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Francis Hallé, the botanist who took a raft into the rainforest canopy 22 Jan 2026 04:00:24 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/francis-halle-the-botanist-who-took-a-raft-into-the-rainforest-canopy/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: In most forests, a visitor’s eye is trained on what can be reached. The trunk can be measured. The leaves can be plucked. A specimen can be pressed, labeled, and filed away. Yet the largest share of life in a tropical rainforest is suspended overhead, in a zone of light, wind, and constant exchange. For much of the 20th century, that upper world remained a blank on the map of biology, less from lack of curiosity than from a practical problem: it was hard to work where you could not stand. Science often advances when someone treats a logistical obstacle as an intellectual one. In the 1980s, a group of researchers and engineers devised a way to bring a laboratory to the canopy itself. A balloon could lift a platform, set it down on the crowns of trees, and allow botanists to move and observe without felling what they came to study. The method was unglamorous in its intent, even if the image was memorable: a raft perched in the treetops. It opened a layer of forest that had been described more than it had been examined. The botanist at the center of this project had little taste for grand titles. Asked if he was an explorer, he waved it away. “No, no, no, botanist is more than enough for me.” he said. “Life is too short for a botanist,” he added, as if the subject could never be finished. The remark was not a pose. It reflected a view…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - The richest part of a tropical rainforest is often the hardest to study: the canopy, where much of its biodiversity lives beyond reach from the ground. Francis Hallé helped change that by finding ways to observe the treetops without cutting them down. - A French botanist, biologist, and illustrator, he became known for the “canopy raft,” a platform set onto the crowns of trees by a balloon. It turned the upper forest from a place described in theory into one examined up close. - Hallé was an expert in tropical forest ecology and “the architecture of trees,” a way of identifying trees by how they grow and branch. He paired field science with drawing and plain speech, and he was unsparing about the forces driving deforestation. - In his later years he pursued a long-term plan to restore a “primeval forest” in Western Europe, left to evolve with minimal human interference over centuries. It was, in his view, a test of whether societies could think beyond the political moment. authors: | ||
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Indonesia revokes forest and mine permits over role in deadly Sumatra landslides 22 Jan 2026 01:38:30 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/indonesia-revokes-forest-and-mine-permits-over-role-in-deadly-sumatra-landslides/ author: Hans Nicholas Jong dc:creator: Hans Nicholas Jong content:encoded: JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has revoked the permits of 28 companies over environmental violations that authorities say exacerbated the deadly floods and landslides that struck the island of Sumatra in late 2025. The revocations follow an audit carried out by a government task force responsible for forest area enforcement after disasters triggered by Cyclone Senyar in November 2025, which killed about 1,200 people across Indonesia’s main western island. The audit found that the 28 companies had violated various rules, including the 2009 law on environmental protection, and bore responsibility for environmental damage linked to the disasters. Authorities still haven’t disclose detailed findings or evidence for each case. The audit results were presented to President Prabowo Subianto during an online meeting on Jan. 19. “Based on that report, the president decided to revoke the permits of 28 companies that were proven to have committed violations,” State Secretariat Minister Prasetyo Hadi said at a press conference on Jan. 20, as quoted by CNBC Indonesia. The move signals a shift in how administrative enforcement is framed in Indonesia, with permit sanctions now explicitly justified by post-disaster accountability rather than routine compliance alone. The revoked permits include 22 forest utilization permits (PBPH) for operating in natural and plantation forests, covering a combined area of about 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) — roughly one-third the size of Belgium — as well as six mining, plantation and timber forest product utilization permits (PBPHHK). Among the affected permit holders is major pulpwood producer PT Toba…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Indonesia has revoked the permits of 28 companies after a post–Cyclone Senyar audit found environmental violations that authorities say worsened deadly floods and landslides in Sumatra in late 2025, which killed about 1,200 people. - The revoked permits cover about 1 million hectares of forests and include major players such as pulpwood producer PT Toba Pulp Lestari, marking a shift toward framing permit enforcement as post-disaster accountability. - Two high-profile projects in the Batang Toru ecosystem were hit: a nearly completed hydropower plant and the Martabe gold mine, both long criticized for operating in landslide-prone terrain that’s the only habitat of the critically endangered Tapanuli orangutan. - Environmental groups have welcomed the revocations, but warn the move is incomplete, calling for transparency, ecosystem restoration, protection against permit transfers to new operators, and broader action to halt deforestation in vulnerable watersheds. authors: | ||
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Philippines hosts new Asia-Pacific hub for sustainable agriculture, cuisine 21 Jan 2026 23:16:33 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/philippines-hosts-new-asia-pacific-hub-for-sustainable-agriculture-cuisine/ author: Erik Hoffner dc:creator: Keith Anthony Fabro content:encoded: BACOLOD CITY, Philippines — For five days last November, the city of Bacolod in the central Philippine province of Negros Occidental became a crossroads of food cultures from across Asia and the Pacific. The aroma of grilled seafood, fermented sauces, roasted coffee and freshly ground spices filled the air as farmers, chefs, food artisans, scientists, fisherfolk, Indigenous leaders, researchers and policymakers gathered to talk about seeds, soil, culture and survival. The event marked the first Asia-Pacific convergence of the global Slow Food movement, bringing together more than 2,000 delegates from 20 countries in Bacolod. The participants were drawn by shared concerns over biodiversity loss, climate change, and the future of food systems across the region. Organized by the international NGO Slow Food, which advocates for good, clean and fair food for all, in collaboration with Philippines partners, the gathering sought to strengthen regional networks around agroecology, a sustainable farming approach that integrates ecology, Indigenous knowledge, and social action, while showcasing food cultures rooted in local ecosystems. “This is a space where communities, ingredients, and ideas come together to shape the future of food,” Edward Mukiibi, president of Slow Food, told Mongabay, describing it as both a cultural platform and a venue for confronting urgent environmental challenges. Myrna Pula, a T’boli Indigenous leader from the southern Philippines, showcases heirloom rice varieties that have sustained her community and culture for generations. Image by Keith Anthony Fabro for Mongabay. Hub for ‘good, clean and fair’ food A key outcome of the gathering was…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - More than 2,000 farmers, chefs and policymakers met last November in the Philippines to explore food systems rooted in biodiversity conservation, Indigenous knowledge and local food security. - Speakers highlighted agroecology and nature-based solutions as practical ways to strengthen food security while restoring ecosystems and supporting livelihoods. - Climate risks from typhoons to floods underscored why diversified farming and healthy soils matter for resilience across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. - The gathering signaled a pushback against industrial agriculture, including GMOs, and a move toward regional cooperation on “good, clean and fair” food. authors: | ||
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Critical wetland in Angola gets formal Ramsar recognition 21 Jan 2026 22:27:15 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/critical-wetland-in-angola-gets-formal-ramsar-recognition/ author: Bobbybascomb dc:creator: Ryan Truscott content:encoded: In a remote part of Angola’s highlands, a critical natural reservoir or “water tower” has been recognized as a wetland of international importance. Known to locals as lisima lya mwono, or “source of life,” the area supplies water to the region’s most important rivers and supports unique native wildlife. Officially designated last October by the Angolan government and announced Jan. 6 by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the site covers around 53,000 square kilometers (20,500 square miles) in Moxico province. The area sits on a vast plateau roughly 1,200 meters (3,900 feet) above sea level. It’s creased by valleys and dotted with freshwater lakes, rivers, peatlands and marshes. These ecosystems store huge volumes of rainfall, releasing it steadily into major African river systems, including the Okavango and Zambezi. “It’s like a hidden world,” Kerllen Costa, Angolan director for the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project (NGOWP), told Mongabay. Project researchers first encountered the region’s water systems while tracing the length of the Cuito River in 2015. Since then, the team has documented nearly 150 new-to-science species from the area, including spiders, snakes, mice and mushrooms. Camera traps have revealed abundant wildlife, including lions, leopards and cheetahs. They’ve also confirmed local reports of secretive “ghost elephants” that may be a genetically distinct population. NGOWP botanical research director David Goyder, also with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K., said the water tower’s deep, sandy soils support deciduous miombo woodlands. These are home to highly specialized plants, often unique to the region,…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: In a remote part of Angola’s highlands, a critical natural reservoir or “water tower” has been recognized as a wetland of international importance. Known to locals as lisima lya mwono, or “source of life,” the area supplies water to the region’s most important rivers and supports unique native wildlife. Officially designated last October by the […] authors: | ||
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IUCN launches group to conserve at-risk microbes vital to life on Earth 21 Jan 2026 21:12:24 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/iucn-launches-group-to-conserve-at-risk-microbes-vital-to-life-on-earth/ author: Glenn Scherer dc:creator: Sean Mowbray content:encoded: Invisible in their trillions, microbes dwell in our bodies, grow in soils, live on trees and are integral to planetary health. Yet the huge oversized roles these teeming biodiverse microbial communities play as a foundation for life on Earth is often overlooked. And so, too, are the threats microorganisms face, especially from humanity’s actions. But this scientific inattention is about to end, as a newly launched International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) species survival commission focuses on microbiology and dire threats to microbial species. “I think this is a huge milestone for microbiologists, but also for conservation overall, because for the first time, we have an official recognition that microbes need to be included in the conservation agenda,” says Raquel Peixoto, co-chair of the IUCN specialist group and chair of the Marine Science Program at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. “We cannot talk about either climate change or biodiversity loss without talking about microbes, because we need them to keep the ecosystems healthy and working, and we need them to keep the organisms working,” she adds. All plants and animals host invisible communities of microbes. These vast unseen microbiomes are fundamental to life as we know it, but these invisible ecosystems are also threatened by numerous intensifying pressures, including pollution, climate change and land use change. Prochlorococcus microorganisms in the world’s oceans produce vast amounts of oxygen via photosynthesis. Increasing water temperatures could cause declines of this invaluable microbe. A recent study estimates that…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Microbial communities, though invisible to the naked eye, are vitally important to planetary health and to Earth’s ecosystems. But they are often neglected in conservation strategies. - Like other branches of life, microbial communities are under threat due to climate change, pollution, land use change and a wide range of other human actions. Degraded microbial communities can have harmful consequences for human well-being, ecosystems health and wider planetary processes. - A newly launched specialist group under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) aims to place microbes on the conservation agenda. - The new IUCN group plans to develop conservation strategies aimed at identifying and protecting at-risk microbial species vital to planetary health and create a Red and Green List, similar to those that exist for threatened animals and plants. authors: | ||
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Overuse is pushing the world toward ‘water bankruptcy’ 21 Jan 2026 18:05:55 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/overuse-is-pushing-the-world-toward-water-bankruptcy/ author: Glenn Scherer dc:creator: Bobby Bascomb content:encoded: The world is depleting its freshwater far faster than nature can replace it, pushing many regions into “water bankruptcy,” according to a new report from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). The report compares Earth’s hydrological system to a household’s finances. Rivers, rainfall and snow represent annual income, while glaciers, wetlands and aquifers are long-term savings. Many regions have withdrawn too much water from both the “income” and “savings” accounts, leading to a water bankruptcy. “This report tells an uncomfortable truth: many regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” lead author Keveh Madani said in a statement. Many water systems have been overdrawn for more than 50 years, the report finds. Roughly 70% of large aquifers show long-term decline while 30% of glacier mass has been lost since the 1970s due to a warming climate. Some mountains in low and mid latitudes are expected to lose their glaciers completely in the coming decades, meaning the rivers they feed won’t be replenished. When glaciers melt and aquifers are pumped dry, those resources can’t be replaced in a human timescale. Scientists have long warned of a global water crisis, but water bankruptcy is the post-crisis stage of irreversible damage to water systems. “The language of crisis — suggesting a temporary emergency followed by a return to normal through mitigation efforts — no longer captures what is happening in many parts of the world,” the report authors note. Agriculture accounts for roughly…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: The world is depleting its freshwater far faster than nature can replace it, pushing many regions into “water bankruptcy,” according to a new report from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). The report compares Earth’s hydrological system to a household’s finances. Rivers, rainfall and snow represent annual income, while glaciers, […] authors: | ||
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Earth Rover Program seeks to track the world’s soil health 21 Jan 2026 18:02:09 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/earth-rover-program-seeks-to-track-the-worlds-soil-health/ author: Terna Gyuse dc:creator: John Cannon content:encoded: With a synchronized tap from run-of-the-mill hammers on metal plates resting on the ground, researchers kneeling in nine fields across four continents believe they’ve hit upon more than just the earth beneath their feet. “Waiting for it,” someone said. And then, “Waveforms!” “Excellent, waveforms!” another said, as the tiles on screen reveal EKG-like sets of squiggles on laptops and smartphones from each of the locations. The video promotes the Earth Rover Program, a new effort to glean critical details about the soil from the way that a hammer tap tickles a set of sensors. It’s early days for the project. But its global team is working to bring the tools of seismology — known affectionately as “the science of the squiggle,” said co-founder Simon Jeffery — to bear on teasing apart the global puzzle of soil health. Jeffery and his fellow founders, geophysicist Tarje Nissen-Meyer and journalist George Monbiot, have staked out a far-reaching ambition to map soils with a cost-effective technology. They say they hope the program will equip farmers the world over with a better set of tools to grow crops and ensure that soils will remain healthy long into the future. “If we don’t have soil, then we don’t have the wonderful aboveground ecosystems that the vast majority of us enjoy so much,” Jeffery, a professor of soil ecology at Harper Adams University in the U.K., told Mongabay in an interview. He’s quick to point out that soil — the accumulated minerals, organic matter, droplets of liquid…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Leveraging tools from seismology — the study of earthquakes and the inside of our planet — the Earth Rover Program aims to provide critical data on the health of soil. - Humans, and terrestrial life in general, depend on the soil for nourishment. - Yet, in many parts of the world, soils are degraded, worn out and eroding away. - The recently founded program involves the development of inexpensive technology that farmers and scientists alike can use to better understand soil health and what can be done to improve it. authors: | ||
