Between the pandemic, widespread environmental policy setbacks, devastating fires and storms, civil strife, and rising authoritarianism, 2020 was a challenging year. Mongabay persevered through these difficult times, supporting its staff and contributor network, while continuing to produce impactful reporting. Five topline successes in 2020 Navigating the pandemic: In these times of hardship and great uncertainty,
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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 “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
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
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 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
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
