Deforestation makes room for a new oil palm plantation in Riau, Sumatra. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. The rights of local and indigenous peoples aren’t being adequately protected in the…
Society for Conservation Biology warns that Africa could follow Southeast Asia in losing substantial amounts of its forest Africa’s people, forests and wildlife are in trouble if the mostly unbridled…
Forest abutting Sanaga river in Cameroon. Photo courtesy of Google Earth. Cameroon is struggling to make progress in combatting illegal logging. Regulatory budgets are too thin to protect the country’s…
Global Forest Watch image showing recent FORMA and Terra-I forest cover change alerts that reveal clearing in concessions controlled by a subsidiary of United Cacao. A company aiming to be…
Borneo consistently makes the list of the world’s “biodiversity hotspots” – areas full of a wide variety of forms of life found nowhere else, but which are also under threat.…
Climate change could make life more difficult for the world’s rarest chimpanzee subspecies, reported a team of scientists in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology on Tuesday. The range of the…
Aiming to be the world’s largest purveyor of sustainable cacao, a company is developing a plantation in the Amazon that scientists say comes at the expense of primary forest A…
The rainforests of South America face many threats. The deforestation occurring on the continent is among the highest in the world and results in losses of habitat, biodiversity and massive…
New report underlines importance of indigenous land rights as industry pressures escalate The views of the people who live in forests around the world often get swamped in the debate…
Illegal deforestation occurring despite Guyana’s ground-breaking low carbon development strategy Foreign companies investing in Guyana’s substantial forests are supposed to adhere to national laws and international agreements. But civil society…
This article is the second in a three-part series that will examine the global impact of oil palm agriculture on local communities. Read the first part here. As the lands…
This article is the first in a three-part series that will examine the global impact of oil palm agriculture on local communities. There’s little doubt that the use of palm…
Uganda, Ethiopia, and the DRC made lofty forest restoration pledges Forest during the UN Climate Summit last month. Will they follow through? The United Nations Climate Summit at the end…
Ninety-two percent of intact forests suitable for cultivation Climate change is likely to alter how we humans grow adequate amounts of food for a swelling global population. Assessing just how…
WARNING: Graphic photos below. 35,000 elephants killed in Africa in 2012 for black market ivory trade A joint force of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and government authorities are in…
Illegal clearing for agriculture caused almost 50 percent of the world's forest loss Nearly 50 percent of tropical deforestation to make room for commercial agriculture between 2000 and 2012 was…
As nations invest billions in extraction development, forests may suffer big losses Many of the minerals that enable our technology, back the value of our economies (or did at one…
New research shows African apes likely to be affected by palm oil, but there’s hope, says the author As palm oil producers increasingly look to Africa’s tropical forests as suitable…
Forest loss increased nearly three-fold in some areas since 2011 Road construction, the promise of employment, and the conversion of forest to farmland – the effects of logging tropical forests…
New forestry laws in the works, but may not be enough Oil palm nursery in a Herakles Farm’s concession area. Photo: © Greenpeace/Alex Yallop. The potential for new laws governing…
The Colorado River vanishes before it reaches the Sea of Cortez in all but the wettest years. Companies in California and the southwestern U.S. have diverted its once-vibrant flow to…
John is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Follow him on Twitter: @johnccannon.
John became a correspondent for Mongabay in 2014 and joined the site's team full time in October 2016. John's journalistic work has also appeared in New Scientist, Slate.com, Yale Environment 360, Pacific Standard, Science (online), Business Insider and Bicycle Times. John has been a guest on the BBC as well as NPR's All Things Considered and Living on Earth, and he has also had several short stories published in literary magazines. He studied biology as an undergraduate at the Ohio State University and has a graduate degree in science writing from UC Santa Cruz. Always eager to find local perspectives on globally relevant stories, John has reported from Brunei, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Peru and Rwanda. He currently lives in Afghanistan with his wife.