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Growing native plants to heal land at Indigenous owned nursery in British Columbia 21 Jan 2026 17:13:33 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/growing-native-plants-to-heal-land-at-indigenous-owned-nursery-in-british-columbia/ author: Jeremy Hance dc:creator: Ruth Kamnitzer content:encoded: CRANBROOK, British Colombia | At the Nupqu Native Plant Nursery in the Canadian province of British Columbia, sulfur buckwheat seedlings fill Styrofoam trays. It’s October, the end of the growing season, and each is just a small cluster of dark-green, waxy, oval leaves, undersides bleeding to purple. Sulfur buckwheat (Eriogonum umbellatum) is a high-altitude grassland species and one of the most in-demand species for restoration of highly degraded land, says Melanie Redman, the nursery’s seed specialist. But it’s also notoriously tricky to propagate. It usually takes two to three years to coax the plant from seed to seedling. This year, however, the nursery has managed to get the whole process down to just one year. Nupqu, which means “black bear” in the Ktunaxa language, is a wholly Ktunaxa-owned land and natural resource management company, part of a number of businesses jointly owned by the four Ktunaxa First Nations in Canada and the Ktunaxa Nation Council. Five years ago, the company acquired an existing native plant nursery, located on the ʔaq̓am reserve, and has since been building up expertise and capacity. The Nupqu Native Plant Nursery, which says it’s the largest Indigenous-owned native plant nursery in Canada, now cultivates more than 60 plant species. Most are grown from seeds collected on the Canadian portion of the Ktunaxa’s traditional territory, which stretches over 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles) across the Kootenay region of what is now British Columbia. It’s a land of jagged peaks, high alpine meadows, grasslands, dappled forests, fish-bearing…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - The Ktunaxa First Nation owned Nupqu Native Plant Nursery in south-eastern British Columbia propagates over 60 native plant species, with a focus on locally-collected seed. - The nursery grows 700,000 seedlings on site, and through five partner nurseries, supplies 2.5 million seedlings a year for restoration, mostly within Ktunaxa territory in Canada. - Over the past five years of operation, the nursery has built up a wealth of knowledge on how to propagate many tricky species. - Nupqu is now working with partners to build up an Indigenous-led native plant nursery industry in British Columbia. authors: | ||
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Is South Asia becoming inhospitable for migratory birds? 21 Jan 2026 10:19:21 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/is-south-asia-becoming-inhospitable-for-migratory-birds/ author: Abusiddique dc:creator: Sadiqur Rahman content:encoded: Every winter, millions of birds fly thousands of kilometers via the Central Asian Flyway (CAF) and East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF), from the frozen expanses of Siberia and Central Asia to the warmer South Asia and beyond. The birds’ migration depends on a chain of intact ecosystems: primarily wetlands, riverine forests and coastal mangroves, which serve as their crucial stopover sites for rest and refueling. However, today, many of these habitats and food sources are disappearing. Researchers from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, India, the Maldives, Bhutan and Sri Lanka have assessed that wetland conversion amid agricultural expansion and rapid urbanization, unplanned fishing and pollution are degrading the wetlands, mudflats and river systems across South Asia. Bangladeshi ornithologist Sayam U. Chowdhury, a researcher at the Conservation Research Institute (CRI) under the University of Cambridge, explains how rapid urbanization and the loss of natural wetlands pose a serious threat to migratory waterbirds. Although many people associate waterbirds with fish, most migratory species — including ducks, geese and shorebirds — rely on shallow wetlands, mudflats and nearby agricultural lands. They primarily feed on aquatic vegetation, seeds and invertebrates rather than fish. “When waterbodies are drained, polluted or heavily altered, it destroys the habitats and food resources these birds depend on during their non-breeding season,” Chowdhury tells Mongabay. Bangladesh lies within both the Central Asian and the East Asian-Australian flyways and provides habitat for around 310 migratory bird species, according to Bangladesh’s National Report of COP13’s Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Migratory birds are losing critical stopover habitats across South Asia along major global flyways due to human-driven causes. - Draining wetlands and overfishing eliminate aquatic vegetation, invertebrates and fish that form the dietary base for migratory birds. - Researchers emphasize that protecting migratory birds requires coordinated action beyond national borders. authors: | ||
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‘Holy river’ carries industrial waste & sewage from Nepal to India 21 Jan 2026 10:01:40 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/holy-river-carries-industrial-waste-sewage-from-nepal-to-india/ author: Abhaya Raj Joshi dc:creator: Suresh Bidari content:encoded: BIRGUNJ, Nepal — When 38-year-old Pradeep Kumar Bishwokarma was growing up in Ramgadhawa, a neighborhood in southern Nepal’s industrial town of Birgunj, he would jump into the Sirsiya River to beat the summer heat as his mother washed clothes and residents drew drinking water from it. Today, Bishwokarma and his fellow residents of the border town cover their noses with a handkerchief whenever they pass by the river that was once their village’s lifeline. The flowing liquid no longer resembles a river. It is thick and black as if a truckload of oil had been dumped into it. The air around the river feels heavy with the stench of sulfur and rotting organic matter. “This is no longer a river,” Bishwokarma said, pointing toward it. “It has become an open drain for factories, and we haven’t just lost a river, we’ve lost our self-respect,” he added. The river, which was once a crucial part of daily life, religion and agriculture in Bara and Parsa districts, is one of the 6,000-odd rivers and rivulets flowing into India from Nepal. It begins its journey from the Ramban Jhadi( forest) of Bara district farther north and passes through Nepal’s largest industrial zone, the Bara-Parsa corridor. Map of factories along the Sirsiya River. Source: Feasibility Study for Effluent Treatment Plant for Discharges from Industries in the Birgunj-Pathlaiya section. (Image not in scale) Today, ineffective environmental regulation and poor coordination among government agencies have allowed factories to dump untreated industrial waste and sewage into the…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - The Sirsiya River, once central to daily life, agriculture and religious rituals in southern Nepal, is now heavily polluted with industrial waste and sewage, turning it into a public health hazard. - Factories in Nepal’s industrial corridor discharge untreated effluents as weak enforcement, ineffective regulation and unimplemented wastewater plans allow pollution to persist. - Pollution flows into Raxaul, India, contaminating water and harming crops, while residents on other side of the border say Indian efforts to treat local sewage can’t offset the influx from Nepal. authors: | ||
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2025 was third-warmest year on record, research shows 20 Jan 2026 22:22:58 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/2025-was-third-warmest-year-on-record-research-shows/ author: Bobbybascomb dc:creator: Shanna Hanbury content:encoded: 2025 was the third-warmest year on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The warmest year on record is still 2024, with 2023 coming in second. The global average surface temperature for 2025 was estimated to be 1.44° Celsius (2.59° Fahrenheit) higher than preindustrial levels. The last 11 years have been the warmest 11 years since global records began in 1850. “The year 2025 started and ended with a cooling La Niña and yet it was still one of the warmest years on record globally because of the accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere,” WMO secretary-general Celeste Saulo said in a statement. Annual global mean temperature anomalies relative to the 1850-1900 average, shown from 1850 to 2025 across eight data sets. Image courtesy of WMO. To calculate the mean temperature of 2025, the WMO consolidated eight different data sets from agencies based in North America, Europe and Asia. Each data set uses a different methodology, resulting in slightly different conclusions and a margin of uncertainty of ±0.13°C (±0.23°F). Six of the data sets were based on measurements made at weather stations and by ships and buoys. The other two, ERA5 by the EU-run Copernicus Climate Change Service and JRA-3Q by the Japan Meteorological Agency, are based on modeling. Although it wasn’t the warmest year on record, 2025 was expected to be cooler due to a La Niña event, which typically lowers ocean surface temperatures. But separate research published in January found that the world’s oceans set a…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: 2025 was the third-warmest year on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The warmest year on record is still 2024, with 2023 coming in second. The global average surface temperature for 2025 was estimated to be 1.44° Celsius (2.59° Fahrenheit) higher than preindustrial levels. The last 11 years have been the warmest 11 years […] authors: | ||
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Drag artist Pattie Gonia on why nature advocacy needs joy to succeed 20 Jan 2026 21:01:24 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/podcast/2026/01/drag-artist-pattie-gonia-on-why-nature-advocacy-needs-joy-to-succeed/ author: Mikedigirolamo dc:creator: Basten GokkonMike DiGirolamo content:encoded: Professional drag artist and environmental activist Pattie Gonia has more than 1.5 million followers on Instagram and has raised $1.2 million for environmental nonprofits by hiking 100 miles, or 160 kilometers, in full drag into San Francisco. She has gained international recognition for using drag artistry to advocate for the environment, in acknowledgment and celebration of hundreds of researchers and scientists in the field who identify as queer. She joins Mongabay’s podcast to explain why joy is a fundamental ingredient missing in the environmental advocacy space, how she prioritizes it in her work as a drag performer and activist, and why she feels the environmental movement must prioritize it to succeed. “If we want people to join this movement, we have to make it freaking fun,” she says. Rather than highlighting the ways in which we are all different or siloing the environmental sector from everyday citizens, Pattie Gonia encourages the movement to embrace what all humans share in common — the natural world — and protect it from entrenched power structures of exploitation and the ultrawealthy. A merging of culture, art and nature is what she wants to see more of. “The outdoor communities need to start working together, because we have hunters over here and we have like little liberal L.A. girlies over here. And we’re all actually fighting for the same thing. And we have more in common with each other than we do with these billionaires who oppress us all. So how about we work together…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: Professional drag artist and environmental activist Pattie Gonia has more than 1.5 million followers on Instagram and has raised $1.2 million for environmental nonprofits by hiking 100 miles, or 160 kilometers, in full drag into San Francisco. She has gained international recognition for using drag artistry to advocate for the environment, in acknowledgment and celebration […] authors: | ||
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Predators of the Great Wildebeest Migration: Then and now (cartoon) 20 Jan 2026 17:48:36 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/custom-story/2026/01/predators-of-the-great-wildebeest-migration-then-and-now-cartoon/ author: Nandithachandraprakash dc:creator: Rohan Chakravarty content:encoded: While ecotourism has contributed both to wildlife conservation and community welfare in Kenya, over-tourism and the corporatization of ecotourism are now proving to be literal impediments in the ecological webs of the Kenyan wilderness. A Maasai leader recently took legal action against luxury chain Ritz-Carlton, claiming that its new lodge in Kenya’s Maasai Mara Reserve obstructs a crucial wildebeest migration corridor.This article was originally published on Mongabay description: While ecotourism has contributed both to wildlife conservation and community welfare in Kenya, over-tourism and the corporatization of ecotourism are now proving to be literal impediments in the ecological webs of the Kenyan wilderness. A Maasai leader recently took legal action against luxury chain Ritz-Carlton, claiming that its new lodge in Kenya’s Maasai Mara Reserve […] authors: | ||
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How US intervention could deepen Venezuela’s environmental crisis 20 Jan 2026 17:32:36 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/how-us-intervention-could-deepen-venezuelas-environmental-crisis/ author: Alexandrapopescu dc:creator: Maxwell Radwin content:encoded: When U.S. forces entered Venezuela earlier this month and removed President Nicolás Maduro, officials framed the intervention as a strategic economic opportunity. President Donald Trump repeatedly pointed to the country’s oil reserves and rare earth minerals, saying U.S. companies stood to earn billions of dollars. Less attention has been paid to the environmental risks of his plan. More than half of Venezuela is covered by forest, some of it in the Amazon Basin. It also has grasslands, wetlands and thousands of kilometers of Caribbean coastline. These ecosystems were already under strain under the Maduro government, but critics warn that foreign intervention could intensify the damage. “If environmental risks aren’t taken into account in this process, we’re probably facing a potential environmental catastrophe of a very large magnitude,” Eduardo Klein, a marine ecology professor at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, told Mongabay. Venezuela has an estimated 300 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, the largest in the world. Yet it produces slightly less than a million barrels a day, far below many other oil-producing countries with smaller reserves. By international standards, Venezuela’s oil is heavier than in other parts of the world, making it more costly and requiring special processing equipment. The government has also allowed pipelines and refineries to fall into disrepair over the last 20 years, the result of financial mismanagement, corruption, an untrained workforce and sanctions. In 2024, there were at least 65 oil spills across eight states, according to the Venezuelan Observatory for Political Ecology. It also…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Following the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. has expressed interest in the country’s oil and minerals. But the current landscape means that a rushed investment could be disastrous for the environment, critics warn. - Venezuela has an estimated 300 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, the largest in the world. But decaying infrastructure and corruption make investment almost impossible, with a high risk of spills inside sensitive ecosystems. - The country also has massive mineral deposits, many of them in the rainforest and on Indigenous territory. The mines are largely controlled by criminal groups, making U.S. involvement there extremely complicated, critics said. authors: | ||
