Impacts & Success Stories
A sampling of some of Mongabay’s successes.
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...
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...