About Mongabay Environews Philippines

Mongabay Environews Philippines is a conservation and environment news and features service that aims to bring high quality, original reports from nature’s frontline in the Philippines. As a Philippine-specific portal of the global news platform mongabay.com, this website follows the format of Mongabay’s dedicated regional outlets in India, Indonesia, and Latin America, but is staffed and supported through a partnership with Philippine EnviroNews and Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

Mongabay has grown into the world’s most popular rainforest information site and a well-known source of environmental news reporting and analysis. Today, Mongabay draws more than 3 million visitors per month and publishes stories in more than half a dozen languages. It is commonly used as an information source by mainstream media, including The Economist, Bloomberg, National Geographic, and the Associated Press. Mongabay is also widely recognized as an accurate and trustworthy source by civil society organizations as well as development agencies. Rhett A. Butler founded mongabay.com in 1999 out of his passion for tropical forests. He named the site Mongabay after an island in Madagascar.

The Philippines is identified as one of the 18 megadiverse countries in the world and the smallest in terms of land area. As an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia, the Philippines’s vast forest reserves and over 36,000 km coastline with 2.5 million coral reef cover are homes to more than 50,000 species, making it among the top conservation areas in the world. Located at the apex of the Coral Triangle, the Philippines is an integral part of this global center of marine biodiversity. The Coral Triangle is a marine region that spans parts of the Philippines. Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste with at least 509 species of reef-building corals.

Rapid urbanization, transformation of forest reserves to agricultural land, and active mining operations in protected areas have affected natural resources, biological diversity, and displaced or threatened indigenous communities in the Philippines. Illegal wildlife trade is considered the biggest challenge to conservation alongside poaching, deforestation and wildlife habitat destruction. From the country’s 244 identified protected areas, inland wetlands and caves, we bring you stories of people and communities, animals, plants and their habitats.

This website will focus on producing written content in English, but in time, we intend to broaden our offerings to video and other local languages. Our articles are produced under an open Creative Commons license allowing other outlets to use our content, commercially or non-commercially, at no cost.