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Too many African plants fall into the IUCN’s ‘not evaluated’ trap (commentary) 20 Jan 2026 16:41:05 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/too-many-african-plants-fall-into-the-iucns-not-evaluated-trap-commentary/ author: Erik Hoffner dc:creator: Victor Nsereko Wantate content:encoded: Many African conservation decisions such as funding, policy, species prioritization and nursery propagation implicitly treat the IUCN Red List as a complete map of extinction risk. It is not. For plants including trees, the biggest risk is not only that we mis-rank species, it’s that we overlook vast numbers of species that have never been globally assessed or have assessments that are decades old. So, how much plant diversity is assessed? Globally, one widely cited synthesis notes that of about 350,000 vascular plant species, the IUCN Red List documents about 62,666 species, or roughly 18%. That means most vascular plant species worldwide have no global Red List category to guide action. Africa illustrates the gap even more starkly. A comprehensive checklist of Mozambique’s vascular flora (compiled in July 2021) reported that although 1,667 taxa in the national checklist were registered on the IUCN Red List, the global extinction risk status for 76.5% of Mozambique’s vascular flora was not evaluated (including taxa explicitly categorized as not evaluated (NE) and taxa not listed on the IUCN Red List). At a broader (tropical Africa) scale, one peer-reviewed analysis of 22,036 green plant species found that only 2,856 had full IUCN assessments available (about 13%), and only 2,009 (9.1%) had assessments published after 2001. In other words, 87% of species had their assessments published a quarter century, or longer, ago. Flower and leaves of mgambo tree (Majidea zangueberica), which is also known as black pearl tree or velvet seed tree. Image courtesy of Lukango…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Of the approximately 350,000 vascular plant species in the world, only about 18% have been assessed by the IUCN Red List, and the situation is starker still if one looks at just tropical African species. - Further, IUCN’s “not evaluated” category simply means a species has not yet been assessed against Red List criteria, and in practice, African conservationists often meet a more confusing reality: Many species are not on the global Red List at all but are still informally talked about as if they are NE. - “Here’s a constructive way forward via “Red List + Reality” decision rules…A stronger system could combine global assessments with local intelligence,” a new commentary suggests. - This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay. authors: | ||
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Brazil bets reducing poverty can protect the Amazon 20 Jan 2026 16:31:58 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/brazil-bets-reducing-poverty-can-protect-the-amazon/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: In the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, in Brazil’s western Amazon, daily life still depends on the forest. Families tap rubber, collect Brazil nuts, and manage small plots without clearing large areas. The reserve is named after Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper and labor leader murdered in 1988 for defending that way of life. More than three decades later, the logic he argued for — that forests are better protected when people can make a living from them — has returned to the center of Brazilian conservation policy. That shift is taking place within ARPA, the Amazon Region Protected Areas program. Created in 2002 by the Brazilian government and later backed by WWF and major donors, ARPA supports 120 protected areas covering more than 60 million hectares (148 million acres), an expanse roughly the size of Madagascar. Its early years focused on expanding protected areas and building a long-term financing structure. The results were tangible. Between 2008 and 2020, deforestation in ARPA-supported areas was significantly lower than in comparable regions, avoiding large volumes of carbon emissions. A new phase, ARPA Comunidades, reflects a change in emphasis, contributor Constance Malleret wrote for Mongabay. About half of the protected areas under ARPA are sustainable-use reserves, where people live and work inside the forest. Until now, these communities benefited indirectly from conservation spending. The new program aims to support them directly. “We were missing closer attention to the communities living in these sustainable-use conservation units,” said Fernanda Marques of FUNBIO, the Brazilian nonprofit that…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: In the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, in Brazil’s western Amazon, daily life still depends on the forest. Families tap rubber, collect Brazil nuts, and manage small plots without clearing large areas. The reserve is named after Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper and labor leader murdered in 1988 for defending that way of life. More than […] authors: | ||
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For two of the world’s most at-risk primates, threats abound and the future looks grim 20 Jan 2026 10:54:32 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/for-two-of-the-worlds-most-at-risk-primates-threats-abound-and-the-future-looks-grim/ author: Terna Gyuse dc:creator: Mino Rakotovao content:encoded: Between Nigeria’s Cross River and Cameroon’s Sanaga River lies one of West Africa’s largest remaining blocks of intact rainforest. Noisy groups of Preuss’s red colobus monkeys (Piliocolobus preussi) move through this forest’s canopy in bands 20-to-60-strong, feeding mainly on the young leaves of just a few tree species, including Lecomtedoxa klaineana (known locally as oguomo) and Xylopia aethiopica (“grains of Selim”). The leaf-heavy diet of these social monkeys helps shape forest structure, and declines in their numbers often foreshadow wider losses of wildlife across the forest. Half a world away, a very different primate lurks in the trees on the small, relatively isolated Indonesian island of Bangka. Readily identified by its pale facial mask, the Bangka slow loris (Nycticebus bancanus) is arboreal, nocturnal, and venomous, with large eyes and deliberate movements. Not much formal scientific knowledge has been gathered about this species since it was first described in 1937, but local conservationists have rehabilitated and released several dozen of the animals over the past decade. Both species feature on the “Primates in Peril”, a roll call of the world’s 25 most endangered primates, a call for careful, focused conservation action. The future prospects for either primate illustrates how a threatened species’ survival may depend on very specific conditions: the health and protection of a single small island, or a particular forest type, or a few key plant species within that forest can make the difference between persistence and disappearance. Korup National Park, Cameroon. Image by Pleauthon Pierre via Flickr (CC…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Preuss’s red colobus is found in two populations in West Africa — roughly 3,000 individuals in the Korup–Cross River forest block and none confirmed in the Yabassi Key Biodiversity Area for more than a decade — and faces intense pressure from hunting and habitat loss. - The Bangka slow loris, restricted to Bangka Island in Indonesia has not been systematically studied for decades and has suffered extensive habitat loss from mining and forest conversion. - Proper field studies and conservation approaches used for other slow loris species could provide a road map for assessing and protecting the Bangka slow loris. - For Preuss’s red colobus, a regional action plan is advancing in Nigeria, where monitoring and community outreach are underway, but implementation in Cameroon has been hampered by ongoing civil unrest around Korup National Park. authors: | ||
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The knowledge to save coffee already exists, now it’s in one e-library 20 Jan 2026 05:02:41 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/the-knowledge-to-save-coffee-already-exists-now-its-in-one-e-library/ author: Erik Hoffner dc:creator: Bobby Bascomb content:encoded: Roughly half the world’s arabica coffee-growing regions will become unsuitable for cultivation of the crop by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. The consequences of a shrinking coffee harvest extend far beyond a daily caffeine fix, but experts say solutions do exist. One promising approach is agroforestry. The nonprofit Coffee Watch has now created an e-library of all the research ever conducted on coffee agroforestry to help producers grow the finicky plant amid the changing climate. Coffee is “a very sensitive little plant,” Etelle Higonnet, founder and director of Coffee Watch, told Mongabay in a video call. “It doesn’t like cold, but it doesn’t like hot. It doesn’t like dry, but it doesn’t like wet.” It only grows well in mountainous areas in the tropics. Coffee agroforestry seeks to mimic natural ecosystems by growing coffee alongside other trees and bushes, creating a moderated microclimate that meets the “Goldilocks” balance of temperature and rainfall, mitigating the impacts of climate change. The approach can also support soil health and biodiversity, and produce better coffee. Companion plants grown with coffee can include fruit trees or other cash crops that provide additional income and food for coffee growers. Coffee agroforestry is potentially a win-win, Higonnet said, but only if producers know how to do it. That’s where the Coffee Watch e-library comes in. “Anything that’s ever been written about agroforestry coffee is in this library. That way, companies don’t have to do a million stupid pilot projects and reinvent the wheel for 20…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: Roughly half the world’s arabica coffee-growing regions will become unsuitable for cultivation of the crop by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. The consequences of a shrinking coffee harvest extend far beyond a daily caffeine fix, but experts say solutions do exist. One promising approach is agroforestry. The nonprofit Coffee Watch has now […] authors: | ||
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From south to north, Sri Lanka’s cricket dreams undermine fragile ecosystems 19 Jan 2026 13:51:40 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/from-south-to-north-sri-lankas-cricket-dreams-undermine-fragile-ecosystems/ author: Dilrukshi Handunnetti dc:creator: Malaka Rodrigo content:encoded: COLOMBO — Cricket is more than a sport in Sri Lanka. It is woven into the country’s postindependence identity, a unifying passion that cuts across class, ethnicity and geography. Yet in recent years, the push to expand cricket infrastructure has increasingly collided with fragile ecosystems, triggering uncomfortable questions about development priorities, environmental governance and climate resilience. The latest controversy centers around plans to build an international cricket stadium on Mandaitivu, a small island off the Jaffna Peninsula in Sri Lanka’s Northern province. Environmentalists warn that the proposal threatens a sensitive coastal ecosystem already under pressure from sea-level rise, flooding and postwar development. Mandaitivu Island has a traditional fishing community that relies on prawns and crabs for its livelihood, and the mangrove ecosystems are their breeding ground. Image courtesy of Muhunthan Balachandiran. In September, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake launched the construction, stating that the Jaffna International Cricket Stadium will not merely be a venue for cricket, but a symbol of national unity. Prasanna Rodrigo, media spokesperson for Sri Lanka Cricket, confirms a delay in commencing construction due to Cyclone Ditwah but says development work is being carried out as planned to have the project commissioned for international matches by 2027. This international cricket ground is part of Sri Lanka Cricket’s broader initiative to develop a modern sports city in Jaffna covering a total area of 56 hectares (138 acres), Rodrigo told Mongabay. Mandaitivu is a low-lying island of 7.6 square kilometers (2.9 square miles), rising only about 5 meters (16 feet) above sea…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Sri Lanka plans to construct an international cricket stadium and a sports complex on the northern island of Mandaitivu spanning more than 56 hectares to popularize the sport in the country’s Northern province. - Mandaitivu overlaps with mangroves and coastal wetlands in the ecologically sensitive Jaffna lagoon, and environmental groups warn that a construction on the low-lying island could reduce flood retention and increase climate vulnerability. - Mandaitivu’s mangroves support fisheries and coastal livelihoods causing concern about potential decline in aquatic creatures, especially prawns and crabs, impacting the traditional fisherfolk. - Conservationists say the project echoes past ill-informed infrastructure decisions, such as the Hambantota stadium built within an elephant habitat, reflecting weak environmental governance and repeated ecological trade-offs. authors: | ||
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Indonesia sues 6 companies over alleged links to deadly floods & landslides 19 Jan 2026 06:21:50 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/indonesia-sues-6-companies-over-alleged-links-to-deadly-floods-landslides/ author: Philip Jacobson dc:creator: Hans Nicholas Jong content:encoded: JAKARTA — In the wake of the deadly floods and landslides that struck Indonesia in late 2025, the nation’s environment ministry has sued six companies, seeking 4.8 trillion rupiah ($284 million) in environmental damages linked to the disasters. Following devastating floods and landslides triggered by Cyclone Senyar in November, which killed more than 1,100 people across Indonesia’s main western island of Sumatra, the ministry launched an investigation into 70 companies operating in the region to examine possible links between corporate activities and the disasters. This week, the environment ministry’s law enforcement department announced the preliminary results of its investigation. Six companies, it said, were responsible for alleged damage to watersheds in North Sumatra province, involving the clearing of 2,516 hectares (6,217 acres) of rainforest, particularly in and around the Batang Toru and Garoga watersheds. “The reason these companies are being sued is that, based on expert studies, alleged environmental damage was found around the Garoga watershed and the Batang Toru watershed,” said Dodi Kurniawan, the director of environmental dispute resolution at the ministry, during a press conference in Jakarta on Jan. 15. Sentinel-2 imagery (natural colors, 10-meter spatial resolution) over the rainforest of Batang Toru, home to the Tapanuli orangutan, taken before and after the extreme rainfall event that caused havoc in Sumatra in late November 2025. The before image was taken on Oct. 27, 2025; the after image on Dec. 3, 2025, showing patches of bare soil suddenly appearing. Image courtesy of TheTreeMap. The steep rainforest hills of Batang…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Indonesia’s environment ministry is seeking 4.8 trillion rupiah ($284 million) in environmental damages from six companies it has linked to deadly floods and landslides triggered by Cyclone Senyar in November. - Following the disasters, the ministry launched an investigation into dozens of companies in the region; the findings determined six companies were responsible for alleged damage to watersheds in North Sumatra. - The areas affected include Batang Toru, an ecologically fragile ecosystem home to the Tapanuli orangutan, the world’s rarest great ape. authors: | ||
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A new treaty comes into force to govern life on the high seas 17 Jan 2026 00:03:07 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/a-new-treaty-comes-into-force-to-govern-life-on-the-high-seas/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: For most of modern history, the open ocean has been treated as a place apart. Beyond the 200-nautical-mile limits of national jurisdiction, it was governed by custom, fragmented rules, and the assumption that what lay far offshore was too vast to manage and too resilient to exhaust. That assumption has worn thin. On January 17th 2026, a new United Nations agreement—the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction accord, or BBNJ—will enter into force, creating the first global framework aimed explicitly at conserving life in the waters and seabed beyond national borders. Oceanic manta rays photo courtesy of Mark Erdmann The scale of what it covers is hard to overstate. Areas beyond national jurisdiction account for roughly 60% of the ocean and more than 40% of the planet’s surface. They include deep trenches, seamount chains, midwater ecosystems, and the largely unseen communities that regulate nutrient cycles and store vast amounts of carbon. Less than 1.5% of this space is currently protected in any formal sense. Fishing, shipping, bioprospecting, and exploratory mining have expanded there faster than the rules governing them. BBNJ is an attempt to close that gap. Finalized in 2023 after two decades of negotiation, the treaty passed the threshold for entry into force when Morocco became the 60th country to ratify it last September. More than 80 states are now full parties, according to the High Seas Ratification Tracker. The United States helped shape the text but has not ratified it. The agreement rests on four pillars. An Ocean sunfish (Mola…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - A new United Nations treaty governing biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction will enter into force on January 17th 2026, creating the first global framework to conserve life on the high seas. - The agreement covers roughly 60% of the ocean and introduces mechanisms for marine protected areas, environmental impact assessments, benefit-sharing from marine genetic resources, and capacity building for poorer states. - Long treated as a global commons with weak oversight, international waters have seen mounting pressure from overfishing, prospective seabed mining, and bioprospecting, with less than 1.5% currently protected. - The treaty’s significance will depend less on its text than on whether governments use it to impose real limits on exploitation and translate shared commitments into enforceable action. authors: | ||
