Mongabay launches India-specific conservation and environment news portal

Mongabay-India will bring original news and feature stories from India’s forests, mountains, oceans, rivers, urban centres and villages. There will be stories about communities that live close to nature in and around protected areas, and also from those in the cities, towns and villages. While some features will hold a mirror up to habitat destruction, there will be also be inspiring stories that are models for positive action.

“India has incredible biological and cultural diversity, but it also faces many environmental challenges,” said Rhett A. Butler, founder and CEO of Mongabay. “However, local entrepreneurs, researchers, civil society groups, and others are devising ingenious solutions to many of these issues, providing inspiring models that could be adopted more widely provided they were better known.

Mongabay-India aims to help fill knowledge gaps and disseminate this vital information across a wide range of audiences.”

“India is already one of Mongabay’s largest markets in terms of readership so we’re thrilled to expand local coverage of key conservation and environmental issues,” he continued.

“Mongabay-India will be a great opportunity to showcase India’s biodiversity, unique ecosystems, and innovative solutions to the challenges that we face.”

About 15% of the 2.5 million visitors Mongabay gets every month are from India.

Through its stories, Mongabay-India will look at India’s development through the prism of conservation and environment. As an emerging economy, India’s growth story has had varying impacts on the country’s habitats, natural resources, biological diversity and forest-dwelling communities.

Stretching from tropical to temperate latitudes, with a 7500 km long coastline, two archipelagos, and being home to the tallest mountains and largest mangrove tracts in the world, India harbours biodiversity hotspots of global importance. Mongabay-India will bring stories of people, animals, plants and their habitats.

The environmental news portal particularly aims to bring biodiversity issues into mainstream discussion in India. Even though the day-to-day lives of those living in cities, towns and villages of the country are dependent on India’s rich biological heritage, there has been a disconnect in this understanding in recent years.

As the country moved into a market economy driven by a desire to consume, the awareness on the ecological footprint of individual and collective action receded into the background. Through interesting news and feature stories, photo features, analyses, video stories and podcasts, Mongabay-India will bring these linkages back into the public understanding.

“Conservation of biological diversity will happen naturally if there is a greater public appreciation on the significance of this heritage to their lives and livelihoods,” said S. Gopikrishna Warrier, senior contributing editor, Mongabay-India.

“Through our stories we will reinforce the fact that conservation is not a mere elite preoccupation but an investment for our own survival. When biodiversity concerns are mainstreamed into the national narrative it would naturally reflect on improved and sensitive policy making that will favour conservation.”

At present, Mongabay-India will focus on producing content in English, but in time, it intends to broaden its offerings into other languages.

Rhett A. Butler founded Mongabay in 1999 out of his passion for tropical forests. He named the site Mongabay after an island in Madagascar. Since it was founded, 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 2.5 million visitors per month and publishes stories in nine languages. Visitors from India constituted 15% of this number in 2017. 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 recognised as an accurate and trustworthy source by civil society organisations, development agencies, and government institutions.