MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte has issued an order to lift a nine-year moratorium on granting new mining permits in the Philippines. The order is expected to ease the entry…
AKLAN, Philippines — Although it lies less than 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the globally famous resort island of Boracay, the province of Antique in the central Philippines remains primarily…
MISAMIS ORIENTAL, Philippines — The southern Philippines is home to the world's rarest and most endangered crocodile species: the freshwater Philippine crocodile (Crocodylus mindorensis). After decades of sliding toward extinction,…
PALAWAN, Philippines — In a span of six months, Philippine environmental authorities have seized 150 tons of giant clam shells from a string of operations across the island province of…
MANILA — The Philippines is protesting the presence of more than 200 Chinese fishing vessels anchored at Whitsun Reef, a shallow coral region located 175 nautical miles (324 kilometers) west…
MANILA — Palawan is an outlier in the Philippine archipelago, its topography and habitat closer to that of Borneo than the rest of the country’s major islands. This so-called last…
MANILA — For the Philippines, the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t the only disaster to hit the country in 2020. The year started out with a volcanic eruption and closed with two…
In 1993, a lone stream frog was discovered once but never found again in the wild. Herpetologists thought the frog species went extinct before it could be studied. Then, last…
KALINGA, Philippines — On Nov. 12, 2020, Typhoon Vamco cut across the northern Philippines, flooding more than 60 cities and towns in the Cagayan Valley. Millions of dollars’ worth of…
MANILA — The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 spewed enough volcanic ash into the atmosphere to cool the world. In the immediate vicinity of the volcano,…
ALBAY, Philippines — When Typhoon Goni made landfall in the Philippines on Nov. 1, 2020, experts predicted disaster. A day earlier, the national volcanology institute, PHIVOLCS, had warned that heavy…
MINDANAO, Philippines — Four years ago, villagers in the town of Labason in the southern Philippines’ Zamboanga Peninsula woke up to a spectacle they never thought could happen in these…
AKLAN, Philippines — At dawn on Dec. 30, 2020, police officers raided Indigenous villages within a military reservation camp in the central Philippines in search of alleged members of the…
MANILA — Knowledge of the Philippine pangolin, the only pangolin species in the country, is scant. Sightings of the animal are rarer still. But unlike other pangolin species around the…
MANILA — Indigenous youths harboring from a military-led counterinsurgency in the Philippines may soon lose the only safe space they have known for the past two years. Under a nearly…
The old adage of "money talks" is being given a modern data analysis stress test and applied to the assassinations of civil society activists in the global mining sector. In…
Though other stories might have dominated the headlines, 2020 was a year of tremendous change in land use and land cover. Massive fires burned across Australia, the Amazon, and the…
MINDANAO, Philippines — Efforts to conserve the critically endangered Philippine eagle, one of the rarest raptors in the world, soared high even amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the global havoc…
MANILA — In 2017, a group of researchers surveying mollusks in a popular ecotourism site east of the Philippine capital stumbled upon a tiny land snail with a unique “upside…
ALBAY, Philippines — Spotting false geckos in the wild can be hard. They can easily disappear into their environment thanks to their cryptic colors and markings and their use of…
SARANGANI, Philippines — Half a decade ago, the curiosity of a 10-year-old boy helped ignite a love affair with birds that have swept up his village and helped bolster support…
AKLAN, Philippines — In December 1989, Elizabeth Ramos, now 63, heard from a neighbor that a mangrove reforestation project was underway near her home in the province of Aklan in…
AKLAN, Philippines — Authorities in the Philippines have arrested a resort owner on the island of Boracay for allegedly violating the country’s forestry and marine resources management laws. The investigation…
MANILA — The Philippines’ energy department has declared a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, following a reassessment of the country’s energy system. But while the ban halts applications for…
MANILA — State-run Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) will be cleaning up its widely criticized overseas coal energy investments, putting in limbo two projects in the pipeline in the Philippines…
MANILA — In the Philippines, the fishing industry has long been considered male territory, with fathers, sons and brothers taking their boats out to sea each day in hopes of…
SOUTH COTABATO, Philippines — A court in the Philippines has dealt another setback to the company looking to mine Southeast Asia’s largest untapped deposits of copper and gold, ruling to…
A new tiny orchid species with fiery orange flowers has been discovered on a mountain peak in the northern Philippines’ Cordilleras range. The wild orchid species was named Dendrochilum ignisiflorum…
When rain falls on Bantayan Island, the supply of fresh water rises. If the rains fail, it becomes scarcer. The more than 120,000 residents of Bantayan and 22 nearby islets…
MINDANAO, Philippines — In his 52 years, Vicente Bandojo says, he has never been admitted to a hospital or consulted a medical doctor for any ailment that afflicted him. Bandojo…