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Mosquitoes in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest prefer human blood 16 Jan 2026 22:59:07 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/mosquitoes-in-brazils-atlantic-forest-prefer-human-blood/ author: Glenn Scherer dc:creator: Bobby Bascomb content:encoded: As deforestation and habitat loss drive down wildlife populations, mosquitoes are increasingly turning to another source for their blood meal: humans. That’s the finding of a new study in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, a global biodiversity hotspot with less than a third of its original forest remaining. Mosquitoes in the Atlantic Forest “have a clear preference for feeding on humans,” senior author Jeronimo Alencar, a biologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro, said in a statement. To reach that conclusion, researchers collected 1,714 mosquitoes from two different Atlantic Forest reserves in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. Only female mosquitoes bite; they require a blood meal to develop their eggs, so researchers focused on the 145 engorged female mosquitoes they collected. Of those, just 24 contained blood that could be successfully analyzed and matched to known vertebrates using DNA analysis. Three-quarters of the samples, 18 of the 24, revealed that the mosquitoes had fed on humans. The other sources of blood came from six birds, one amphibian, one canid and a mouse. Several mosquitoes had fed on more than one host species, including combinations of human/amphibian and human/bird, further raising concerns about the spread of disease. Researchers say they believe mosquitoes are showing a preference for human blood because deforestation and habitat loss have reduced the number of wild animals available for mosquitoes to feed on. “Once the vertebrate population decreases, moving for other habitats, mosquitoes … go in search of new blood sources,” Sérgio Lisboa Machado,…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: As deforestation and habitat loss drive down wildlife populations, mosquitoes are increasingly turning to another source for their blood meal: humans. That’s the finding of a new study in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, a global biodiversity hotspot with less than a third of its original forest remaining. Mosquitoes in the Atlantic Forest “have a clear preference […] authors: | ||
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Colombia poised for another drop in deforestation in 2025, data show 16 Jan 2026 19:58:42 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/colombia-poised-for-another-drop-in-deforestation-in-2025-data-show/ author: Alexandrapopescu dc:creator: Maxwell Radwin content:encoded: Deforestation in Colombia appears to have declined in 2025, with notable reductions in several departments that have historically struggled with forest loss. An estimated 36,280 hectares (89,650 acres) of forest were lost during the first three quarters of the year, a 25% drop from the 48,500 hectares (about 119,850 acres) recorded over the same period in 2024, according to the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM), a government agency. The figures only account for January to September, as data for the final quarter of the year are still being processed. Officials celebrated the results while stressing the need to continue improving forest conservation strategies. “The sustained reduction of deforestation in the Amazon is the result of collaboration between the national government and communities, through ecological restoration actions, voluntary conservation agreements, strengthening of sustainable production chains and forest management,” the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development said in a December statement. Colombia has around 60 million hectares (148 million acres) of forest cover, representing more than half of its total land area. This includes the Amazon Rainforest and savanna ecosystems like the Orinoquía. For decades, the country has struggled to slow the spread of cattle ranching and agriculture as well as illicit crops like coca, the primary ingredient in cocaine. In 2025, many of the worst-hit departments also saw the largest drops in forest loss, signaling progress in addressing some of these long-standing drivers. “When the figures are low, we should take advantage and strengthen actions to reduce threats,…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Deforestation in Colombia appears to have declined in 2025, with notable reductions in several departments like Meta, Caquetá and Guaviare. - The main drivers of deforestation include the spread of cattle ranching and agriculture, as well as illicit crops like coca, the primary ingredient in cocaine. - Officials attributed the declining trend to collaboration with Indigenous communities and environmental zoning in rural areas, as well as ecotourism and a program providing financial incentives for communities involved in forest conservation. authors: | ||
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How many insects does California have? We’re getting closer to an answer 16 Jan 2026 18:34:09 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/how-many-insects-does-california-have-were-getting-closer-to-an-answer/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: California’s insects are as outsized as the state itself. Between its redwood forests and desert basins may live 60,000, perhaps even 100,000 species — though no one truly knows. That uncertainty drives the California Insect Barcode Initiative, an audacious attempt to document every insect in the state through DNA sequencing. Leading the effort is Austin Baker, a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. His mission sounds improbable: to collect, sequence and catalog every fly, ant and beetle that hums, crawls or burrows across California. “You could visit any vegetated area across that state and potentially collect several new (undiscovered and unnamed) insect species,” he says. Baker and his colleagues are working under the California All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (CalATBI), which seeks to “discover it all, protect it forever.” Their approach is exhaustive. California’s habitats range from fog-draped coasts to alpine forests and sun-scorched deserts, each with its own suite of species. To cover this diversity, the team is sampling every ecoregion recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency, deploying a mix of techniques and leaving passive traps in the field for months at a time. Every specimen collected is preserved and archived, forming a permanent record alongside its DNA barcode. “DNA barcoding is an excellent way to discover and delimit species, although it is not perfect,” Baker says. “Verifying accuracy requires going back to the voucher material for further examination.” The undertaking is vast and collaborative. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, the California Academy of…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: California’s insects are as outsized as the state itself. Between its redwood forests and desert basins may live 60,000, perhaps even 100,000 species — though no one truly knows. That uncertainty drives the California Insect Barcode Initiative, an audacious attempt to document every insect in the state through DNA sequencing. Leading the effort is Austin […] authors: | ||
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Hidden heroes: Australian tree bark microbes consume greenhouse & toxic gases 16 Jan 2026 16:31:46 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/hidden-heroes-australian-tree-bark-microbes-consume-greenhouse-toxic-gases/ author: Glenn Scherer dc:creator: Ruth Kamnitzer content:encoded: Microbes living in tree bark consume vast amounts of climate-related and toxic gases, according to new research published Jan. 8 in Science. In the past, tree bark was considered little more than an inert protective covering for trees and unlikely to support significant microbial life. But over the last decade, research has found that microbes not only thrive in tree bark, but they consume methane, a phenomenon significant on a global scale. This knowledge caused scientists at Australia’s Monash and Southern Cross universities to wonder if microbial communities living in tree bark might also be utilizing and absorbing other ubiquitous atmospheric gases, a line of reasoning that turned out to be “spot on,” says Pok Man Leung, a research fellow at Monash University and the study’s co-lead author. The research team sampled the bark of eight common Australian trees across different biomes in subtropical eastern Australia. They then used metagenetics along with laboratory and field-based measurements of gas fluxes to determine what kinds of microbes lived in the bark, and what they were doing. Melaleuca wetland forest on the Tweed Coast of Australia, a hotspot for tree bark microbial life. Image courtesy of Luke Jeffrey/Southern Cross University. They found that the trees’ bark was brimming with microbes that digest methane, hydrogen, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Methane is at least 20 times more potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, while hydrogen and carbon monoxide are considered indirect greenhouse gases. Carbon monoxide and VOCs are both harmful…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - A new study carried out in Australia finds that the bark of common tree species holds diverse microbial communities, with trillions of microbes living on every tree. - The research determined that many of these microbial species specialize in metabolizing methane, hydrogen, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). - Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, while hydrogen and carbon monoxide are considered indirect greenhouse gases. Carbon monoxide and VOCs are also both hazardous to human health. - The study found that tree bark microbes play a significant, previously unknown role in atmospheric gas cycling, potentially boosting estimations of the climate benefits offered by global forests. Learning which tree species boast the best microbes for curbing climate change and pollution could better inform reforestation strategies. authors: | ||
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Mike Heusner, steward of Belize’s waters, has died, aged 86 16 Jan 2026 15:55:36 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/mike-heusner-steward-of-belizes-waters-has-died-aged-86/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: For a small country, Belize has long carried an outsized reputation among people who care about water. Its flats and mangroves, its reef and river systems, have drawn anglers and naturalists who come for beauty but stay, if they are paying attention, for the fragile bargain that keeps such places alive. Tourism can finance protection. It can also erode the very ecosystems it depends on. Few industries have to argue so often that their future rests on restraint. That tension became sharper as Belize’s economy modernized and the pressures on its marine life grew more visible. The debate was never only about fish. It was about livelihoods, access, and who gets to decide what “development” means in a place where nature is not a backdrop but a working asset. The people who shaped that conversation were not always politicians or scientists. Some were business owners who spent enough time on the water to see what was changing, and who learned to speak in the language of policy when it mattered. Michael J. “Mike” Heusner, who died on January 10th at 86, was one of them. For decades he was a leading figure in Belize’s tourism and sportfishing sectors and a steady advocate for conservation. He helped build Belize River Lodge into a premier destination for anglers, while pushing the idea that the country’s natural environment was not separate from its economy, but the condition of its survival. Heusner’s authority came from lived experience and long committee meetings. He served with…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: For a small country, Belize has long carried an outsized reputation among people who care about water. Its flats and mangroves, its reef and river systems, have drawn anglers and naturalists who come for beauty but stay, if they are paying attention, for the fragile bargain that keeps such places alive. Tourism can finance protection. […] authors: | ||
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Mongabay launches Newswire Desk to deliver bite-sized, accessible news on nature to diverse audiences 16 Jan 2026 12:50:12 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/mongabay-launches-newswire-desk-to-deliver-bite-sized-accessible-news-on-nature-to-diverse-audiences/ author: Alejandroprescottcornejo dc:creator: Mongabay.com content:encoded: With information moving faster than ever, the public’s need for credible, accessible environmental reporting has never been greater. In response, Mongabay has launched its Newswire Desk, specializing in short, written and multimedia content that brings news from nature’s frontline to non-specialist audiences. “Improving access to information isn’t only accomplished by publishing online for free. It’s achieved by providing information that satisfies audiences’ needs and adapts to their constraints,” says Willie Shubert, Mongabay’s executive editor and VP of programs. “The purpose of the Newswire Desk is to meet people where they are and inspire their curiosity to learn more.” The Newswire Desk enables Mongabay to cover significantly more news about environmental science, the ecosystems people interact with daily, and the links between current events and Nature. “The Newswire Desk has a mandate to use plain, direct language to break through jargon and quickly identify how people’s daily lives are connected to the environmental issues Mongabay covers in depth,” Shubert says. “It only takes a couple of minutes to read a short article and we envision the Newswire will become a starting point that welcomes people to discover all that Mongabay has to offer.” A king cobra (Ophiophagus hannah). Image by Max Tibby via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0). The people behind Mongabay’s Newswire Bobby Bascomb in Monteverde, Costa Rica working on a story about tree climbers collecting epiphytes for a study. The hard hat was to protect from falling tree branches. Photo: Bobby Bascomb Currently, three of Mongabay’s five bureaus publish short…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - In response to a growing need for timely, credible, accessible environmental reporting, Mongabay has launched its Newswire Desk, specialized in creating short, written and multimedia content to reach new audiences. - The Newswire Desk has a mandate to use plain, direct language to break through jargon, spark curiosity and quickly identify how people’s daily lives are connected to the environmental issues Mongabay covers in-depth. - To reach new audiences, the desk responds quickly to emerging developments, condenses long-form reports into concise updates, and adapts stories for mobile and social media use. - The desk has already shown strong results by expanding production, increasing readership, and demonstrating real-world impact throughout academic and advocacy circles. authors: | ||
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Flores’ geothermal ambitions collide with justice, culture & local resistance 16 Jan 2026 08:50:08 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/flores-geothermal-ambitions-collide-with-justice-culture-local-resistance/ author: Basten Gokkon dc:creator: Basten Gokkon content:encoded: When Indonesia designated Flores a “geothermal island” in 2017, identifying up to 21 geothermal sites, the policy was framed as a cornerstone of the country’s renewable energy transition. Backed by international lenders and enshrined as a “national strategic project,” Flores was positioned as a global showcase for clean energy. Eight years later, key geothermal projects on the island remain suspended, derailed by sustained resistance from Manggarai communities who argue that the transition has come at the expense of justice, safety and cultural survival, found a study published Nov. 13 in the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. Locator map of Flores Island, East Nusa Tenggara. Image by Gunkarta via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Flores of East Nusa Tenggara province is a rugged and mountainous island where electricity access remains uneven. As of 2025, parts of the island were still not connected to the grid, which relies heavily on imported diesel and coal, both costly and polluting. Citing energy insecurity and the nearly 1 trillion rupiah ($59 million) spent annually on electricity subsidies, the government has argued that geothermal power could meet all of the island’s electricity needs. “Flores has become a uniquely distinctive case in Indonesia’s geothermal energy transition. It may even be unprecedented globally, as an entire island has been designated a “geothermal island,” with exploration occurring simultaneously across multiple sites,” Cypri Jehan Paju Dale, a social anthropologist with Kyoto University and University of Wisconsin-Madison who is a corresponding author of the study, told Mongabay in…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Indonesia’s decision to turn Flores into a “geothermal island” was meant to anchor its renewable energy ambitions on a single, high-profile stage. - Now a decade on, the plan has collided with local realities on a rugged, underdeveloped island where energy access remains uneven and development pressures are intensifying. - A new study traces how this tension has made Flores an unexpected flashpoint in the national debate over how the energy transition should be carried out. authors: | ||
