time that a Mongabay feature has been selected. When he heard the news earlier this year, Hance exclaimed, “The news that my article on Sumatran rhinos was going to be included [came] totally out of the blue, it’s a huge honor and I’m over the moon...
110,000+ signatures: Petition inspired by Mongabay story on a pristine but threatened PNG island keeps growing
A petition inspired by a Mongabay story has topped its goal of 110,000 signatures, and keeps growing. “Logging, mining companies lock eyes on a biodiverse island like no other” was published on July 31st by Mongabay and the online petition appeared about 10 days later after the story garnered much attention on social media platforms. In the story, writer Gianluca Cerullo explains that Woodlark Island sits far off the coast of Papua New Guinea and is swathed in old growth forests home to animals found nowhere else on the...
Indonesia for Sale series honored with Society of Environmental Journalists award
The Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) has given the second feature in the Indonesia for Sale series, “Ghosts in the Machine,” recognition under the Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding In-depth Reporting as part of its annual awards for environmental journalism. Produced in partnership with The Gecko Project, the series has 3 main features so far plus a number of other assets including video and interviews. The SEJ judges wrote this about the story: “A remarkable example of brave, tenacious journalism, methodically unravelling systemic corruption in Indonesia extending to the highest levels...
Mongabay Latam and El Deber win prestigious El Rey Award
Mongabay Latam and its partners at the major Bolivian daily newspaper El Deber have won the El Rey Award, also known as the King of Spain International Journalism Award. A top prize recognizing the best in Spanish and Portuguese-language journalism in Ibero-America since 1983, the awards are announced annually by Agencia EFE and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development. The Mongababy-El Deber team was recognized for Roberto Navia Gabriel’s investigative report on illegal trafficking in jaguar fangs, which was produced and published by both media outlets. When the...
Bioacoustics paper published in Science
In 2017, Mongabay’s Conservation Effectiveness series looked at what the scientific literature tells us is working and not working in the field of conservation. The series produced award-winning reporting which generated wide-ranging discussions across conservation. One of the key conclusions from the project was that conservation studies generally haven’t been designed to rigorously assess effectiveness of projects, interventions, or strategies. After the series wrapped up, we kept thinking about this issue and whether there may be other ways to measure conservation outcomes. Zuzana Burivalova, the Princeton scientist we hired...
Mongabay Latam story generates multiple impacts in Peru
For the residents of remote rural areas like the Peruvian Amazon, Mongabay provides a vital service by covering issues that the mainstream media have neither the editorial budgets nor perhaps the political space to report on. However, local and international NGOs, a core constituency of civil society, increasingly use our reports to share information with their communities and advocate for policy changes from governmental officials. One example from Peru is particularly illustrative of Mongabay’s role in enabling consensus building. In September 2017, six farmers were murdered in the district...
“Conservation Effectiveness” series wins award
A feature on how conservation NGOs use evidence to guide their decisions, by staff writer Shreya Dasgupta, is the winner in the environment category of the 2018 Science Seeker Awards. Scientists have long urged conservation NGOs to make decisions based on scientific evidence, Shreya writes in the piece. However, big conservation NGOs run into many problems in trying to use the available science. So she sets out to explain what is known about the topic by looking at the published evidence: “Overall, there has been a rise in peer-reviewed...
Mongabay investigation makes “Best Nonprofit Journalism of 2017” list
Congratulations to the reporting team of Sue Branford, Maurício Torres, and Thais Borges: the third feature in their multi-part investigation from the Tapajós River Basin in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon carried out in cooperation with The Intercept-Brasil was selected by the Institute for Nonprofit News for their ‘Best Nonprofit Journalism of 2017‘ list. The feature, “Day of Terror,” revealed how a raid by federal police on an indigenous Munduruku village resulted in one death and multiple injuries, and prompted a prosecutor to open a new investigation and...
