Rainforest Action Network

In March, a mobilization of frontline community leaders and environmental and social justice advocates gathered in Houston, Texas to confront the corporate billionaires and fossil fuel executives at CERAWeek, the Super Bowl of oil and gas conferences. We’re in the midst of the biggest fossil fuel buildout of our lifetimes: methane gas (aka liquefied “natural” gas or LNG) expansion across the US Gulf South, including Texas.

Everyone knows by now that the war in Iran — a devastating conflict already exacting a heavy human toll — is disrupting the flow of oil around the world. It’s also having major effects on global agricultural markets and, with them, the world’s tropical rainforests. American farmers are being squeezed: fertilizer and fuel costs are rising due to the war, and export markets remain from Trump’s tariffs.

2025 proved to be a challenging year for the global climate movement, with a trifecta of escalating disasters, a changing political landscape, and cuts to international aid uniquely affecting frontline communities in the Global South.

The Forest Stewardship Council still wants you to trust that little green tree logo on your furniture box, which is supposed to mean that the wood didn’t come from razed rainforests or lands stolen from Indigenous peoples. A little known fact is that we helped create the certification scheme back in 1993.

On National Oreo Day — March 6 — activists in more than a dozen cities gathered outside offices and facilities belonging to Mondelēz International, the $40 billion company behind Oreo, Ritz, and Chips Ahoy!, to protest the company’s palm oil supply chains.

The agreement that kept the Amazon rainforest from turning into a giant soybean field is falling apart after the industry body representing some of the world’s biggest grain traders backed out of it. For 13 years, deforestation was down 69% in monitored parts of the Amazon rainforest that fell under the Amazon Soy Moratorium’s protections, an agreement that came about in 2006 to control soy — one of the Amazon’s biggest deforestation drivers.

Mondelēz International — the food giant behind Oreos, Cadbury, and Toblerone — has spent years cultivating an image as a sustainability leader, earning high environmental scores and pledging to eliminate deforestation and human rights abuses from its supply chains. Investigative reporting, however, reveals a starkly different reality: of a company that appears more focused on protecting its reputation than preventing harm to vulnerable people and the planet.

On January 5, Brazil’s soy industry association ABIOVE, which represents major grain traders — Cargill, ADM, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, COFCO and Amaggi — formally withdrew from the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM). The move followed years of intensive lobbying, and was triggered by the removal of tax incentives in the state of Mato Grosso for traders upholding the moratorium, which came into effect on January 1, 2026.

Mahakam Ulu is a region in Indonesia that still has some of the largest intact rainforests in Borneo. Our readers may remember it from an article we shared just a couple of weeks ago. The rainforest is under threat as industry expands, including pulpwood plantations — where rainforests are cleared to grow trees that will be turned into paper, cardboard, and fabrics for the fashion industry.

Mahakam Ulu, an ancient watershed in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, offers a glimpse into what Borneo used to be — before demand for coal, potato chips, shrimp, and even RVs wiped out about a third of the island’s rainforest. Slightly smaller than the state of South Carolina, the region teems with iconic and strange life: Proboscis monkeys, clouded leopards, Bornean orangutans — stouter and more reddish-brown than their Sumatran cousins — and Irrawaddy river dolphins.