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Hopes and fears as Guinea exports iron ore from Simandou mines 16 Jan 2026 08:30:02 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/hopes-and-fears-as-guinea-exports-iron-ore-from-simandou-mines/ author: Terna Gyuse dc:creator: Ashoka Mukpo content:encoded: On Dec. 2, 2025, Guinea celebrated a milestone when a ship loaded with iron ore departed from the newly constructed port of Morebaya on the Atlantic coast. The shipment of 200,000 tonnes of ore, pulled out of the Simandou mountain range in the forested southeast, was destined for China. Successive administrations in the capital Conakry have dreamed of turning the estimated 3 billion tons of ore in the Simandou deposits into cash for decades. Mamady Doumbouya, a military officer who seized power as interim president in 2021, put it at the center of his government’s promises to Guineans. After leaning on the two consortiums that operate mines in Simandou to fast-track construction of the 650-kilometer (400-mile) railway and port facilities needed to bring the ore to market, the first shipment left just weeks before he was elected president in late December. The Simandou mountain range before mining began. Image by cjvp via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) In a symbolic gesture, it contained ore extracted by each of the two consortiums. Simfer is a joint venture between the Anglo-Australian giant Rio Tinto and a group of Chinese companies that includes the state-owned aluminum producer Chinalco. The other, Winning Consortium Simandou, is partly owned by Singaporean investors but is dominated by Chinese interests and firms like the China Baowu Steel Group. Guinea’s government holds a 15% ownership stake in both projects, as well as in a separate joint venture established to build and then run the railway and port facilities needed to…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - After decades of planning, the first shipment of iron ore from Guinea’s Simandou mines is on its way to China. - The shipment marks the beginning of an era in which Guinea is expected to become one of the world’s leading producers of iron ore. - Environmental advocates say that damage from the mines so far has gone largely unaddressed. authors: | ||
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In the race for DRC’s critical minerals, community forests stand on the frontline 16 Jan 2026 08:00:37 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/in-the-race-for-drcs-critical-minerals-community-forests-stand-on-the-frontline/ author: Latoya Abulu dc:creator: Didier MakalLatoya Abulu content:encoded: LIKASI, Democratic Republic of Congo — North of the limits of the Lukutwe community forest concession, two armed soldiers stepped in front of Valery Kyembo and his visitors. Wearing a bright orange vest with the logo of a reforestation project, Kyembo was guiding our journalists through a heavily deforested area in the copper-cobalt belt of the Democratic Republic of Congo, stepping around newly planted seedlings, when he was stopped by members of the FARDC, the national armed forces. Behind them stood a barrier to control access to a semi-industrial mine. “We are visiting the boundaries of our community’s property,” Kyembo tried to explain, before one of the soldiers brandished his automatic weapon to make him turn back. The land in question is the Lukutwe community forest concession (CFCL), 70 kilometers (43 miles) from Lubumbashi, the second-largest city in the DRC. The concession is a titled property created in the mineral-rich area of southeastern DRC by village leaders who sought to protect their land rights and miombo forests against a growing wave of mining companies taking up lands. Valery Kyembo walking in the Lukutwe forest concession in Likasi on November 26, 2025. Image by Glody MURHABAZI / AFP. Ten years ago, the displacement of nearby famers from the villages of Bungubungu and Shilasimba by Société d’Exploitation de Kipoi (SEK), a company owned by Australia-based Tiger Resources in search of copper and cobalt, sparked worry in Lukutwe village that their village could be next. “That’s why when the environmental project came to…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - In the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s copper-cobalt belt, a region rich in critical minerals, villagers are turning to local community forest concessions (CFCLs) to prevent their eviction and conserve the remaining savanna forests in the face of mining expansion. - This is an area where miners from the DRC, China, the U.S. and elsewhere are searching for the minerals powering the high-tech, weapons and clean energy industries. - Community forest concessions offer communities land titles in perpetuity and have environmental management plans led by Indigenous and local communities with the support of environmental NGOs and donors. - But these concessions are not a perfect solution against deforestation or the eviction of communities by mining, and also suffer from a lack of funding to support all their environmental efforts. authors: | ||
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Ocean set ‘alarming’ new temperature record in 2025 16 Jan 2026 01:43:46 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/ocean-set-alarming-new-temperature-record-in-2025/ author: Rebecca Kessler dc:creator: Edward Carver content:encoded: Every calendar year since 2019, ocean temperatures have reached new record highs. 2025 was no exception, according to a new study. The study, published Jan. 9 in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, found that the ocean heat content (OHC) in the upper 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) of the water column had increased by a larger amount than in any year since 2017. “Holy shit, the oceans are hot,” John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in the U.S. and a coauthor of the study, told Mongabay. “I would say it’s an exceptionally large [heat] increase, and it’s surprisingly large and it’s alarmingly large,” he added. Global ocean heat content (OHC) changes for the upper 2,000 m (6,562 ft) of ocean waters since 1958, according to the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). A 1981-2010 average is set as the reference level. The black curves represent monthly changes while the columns show yearly changes. The green bars represent uncertainty estimates. Image by Pan et al., 2025 (CC BY 4.0). Lijing Cheng, a professor at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, seated in the green chair, led the multi-team study on ocean temperatures for calendar year 2025. Image courtesy of Chenhao Guo. The study was undertaken by 55 scientists in 10 research teams located all over the world and led by Lijing Cheng of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) at the…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Ocean temperatures set a record high in 2025, according to a new study. - The authors found that the heat content of the ocean increased by about 23 zettajoules between 2024 and 2025. That’s roughly the equivalent of 210 times humanity’s annual electricity generation. - The ocean has warmed significantly in recent decades largely because it absorbs roughly 90% of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by human-caused greenhouse gases. That makes the ocean a key indicator of global warming. - Warming ocean temperatures contribute to sea-level rise and to extreme weather events, which were frequent in 2025. authors: | ||
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Nitrogen may turbocharge regrowth in young tropical forest trees 15 Jan 2026 16:41:47 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/nitrogen-may-turbocharge-regrowth-in-young-tropical-forest-trees/ author: Jeremy Hance dc:creator: Bobby Bascomb content:encoded: New research finds that tropical forests can grow significantly faster and sequester more climate-warming carbon dioxide when additional nitrogen is available in the soil. “With this information we can prioritise management and conservation practices to maximise forest regrowth,” Kelly Anderson, a research scientist at Missouri Botanical Garden in the U.S., told Mongabay by email. Anderson wasn’t involved with the study but does work with NEXTropics, a network of scientists who collaborate on forest nutrient studies. During the recent study, researchers “wanted to test how either nitrogen or phosphorus limit forest recovery and specifically if there was a shift in that limitation from really young forests to older forests,” Sarah Batterman, corresponding author of the study with the Cary Institute and the University of Leeds, told Mongabay in a video call. To test both nutrients the research team conducted a long-term field experiment in Panama. Research plots were established in 2015 and 2016 in recovering forests of three different ages: those on recently abandoned pasture; young secondary forest (10 years); and older secondary forests (30 years). They also looked at mature forest plots established in 1997, for a total of 76 experimental plots. For each age of forest, plots received one of four treatments: added nitrogen, added phosphorus, both nutrients, and control plots where nothing was added. They also established several replicate plots where they repeated the experiments. Batterman said the strongest response was in young trees that received additional nitrogen. “So, in the first 10 years of forest recovery, the forests…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: New research finds that tropical forests can grow significantly faster and sequester more climate-warming carbon dioxide when additional nitrogen is available in the soil. “With this information we can prioritise management and conservation practices to maximise forest regrowth,” Kelly Anderson, a research scientist at Missouri Botanical Garden in the U.S., told Mongabay by email. Anderson […] authors: | ||
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Involuntary parks: Human conflict is creating unintended refuges for wildlife 15 Jan 2026 16:10:43 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/involuntary-parks-human-conflict-is-creating-unintended-refuges-for-wildlife/ author: Glenn Scherer dc:creator: Annelise Giseburt content:encoded: Few locations on Earth are as haunting or deeply ironic as so-called involuntary parks — places too toxic, dangerous, or otherwise made off-limits for human habitation, but which have paradoxically and unintentionally become sanctuaries for wildlife in our absence. As the name coined by science fiction author Bruce Sterling suggests, involuntary parks weren’t established for conservation — and in many cases aren’t formally recognized as preserves. Some encompass former nuclear, military or manufacturing complexes and/or their buffer zones. Some are sites of major environmental disasters, former battlefields laced with unexploded munitions, or slices of no-man’s land demarcating tense borders between geopolitical rivals. Landmine warning sign in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a legacy of the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. In Ukraine, land mines have rendered large areas off-limits to people, while past wars left huge areas pocked by land mines in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Myanmar, Iraq, Syria, Angola and elsewhere, despite a global treaty banning their use. Image by Darij Zadnikar via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Despite their often destructive origins, a growing number of these involuntary parks have, over time, been officially designated as protected wildlife refuges or cross-border peace parks, actively managed by government organizations and advocated for by citizens and researchers — not so “involuntary” anymore. It’s an attractive narrative. But without sufficient context, the genesis of an involuntary park (a process also controversially dubbed passive rewilding) can “imply that nature simply fixes itself, or that in the absence of human intervention, a favorable recovery inevitably occurs at sites that may…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Involuntary parks — areas made largely untenable for human habitation due to environmental contamination, war, border disputes or other forms of conflict and violence — have often unintentionally benefited nature, with flora and fauna sometimes thriving in the absence of people. - In some cases, these unanticipated refugia have been formalized as wildlife preserves. Hanford Reach National Monument in the U.S. state of Washington is one example. Though the land of this conserved area surrounds a Cold War site contaminated by chemical and radioactive waste, hundreds of species thrive there. - The southern Kuril Islands — territory disputed by Russia and Japan — offer another example. Russia has set up preserves within the long-contested area, while Japan has declared a national park just outside it. But attempts at creating a permanent border peace park or resolving tensions have failed, and future conservation is uncertain. - With the world now rocked by geopolitical conflict and by worsening environmental disasters (due to pollution, climate change and land-use change), nations need to assess how places that become unhealthy to humanity — turning them into involuntary parks — can be healed, and what role conservation can play in recovery. authors: | ||
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A novel sanctuary in Antarctica is preserving ice samples from rapidly melting glaciers 15 Jan 2026 16:05:09 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/a-novel-sanctuary-in-antarctica-is-preserving-ice-samples-from-rapidly-melting-glaciers/ author: Mongabay Editor dc:creator: Associated Press content:encoded: ROME (AP) — Scientists in Antarctica on Wednesday inaugurated the first global repository of mountain ice cores, preserving the history of the Earth’s atmosphere in a frozen vault for future generations to study as global warming melts glaciers around the world. An ice core is something of an atmospheric time capsule, containing information about the Earth’s past changes in a frozen climate archive. With global glaciers melting at an unprecedented rate, scientists have raced to preserve ice cores for future study before they disappear altogether. The Ice Memory Foundation, a consortium of European research institutes, inaugurated the frozen sanctuary on Wednesday at the Concordia station in the Antarctic Plateau. The foundation livestreamed the ceremonial ribbon cutting and opening of the frozen cave where the ice samples will be kept for future generations. The first two sets of samples of Alpine mountain ice cores were drilled out of Mont Blanc in France and Grand Combin in Switzerland and arrived at the station after a 50-day refrigerated icebreaker and plane journey from Trieste, Italy. During the inauguration ceremony, pairs of foundation team members brought box after box of ice cores into the cave, burrowed deep into a 5-meter (yard) high compacted snow drift at a constant temperature of around -52°C/-61°F. “By safeguarding physical samples of atmospheric gases, aerosols, pollutants and dust trapped in ice layers, the Ice Memory Foundation ensures that future generations of researchers will be able to study past climate conditions using technologies that may not yet exist,” said Carlo Barbante, vice chair of…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: ROME (AP) — Scientists in Antarctica on Wednesday inaugurated the first global repository of mountain ice cores, preserving the history of the Earth’s atmosphere in a frozen vault for future generations to study as global warming melts glaciers around the world. An ice core is something of an atmospheric time capsule, containing information about the Earth’s past […] authors: | ||
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Indonesia backs away from coal exit test case amid financial and political pushback 15 Jan 2026 13:44:49 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/indonesia-backs-away-from-coal-exit-test-case-amid-financial-and-political-pushback/ author: Hans Nicholas Jong dc:creator: Hans Nicholas Jong content:encoded: JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has scrapped a plan to retire a major coal-fired power plant, after having promised for years to do so. Airlangga Hartarto, the country’s chief economics minister, said in December that it would be unfeasible to shut down the 660-megawatt Cirebon-1 plant by 2035, which is seven years ahead of its scheduled end of operation. But energy analysts and civil society groups say the decision reflects deeper political and financial resistance to moving away from coal — resistance that could undermine Indonesia’s energy transition at a time when global climate finance is becoming harder to secure. The failure of the early retirement plan for Cirebon-1 exposes how government policies that continue to protect and subsidize coal make it costly to shut plants early, they warn, even as Indonesia seeks international funding to do so. Airlangga said the decision was “based on technical considerations,” arguing that the plant, which went into operation in 2012, is still relatively young and therefore has a long operating life ahead. He also said Cirebon-1 uses “relatively better” technology that results in lower emissions, making it a less suitable candidate for early retirement compared with older, dirtier coal plants. As such, he said, the government will focus on shutting down older units, where the environmental benefits would be greater. “We will look for an alternative — one that is older and whose environmental impacts clearly mean it should already be retired,” he said on Dec. 5, as quoted by state news agency…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Indonesia has abandoned plans to retire the Cirebon-1 coal plant early, citing technical and financial concerns, dealing a blow to what was meant to be a flagship test case for coal phaseout backed by international climate finance. - Analysts say the decision reflects deeper structural resistance to moving away from coal, driven by long-term power contracts, coal subsidies, and policies that make early retirement costly while keeping coal artificially cheap. - The reversal risks undermining Indonesia’s credibility with global partners and investors, particularly under initiatives like the JETP, and exposes inconsistencies between political pledges on renewables and binding policy action. - Critics argue early coal retirement would benefit Indonesia overall if full costs were counted, including health and environmental impacts, but political ties between coal interests and policymakers, along with uncertainty in global climate finance, continue to stall progress. authors: | ||
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Doug McConnell, interpreter of Northern California, has died, aged 80 15 Jan 2026 13:35:18 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/doug-mcconnell-interpreter-of-northern-california-has-died-aged-80/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: Doug McConnell spent much of his adult life doing something that sounds simple and is not: he helped people look closely at the places where they lived. For decades he turned Northern California’s open spaces, back roads, and overlooked corners into familiar destinations people came to recognize and talk about, shown not as scenery but as places shaped by human care and choice. He died on January 13th 2026, after nearly half a century on air and in the field, still working, still curious, still convinced that attention to land mattered. He was a broadcaster, but his real subject was place. McConnell’s programs treated public land as something worth learning about, not just visiting. He did not lecture or scold. He did not argue from a studio desk. He drove, walked, hiked, climbed, and filmed. He listened to rangers, volunteers, advocates, and scientists, and tried to explain what they were doing in plain terms to viewers who might never attend a planning meeting or read an environmental report. McConnell often described himself as someone fortunate to have joined two long-held interests: nature and storytelling. “Getting a chance to do what I have been now doing for so many decades, which is to go wander around, usually with a small camera team and put the spotlight on great people, great places and the wonderful people doing great things on our behalf, has really been a way for me to combine my two passions in life,” he once told the Midpeninsula Regional…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Doug McConnell, who died on January 13, 2026, spent decades using local television to help Northern Californians see their landscapes as shared civic assets rather than scenery, making conservation legible, practical, and personal. - Best known for Bay Area Backroads and OpenRoad with Doug McConnell, he treated parks, trails, and open space as the result of human choices and public effort, consistently foregrounding the people and institutions that protected them. - A storyteller shaped by a lifelong love of California’s diversity, he combined curiosity about place with a clear-eyed understanding of governance, showing how history, policy, and persistence shape the land people inherit. - At a time of mounting environmental strain, McConnell resisted despair by staying close to the work itself, drawing energy from those quietly maintaining and restoring the natural world, and inviting viewers to join them by paying attention. authors: | ||
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Democratizing AI for conservation: Interview with Ai2’s Ted Schmitt and Patrick Beukema 15 Jan 2026 07:29:05 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/democratizing-ai-for-conservation-interview-with-ai2s-ted-schmitt-and-patrick-beukema/ author: Abhishyantkidangoor dc:creator: Abhishyant Kidangoor content:encoded: Environmental data-gathering technology has proliferated in recent years. But how do you derive meaningful insights from myriad data sources? A new AI-powered platform aims to solve this problem. OlmoEarth, developed by the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), is a platform that integrates multiple artificial intelligence models that have been trained on approximately 10 terabytes of environment observation data. The open-source platform, launched in November, helps extract actionable insights from satellite as well as sensor data. The platform allows researchers as well as organizations to use their own data to customize a foundational model and use it to monitor trends such as forest loss or mangrove health without having to build models from scratch. “It’s intended to democratize access to this kind of technology in a no-code kind of way,” Patrick Beukema, the OlmoEarth lead at Ai2, told Mongabay in a video interview. The motivation behind building the platform was to drastically reduce the time scientists spent parsing through humongous volumes of data to get meaningful information from it. “What we set out to do was to flip that on its head and really go from them spending months to literally days to get the same sort of information,” Ted Schmitt, senior director of conservation at Ai2, told Mongabay in a video interview. Mangrove tree rising out of crystal clear turquoise water on the tropical beach of Havelock Island, Andaman Sea, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India. Image by Vyacheslav Argenberg via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Beukema and Schmitt spoke…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - OlmoEarth is a platform that integrates multiple AI models to extract meaningful insights from environmental data. - The platform, developed by nonprofit organization Allen Institute for AI, is trained on 10 terabytes’ worth of Earth observation data. - The platform enables researchers as well as conservation organizations to analyze massive data sets by customizing AI models on the platform. authors: | ||
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Greenland sharks retain functional vision despite extreme longevity 14 Jan 2026 15:10:13 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/greenland-sharks-retain-functional-vision-despite-extreme-longevity/ author: Shreya Dasgupta dc:creator: Bobby Bascomb content:encoded: Greenland sharks are the longest-living vertebrate known to science, topping out at more than 400 years old, and scientists have largely believed they were nearly blind. But new research suggests they actually can see, and, remarkably, maintain their vision for more than a century. Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) mostly live in the cold waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic, in the ocean’s dimly lit twilight zone, at depths of 200-1,000 meters (660-3,300 feet). Their dark habitat led scientists to believe that the sharks could barely see. Many Greenland sharks have also been found with parasites in their eyes, raising the possibility they may even be blind. Lily Fogg, who researches fish vision at the University of Basel in Switzerland, told Mongabay in a video call that shark biologist John Fleng Steffensen approached her to study the Greenland shark’s vision. Fleng Steffensen originally discovered Greenland sharks’ incredible longevity, and had 10 shark specimens from an ongoing study. “He said, ‘I’ve got these eyes, would you like to do a study on them?’ And we said, ‘Why not? That’s a great opportunity.’ If they’re going in the bin, then that would just be a waste,” Fogg said. So, Fogg and her team synthesized the shark’s genome and found that the genes involved with vision were still intact and functioning. The team also looked at cross sections of the sharks’ eyes to see if the structure of the tissue was degraded. “We found that it’s actually beautifully intact,” Fogg said. Furthermore, the researchers found…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: Greenland sharks are the longest-living vertebrate known to science, topping out at more than 400 years old, and scientists have largely believed they were nearly blind. But new research suggests they actually can see, and, remarkably, maintain their vision for more than a century. Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) mostly live in the cold waters of […] authors: | ||
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What can—and cannot—be done to save the world’s glaciers 14 Jan 2026 14:54:01 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/what-can-and-cannot-be-done-to-save-the-worlds-glaciers/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: Glaciers are often treated as scenic features or scientific curiosities. In fact, they are critical infrastructure. Though they cover roughly a tenth of the Earth’s land surface, meltwater from glaciers and seasonal snowpacks supports drinking water, agriculture, industry, and energy production for close to half the global population. That support system is now shrinking, fast. Measurements collected over decades show that glacier loss is not a future risk but a present condition. According to the World Glacier Monitoring Service, glaciers worldwide have lost more than 30 meters of average thickness since 1970. The pace has accelerated since the early 2000s. Each of the last several years has set new records for ice loss. What was once gradual retreat has become sustained decline. Annual mass balance of reference glaciers with more than 30 years of ongoing glaciological measurements. Annual mass change values are given on the y-axis in the unit meter water equivalent (m w.e.) which corresponds to tonnes per square meter (1,000 kg m-2). Courtesy of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) Cumulative mass change relative to 1992 for regional and global means based on data from reference glaciers. Cumulative values are given on the y-axis in the unit meter water equivalent (m w.e.). Courtesy of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) The cause is not mysterious. Rising global temperatures have increased surface melt while shortening accumulation seasons. In many mountain regions, precipitation that once fell as snow now arrives as rain, depriving glaciers of replenishment. The Intergovernmental Panel on…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Glaciers function as critical infrastructure, supplying water, food, and energy for nearly half the world’s population, even though they cover only a small share of the Earth’s surface. That support system is now contracting rapidly. - Global measurements show sustained and accelerating glacier loss since the 1970s, driven primarily by human-caused warming. In many regions, what was once seasonal melt has become irreversible decline. - The impacts extend well beyond the mountains, affecting agriculture, hydropower, ecosystems, and disaster risk in downstream communities across Asia, South America, and beyond. - While scientists and policymakers are testing ways to manage shrinking ice and rising hazards, adaptation has limits. Without deep cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, many glacier-fed regions will soon face long-term water decline. authors: | ||
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Small hippo, big dreams: Can Moo Deng, the viral pygmy hippo, save her species? 14 Jan 2026 14:15:41 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/video/2026/01/small-hippo-big-dreams-can-moo-deng-the-viral-pygmy-hippo-save-her-species/ author: Lucia Torres dc:creator: Sam Lee content:encoded: Social media loves a charismatic, cute, relatable animal. Personalities like Neil the elephant seal and Pesto the giant baby penguin have captivated millions online. And let’s not forget Moo Deng – the pugnacious baby pygmy hippo who exploded onto the scene in late 2024. Viral clips of her wreaking tiny havoc in Thailand’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo made her an overnight sensation, spinning off tons of memes, fan art, and even parodies halfway across the world. But did you know that pygmy hippos are actually an endangered species? They’re native to West Africa, and it’s estimated that there are less than 3,000 individuals left in the world. Which begs the question – has the Moo Deng phenomenon helped wild pygmy hippos at all, by raising awareness and increasing interest in their conservation? Watch our latest episode of Mongabay Explains to find out if being Internet-famous can help a species survive… or even thrive? Mongabay’s Video Team wants to cover questions and topics that matter to you. Are there any inspiring people, urgent issues, or local stories that you’d like us to cover? We want to hear from you. Be a part of our reporting process—get in touch with us here! Banner image: Collage featuring Moo Deng What singing lemurs can tell us about the origin of musicThis article was originally published on Mongabay description: Social media loves a charismatic, cute, relatable animal. Personalities like Neil the elephant seal and Pesto the giant baby penguin have captivated millions online. And let’s not forget Moo Deng – the pugnacious baby pygmy hippo who exploded onto the scene in late 2024. Viral clips of her wreaking tiny havoc in Thailand’s Khao Kheow […] authors: | ||
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Indonesia says 4 million hectares of plantation, mining lands reclaimed in crackdown 14 Jan 2026 11:43:35 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/indonesia-says-4-million-hectares-of-plantation-mining-lands-reclaimed-in-crackdown/ author: Hans Nicholas Jong dc:creator: Hans Nicholas Jong content:encoded: JAKARTA — Indonesia has reclaimed more than 4 million hectares (9.9 million acres, about the size of Switzerland) of land nationwide that had been used for plantations, mining or other activities inside areas officially designated as forest, according to the government. The ongoing crackdown — the country’s most sweeping enforcement drive to date against illegal activities in forest areas — is being carried out by a task force established by President Prabowo Subianto in January 2025, involving the military, police, prosecutors and multiple ministries. Officials say the task force initially targeted 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of land to seize in 2025, and thus it has exceeded its initial target by more than 400% within its first 10 months of operation. But the unprecedented scale of the seizures has also exposed unresolved questions about the data underpinning the campaign, how much of the land involved is actually oil palm, and what will happen to seized plantations and mines after enforcement. The reclaimed areas span mostly oil palm plantations as well as mining concessions — primarily nickel and coal — and conservation zones such as national parks and protected forests. Enforcement actions cited by authorities include oil palm plantations operating without proper forest-area permits, mining operations lacking approval for forest-area use, unlicensed gold mining, illegal tourism structures inside conservation areas and oil palm encroachment inside national parks. Burned land inside Tesso Nilo National Park in Indonesia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Questions about the numbers The scale of the government’s…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - The Indonesian government says it has reclaimed more than 4 million hectares of land used for plantations, mining and other activities inside officially designated forest areas. - This is part of a sweeping crackdown on illegal activities in forest areas, carried out by a year-old task force formed by President Prabowo Subianto. - Land seizures have exceeded the initial target by 400%, officials say, and the scale of the enforcement raises questions about how many oil palm plantations in the country are actually illegal. - The task force has recovered about 2.3 trillion rupiah (about $136 million) in administrative fines, collected from 20 oil palm companies and one nickel mining company; it remains unclear what the money will be used for — and what will happen to the seized plantations and mines. authors: | ||
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After years of progress, Indonesia risks ‘tragedy’ of a deforestation spike 14 Jan 2026 04:27:48 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/after-years-of-progress-indonesia-risks-tragedy-of-a-deforestation-spike/ author: Philip Jacobson dc:creator: Jeff Hutton content:encoded: After years of uneven progress, deforestation in Indonesia is poised to accelerate, owing to widespread logging, expanding plantations and mining. In December, Indonesia’s forestry minister, Raja Juli Antoni, indicated the Southeast Asian nation had lost more forest during the first nine months of 2025 than the annual totals for any of the first three years of this decade. Gross deforestation in Indonesia in 2025 was on track to at least match 2024’s tally, which reflected the most extensive losses since 2019, Antoni told a parliamentary committee in December. As Indonesia pushes ahead with its Merauke Food Estate project, which involves clearing at least 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of forest in South Papua province, worries are mounting that Indonesia’s commodity exports may suffer if big markets like the EU force importers, including food-processing companies, to prove they are not buying palm oil and other products that have resulted from clearing rainforest. “The tragedy of this project [Merauke Food Estate] is that it is undermining Indonesia’s recent success in the battle to halt global deforestation,” Amanda Hurowitz, forest commodities lead at nonprofit Mighty Earth, told Mongabay. Dump trucks maneuver at Weda Bay Industrial Park in Indonesia’s North Maluku province in 2024. The Weda Bay Mine is now among the largest nickel mines in the world. Image by AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim. Deforestation accelerates Indonesia’s deforestation slowed substantially during former President Joko Widodo’s second five-year term in office in part because of a moratorium on clearing forest for oil palm plantations following…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Deforestation is accelerating, underscoring Indonesia’s reputation as a big greenhouse gas emitter and potentially inviting more scrutiny of its commodity exports. - Gross deforestation in Indonesia in 2025 was on track to at least match 2024’s tally, which reflected the most extensive losses since 2019, Indonesia’s forestry minister, Raja Juli Antoni, told a parliamentary committee in December. - Indonesia’s Merauke Food Estate project involves clearing at least 2 million hectares of forest, and worries are mounting that commodity exports may suffer if big markets like the EU force importers to prove they are not buying palm oil and other products that have resulted from clearing rainforest. - A reacceleration in the rate of Indonesia’s deforestation risks is also drawing attention to the country’s spotty climate record: At No. 6, Indonesia ranks among the top greenhouse gas emitters after China, the U.S., India, the EU and Russia. authors: | ||
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Three Andean condor chicks hatch in Colombia as species nears local extinction 14 Jan 2026 02:18:29 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/three-andean-condor-chicks-hatch-in-colombia-as-species-nears-local-extinction/ author: Shanna Hanbury dc:creator: Mongabay.com content:encoded: Since July 2024, three Andean condor chicks have hatched at an artificial incubation program located near Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city, contributor Christina Noriega reported for Mongabay. The artificial incubation program is run by the Jaime Duque Park Foundation, a Colombian conservation nonprofit that has worked since 2015 to counter the birds’ population decline. Globally, the Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) is classified as vulnerable to extinction by the IUCN Red List, with an estimated 6,700 mature individuals remaining across the species’ range, largely concentrated in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. But in Colombia and Ecuador, the species is considered critically endangered, with fewer than 150 birds left in the wild. In Venezuela, the species is believed to have already gone locally extinct. The chicks, named Rafiki, Wayra and Ámbar, hatched in July 2024, September 2025 and October 2025, respectively. “They are the salvation of the species,” Fernando Castro, director of biodiversity at the foundation, told Mongabay. Rafiki and Wayra, the two older chicks, are expected to be released this year near Cerrito, a high-altitude town in northeastern Colombia where nearly half of the nation’s condor population survives today. To boost condor survival, wildlife caretakers at Jaime Duque Park place each egg collected from captive condor nests in an oven-like incubator to provide warmth and safety. Andean condors typically raise one chick every 2-3 years, and first-time parents have been observed accidentally cracking their eggs, Castro told Noriega. But removing the egg from their nest often stimulates the birds to lay again, increasing the number of eggs…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: Since July 2024, three Andean condor chicks have hatched at an artificial incubation program located near Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city, contributor Christina Noriega reported for Mongabay. The artificial incubation program is run by the Jaime Duque Park Foundation, a Colombian conservation nonprofit that has worked since 2015 to counter the birds’ population decline. Globally, the […] authors: | ||
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Ants need urgent protections from global trade, conservationists say 13 Jan 2026 21:25:00 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/ants-need-urgent-protections-from-global-trade-conservationists-say/ author: Shreya Dasgupta dc:creator: Spoorthy Raman content:encoded: As the recent seizure of more than 5,000 endemic ants in Kenya reveals, ants have become part of a thriving global wildlife trade. Transnational traffickers are mopping up ants from the wild to sell them to hobbyists and collectors worldwide. In a recently published letter, conservationists are now calling for greater trade protections for all ant species under CITES, the global wildlife trade treaty. Ants play an important ecological role as seed dispersers and soil engineers and are essential components of soil biodiversity, said Sérgio Henriques, a letter co-author from CCMAR, the Algarve Centre of Marine Sciences at the University of Algarve, Portugal. But they are being harvested “at an alarming rate for a global market that is operating almost entirely in the shadows and moved across the world,” he told Mongabay by email. While the Kenyan seizure garnered international attention, Henriques said data show similar cases in Central Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, where traders target “visually striking” or “ecologically interesting” ant species. “Many of these are range-restricted endemics that are particularly vulnerable to disturbance by poaching,” he added. Ants can also become invasive pests when introduced in areas outside their range. On Australia’s Christmas Island, for instance, yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) from Asia have wiped out native red crabs (Gecarcoidea natalis). Meanwhile, little fire ants (Wasmannia auropunctata) from Central and South America cost a whopping $170 million in damages in Hawai`i annually. “Any of these places that have invasive ant problems are spending bazillions,” Chris Shepherd,…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: As the recent seizure of more than 5,000 endemic ants in Kenya reveals, ants have become part of a thriving global wildlife trade. Transnational traffickers are mopping up ants from the wild to sell them to hobbyists and collectors worldwide. In a recently published letter, conservationists are now calling for greater trade protections for all […] authors: | ||
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Study tracks fishing boats to see how heat waves affect fish distribution 13 Jan 2026 21:09:56 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/study-tracks-fishing-boats-to-see-how-heat-waves-affect-fish-distribution/ author: Morgan Erickson-Davis dc:creator: Edward Carver content:encoded: Marine heat waves have become longer and more frequent along the U.S. West Coast, as elsewhere in the world. But heating doesn’t always lead fish to change their location. A new study suggests a better way to tell if such ecological shifts are happening: Use fishing vessel tracking data. The study, published Dec. 22, 2025, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that tracking data could provide early detection of extreme northward and inshore shifts in albacore tuna (Thunnus alalunga) and Pacific bluefin tuna (T. orientalis) distribution in response to heat waves. The data also showed when such shifts weren’t happening, despite high sea surface temperatures. Related data also showed when there was low albacore availability for fishing. The study indicates that tracking data can in some cases be used as an early-warning signal for ecological change in the ocean, the authors suggest. “We have so much data on fishing vessel activity,” study lead author Heather Welch, a marine spatial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. “These data are traditionally used for surveillance, and it is exciting that they may also be useful for understanding ecosystem health.” Map shows total fishing effort, in hours, for albacore at different locations off the U.S. West Coast from 2010-2024. Annual average locations are overlaid as white points, with two years labeled (2015 and 2017). The 2015 average location indicates a distribution shift by albacore in response to a devastating marine heat wave known…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - A new study suggests an early way to detect ecological shifts during marine heat waves: Use fishing vessel tracking data. - The study found that tracking data could provide early detection of extreme northward and inshore shifts in albacore tuna and Pacific bluefin tuna distribution in response to heat waves and showed when such shifts weren’t happening despite high sea surface temperatures. - The authors position fishers as “apex predators” and build on research that finds that predators are good ecosystem sentinels. authors: | ||
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South Africa’s great white shark population worries researchers 13 Jan 2026 20:43:40 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/south-africas-great-white-shark-population-worries-researchers/ author: Bobbybascomb dc:creator: Victoria Schneider content:encoded: Great white shark populations in South Africa are disappearing, driven largely by human activities that are likely responsible for the collapse of a locally critical apex predator. That’s the conclusion of a review paper published by a group of scientists and conservationists who analyzed data on the abundance of great whites in South African waters. Once considered the global hotspot for great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), in South Africa, populations have largely vanished from their main aggregation sites on the Western Cape since 2018. “This synthesis of various pieces of historical and newly acquired data tells a worrying story about the state of the white shark population in South Africa,” Neil Hammerschlag, one of the authors, told Mongabay via email. Researchers have been trying for years to explain the almost complete disappearance of white sharks from the area. Some researchers argue that the population has simply shifted eastward. As a top ocean predator, the only documented natural threats to great white sharks is predation by orca pods. Recent studies have found pressure from orcas (Orcinus orca) is likely contributing to changes in the sharks’ distribution. However, humans are responsible for a significant portion of the decline, the researchers found. For instance, South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board (KZNSB) maintains a program of lethal control of great whites to ensure beach safety. Between 1978 and 2018, KZNSB’s nets and drumlines were responsible for an average of 28 great white shark deaths annually. The sharks are also caught as bycatch in the country’s…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: Great white shark populations in South Africa are disappearing, driven largely by human activities that are likely responsible for the collapse of a locally critical apex predator. That’s the conclusion of a review paper published by a group of scientists and conservationists who analyzed data on the abundance of great whites in South African waters. […] authors: | ||
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Turning the Amazon’s toxic gold mine waste liability into economic opportunity (analysis) 13 Jan 2026 19:13:58 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/formalizing-amazon-gold-mining-can-transform-a-toxic-liability-into-an-economic-opportunity-analysis/ author: Erik Hoffner dc:creator: Timothy J. Killeen content:encoded: The wildcat gold mining boom that swept across the Amazon beginning in the 1970s left behind an environmental catastrophe of staggering proportions. At least 350,000 hectares (almost 865,000 acres) of forest and wetland habitat have been destroyed by placer mining operations across the Pan Amazon, with the actual figure likely far higher given the limitations of satellite monitoring for small-scale operations and river dredges. In the Tapajós River Basin in Brazil’s Pará state, particularly the municipality of Itaituba, five decades of alluvial mining have devastated tens of thousands of hectares of riparian forest while releasing an estimated 200-500 metric tons of mercury annually into watersheds. Mercury contamination has become endemic: 75% of the population of the municipality of Santarém shows elevated mercury levels, with some residents carrying four times the WHO limit. The legacy extends far beyond the mining sites themselves, as methylmercury bioaccumulates through aquatic food webs, threatening riverside communities across millions of hectares of downstream habitat. Yet hidden within this toxic legacy lies an economic opportunity that could finance comprehensive remediation while generating more than 200,000 formal-sector jobs. The garimpeiro (wildcat miner) reliance on mercury amalgamation technology is remarkably inefficient, because mercury captures only free gold particles through physical absorption, achieving recovery rates of 40-60% from alluvial placers. The remaining 40-60% of gold remains trapped in “tailings” as fine particles, bound in mineral matrices, or simply lost to processing inefficiency. Those tailings, an existing environmental catastrophe, contain an estimated 1,400-2,100 metric tons of recoverable gold worth $90 billion…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - The toxic legacy of gold mining in the Amazon Rainforest could finance its own remediation while creating more than 200,000 jobs that transform illegal extraction into a regulated industry, a new analysis explains. - Across the Amazon Basin, informal and illegal gold mines degrade forests and rivers while using mercury to extract the ore in an outdated, toxic and inefficient process. - If the leftover “tailings” of these outdated operations were treated with modern methods via formalized processing facilities, thousands of jobs could be created and watersheds could be saved from ongoing destruction. - This post is an analysis. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay. authors: | ||
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Canceled tourism project still threatens local communities in Tanzania 13 Jan 2026 16:44:30 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/canceled-tourism-project-still-threatens-local-communities-in-tanzania/ author: Bobbybascomb dc:creator: Victoria Schneider content:encoded: Roughly one year ago, the Tanzanian government canceled a multimillion-dollar tourism project funded by the World Bank, citing concerns over human rights violations. However, community members near the project in Ruaha National Park report that they continue to face violence by park guards. Civil society groups say the government threatens people with eviction. Local residents and representatives with the Oakland Institute, a U.S.-based policy think tank, told Mongabay that rangers with the Tanzania National Parks Authority are still using excessive force against villagers and pastoralists. They also report that farmers are unable to access land they had used before the park boundaries were changed for the now-canceled tourism project. The World Bank Board approved a management action plan (MAP) in April 2025 to address such concerns; two people have since been killed. “The situation is very dire on the ground,” Oakland Institute’s Anuradha Mittal told Mongabay via phone, adding that promises to train rangers and the establishment of a grievance mechanism are not being kept. The MAP was supposed to address harms suffered by communities that filed complaints with the World Bank’s Inspection Panel, an independent watchdog. In September 2024, the panel concluded that the bank failed to follow key policies around resettlement and risk identification, finding that the project had not properly assessed or mitigated local impacts from the tourism project. A spokesperson from the World Bank told Mongabay by email that implementation of the MAP is “well advanced” and that a grievance mechanism was established. The spokesperson said…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: Roughly one year ago, the Tanzanian government canceled a multimillion-dollar tourism project funded by the World Bank, citing concerns over human rights violations. However, community members near the project in Ruaha National Park report that they continue to face violence by park guards. Civil society groups say the government threatens people with eviction. Local residents […] authors: | ||
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North Atlantic right whale births increase 13 Jan 2026 12:50:20 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/north-atlantic-right-whale-births-increase/ author: Shreya Dasgupta dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Scientists monitoring North Atlantic right whales have recorded an increase in births this winter. Fifteen calves have been identified so far, an encouraging figure for a population that has struggled to sustain itself. There were an estimated 384 North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) by the end of 2024, according to the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium. That figure is up from its low point earlier in the decade. Since 2020, the whale’s population has grown by just over 7% from 358 individuals. Scientists identified some first-time mothers entering the breeding pool during the 2025-2026 calving season. They also noted that some females are calving at shorter intervals. These are the kinds of details biologists track when assessing whether recovery is possible. In a small population, every birth matters. But the arithmetic is unforgiving. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries estimates that something like 50 calves a year, sustained over many years, would be needed to put the species on a clear path to recovery. That is well beyond what is plausible, given how few reproductive females remain. Right whales can live for more than a century. In the modern North Atlantic, many do not. Their median lifespan is measured in decades, not because of biology, but because of ropes and steel. The threats to the whale are familiar and well-documented: entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with large vessels, and…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Scientists monitoring North Atlantic right whales have recorded an increase in births this winter. Fifteen calves have been identified so far, an encouraging figure for a population that has struggled to sustain itself. There were an estimated 384 […] authors: | ||
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Myanmar’s botanical data gaps risk its unique flora, collaborations could help, study says 13 Jan 2026 01:00:58 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/myanmars-botanical-data-gaps-risk-its-unique-flora-collaborations-could-help-study-says/ author: Isabel Esterman dc:creator: Carolyn Cowan content:encoded: Myanmar is a country of extremes. From tropical forests, mangroves and wetlands to frost-bitten alpine mountain slopes and jagged limestone karst outcrops, it’s home to tremendous botanical diversity. Orchids alone account for more than 1,200 species, and researchers have described scores of new-to-science plant species in recent years, including a color-shifting Begonia and a rare type of ginger that flourishes in lofty cloud forests. Yet there remain glaring gaps in what’s known about Myanmar’s floristic diversity. “Myanmar hosts exceptionally high plant diversity and endemism,” Ke-Ping Ma, a biologist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Mongabay. “However, there has been a long-standing lack [of] plant distribution data, due in part to limited field surveys and incomplete digitization of herbarium records.” Political instability inflamed by the 2021 military coup also severely hampers biological research. Some of the most unstable parts of Myanmar are also the most biologically rich. Once protected by their remoteness, these areas are increasingly threatened by rampant natural resource extraction as vying political groups seek to fund their operations. “Biodiversity is often one of the neglected victims of war because you can’t go and collect data, and you also can’t protect areas,” said Alice Hughes, a biologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “We have very little data even on basic things like [patterns of] habitat destruction. Whilst we can get some of that information from satellites, obviously, anything requiring on-the-ground information is very, very challenging.” There are 14,020 vascular plant species recorded in Myanmar,…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Home to snowcapped mountains, drought-prone savannas and tropical rainforests, Myanmar hosts tremendous botanical diversity among its richly varied habitats. - There are 864 known plant species that are found only in the conflict-torn country, yet critical knowledge gaps remain. - Researchers recently compiled what is known about Myanmar’s flora, identifying key research gaps and priority areas where conservation efforts for plants are most urgently needed. - They urge collaborative and systematic action to fill in data gaps and protect floristically diverse areas and avoid irreversible species losses. authors: | ||
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Mauritania’s fishmeal fever ends as government tightens regulation 13 Jan 2026 00:09:00 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/mauritanias-fishmeal-fever-ends-as-government-tightens-regulation/ author: Malavikavyawahare dc:creator: Josef SkrdlikOIiver Dunn content:encoded: NOUADHIBOU, Mauritania — On a busy weekday, the coastal strip of Bountiya in Nouadhibou, Mauritania’s second-biggest city, is eerily quiet. This was once the beating heart of the West African nation’s fishmeal industry. “In 2018, it was so busy with trucks and people that you couldn’t even park your car,” said the director of one of 28 processing plants located in the strip, who spoke to Mongabay on condition of anonymity. Managers and owners of the plants were reluctant to speak on record criticizing government policies. Most of the plants in Bountiya are now closed. Those still operating are struggling to survive. A government crackdown in recent years has made it difficult to access raw fish. Fishmeal, sold for animal feed, is made by pressing, drying and grinding fish into powdered form. (A byproduct of this process is fish oil.) It takes 5 kilograms of raw fish to produce 1 kilo of fish powder. “Until 2017, if you were selling your factory, they would call you a fool,” said a manager at another plant, who also asked not to be named. “But now you cannot sell. It’s a fool who buys.” In 2017, Mauritania produced 111,866 metric tons of fish meal, followed by 124,961 metric tons in 2018 and 128,789 metric tons in 2020. A significant chunk of fish landed in Mauritania were consumed by the sector; in 2021 alone, for instance, more than 50% of the total pelagic fish catch went to fishmeal plants. According to official data for…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Until recently, Mauritania was a major fishmeal producer, home to the world’s second-highest number of processing plants, with the boom driven largely by lax regulations and the rapid issuance of permits between 2007 and 2021. - By 2021, more than half of Mauritania’s total pelagic fish catches were being used for fishmeal. - That same year, however, the government began introducing stricter regulations and strengthening enforcement of rules governing the sector. - Only eight fishmeal plants in Mauritania remain active as of September 2025, according to Mongabay’s estimates, and fishmeal production has fallen by more than half since its peak in 2020. authors: | ||
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Photos: Kew Gardens’ top 10 newly named plants and fungi for 2025 12 Jan 2026 23:24:04 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/photos-kew-gardens-top-10-newly-named-plants-and-fungi-for-2025/ author: Lizkimbrough dc:creator: Liz Kimbrough content:encoded: Over the past year, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K., officially named 125 plants and 65 fungi. The new-to-science species include a parasitic fungus that turns Brazilian spiders into “zombies,” a critically endangered orchid with blood-red markings from Ecuador’s cloud forests, and a shrub named after the fire demon from the 2004 Hayao Miyazaki film Howl’s Moving Castle. Each year, Kew releases a list of its “top 10” new plant and fungal species to showcase nature’s vast diversity, as well as its fragility, as many newly described species are already in danger. According to Kew’s “State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2023” report, three out of four undescribed plants are threatened with extinction. One species described in 2025, Cryptacanthus ebo, a bromeliad from the Ebo Forest in Cameroon, may have already gone extinct. Each year, researchers worldwide officially name about 2,500 new plants and even more fungi. An estimated 100,000 plant species and between 2 million and 3 million fungal species remain to be described and named by science. Many of these unnamed fungi are endophytes that live entirely within plant tissues, making up the plants’ microbiomes. “Describing new plant and fungal species is essential at a time when the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change accelerate before our eyes,” Martin Cheek, a senior research leader in Kew’s Africa team, said in a press release. “It is difficult to protect what we do not know, understand and have a scientific name for.” Although a species may be…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, formally named 125 plants and 65 fungi in 2025, including a zombie fungus that parasitizes Brazilian spiders, a bloodstained orchid from Ecuador, and a fire-colored shrub named after a Studio Ghibli character. - Up to three out of four undescribed plant species are already threatened with extinction, with at least one species described this year possibly already extinct in its native Cameroon habitat. - An estimated 100,000 plant species and between 2 million and 3 million fungal species remain to be described and formally named by science. - Many newly described species face immediate threats from habitat loss, illegal collection and climate change, highlighting the urgent need to protect areas before species disappear. authors: | ||
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Cowboy boots made from pirarucu leather fund Amazon’s sustainable fishery 12 Jan 2026 18:26:25 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/cowboy-boots-made-from-pirarucu-leather-fund-amazons-sustainable-fishery/ author: Alexandre de Santi dc:creator: Jenny Gonzales content:encoded: An inhabitant of the Amazon Basin and one of the world’s largest freshwater fishes, the pirarucu (Arapaima gigas) has a hard skin that’s resistant to attacks from aquatic predators such as piranhas, yet is also flexible. Such features, combined with the diamond-shaped design of its scales, have attracted the interest of the global fashion industry. The largest market for sustainably harvested pirarucu skin is the U.S. state of Texas. Country-style boots made from it are manufactured in the U.S. and in Mexico and sold in both countries, a niche business that helps finance sustainable fishing by traditional communities in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Meat is the main product of the managed pirarucu fishery, but the skin, which weighs at least 10 kilograms (22 pounds) and used for footwear and other fashion accessories, sells for a higher price, 170-200 reais ($32-$38). “Selling the skin is crucial to maintaining the 10 reais per kilo of pirarucu [about $1.90/kg, or 86 cents/lb] paid to fishers,” said Ana Alice Britto, commercial coordinator at the Carauari Rural Producers Association, ASPROC. “The skins also help pay a small portion of the logistics, processing and storage costs.” Founded in 1994, ASPROC is the largest organization in the Middle Juruá River region, representing 800 families from 61 riverside communities. Last year, it sold 180 metric tons of pirarucu. Commercial exploitation of the colossal fish — which can weigh up to 200 kg (440 lbs) and measure 3 meters (10 feet) long — began in earnest in the…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Sustainable pirarucu fisheries in Brazil’s Amazonas are restoring once-depleted populations of this freshwater giant, thanks to community-led management systems and sales to brands overseas. - Selling pirarucu skin to the fashion industry, especially for Texas-bound cowboy boots, is key to financing the fishery, helping maintain fair prices for fishers and cover part of the high costs of transport, storage and community monitoring. - The system depends on heavy collective labor and constant protection against illegal fishing, with communities traveling long distances, patrolling lakes and facing armed threats — all while receiving limited recognition or policy support from authorities. authors: | ||
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One year on, TGBS benchmark shows how to restore forests for biodiversity 12 Jan 2026 16:54:04 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/one-year-on-tgbs-benchmark-shows-how-to-restore-forests-for-biodiversity/ author: Jeremy Hance dc:creator: Ruth Kamnitzer content:encoded: There are around 60,000 known tree species in the world, and they can do amazing things: store carbon, provide people with food and firewood, shelter creatures big and small, and so much more. In the past two decades, numerous high-profile initiatives have announced ambitious restoration targets for forests. Restoring forests can bring all kinds of benefits and is widely seen as an effective nature-based solution to climate change and biodiversity loss. But planting the wrong trees, or planting them in the wrong places, is, at best, a missed opportunity — and at worst, can even harm biodiversity. In fact, a 2019 Nature commentary found that almost half the area pledged under the Bonn Challenge, a high-profile initiative to restore 350 million hectares (865 million acres) of degraded forest by 2030, was for plantation-style monocultures, and thus a poor strategy for both carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Meanwhile, half of the land pledged for reforestation under the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative was actually on savanna, a landscape not suitable for tree planting, according to a 2024 Science study. “It started to occur to us that there was potentially a problem here, particularly given the size of the pledges that were being made,” says Paul Smith, secretary-general at U.K.-based charity Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). What was needed, Smith and colleagues thought, was some way to promote best practices and recognize projects that got things right. When they looked at existing certification standards, they found that none focused primarily on biodiversity. What’s…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - The Global Biodiversity Standard (TGBS) is a certification scheme for forest restoration projects that show positive outcomes for biodiversity. - Each assessment includes a field visit by experts from regional hubs, who have been trained in TGBS methodology. - The regional hubs also offer ongoing mentoring to projects, to promote internationally recognized best practices in restoration. - One year on, TGBS has certified six sites, and 15 regional hubs offer mentoring. authors: | ||
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Silvopasture gains momentum in the Amazon, but can it shrink beef’s footprint? 12 Jan 2026 12:26:56 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/silvopasture-gains-momentum-in-the-amazon-but-can-it-shrink-beefs-footprint/ author: Alexandrapopescu dc:creator: Charlie Espinosa content:encoded: In the rolling hills of Iñapari, a remote town in the Peruvian Amazon on the tri-border with Bolivia and Brazil, cattle ranchers are ditching grass monocultures, which have been shown to harm biodiversity, in favor of forested pastures. For Antonio Cardozo, a local rancher who has planted hundreds of native trees, the switch has improved his cattle’s diet and health, while also providing him with additional sources of food and income. “Learning has a cost, but in a few years you start to see a difference,” says Cardozo, who has been combining trees with rotational grazing, a practice that keeps the soil intact and allows grass to regrow. In less than a year, this practice allowed him to more than double the number of cows he grazes per hectare Livestock farming is responsible for roughly 80% of the deforestation in the Amazon Basin and 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Yet agricultural solutions receive just 7% of global climate funding and were absent from the recent COP30 climate summit agreement. According to some researchers, planting trees in pastures, an agroforestry technique known as silvopasture, represents one of the most effective yet neglected opportunities to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Under ideal conditions, silvopasture sequesters carbon in trees and soils while providing better forage and shade to heat-stressed cows, leading to healthier animals that emit less methane and occupy less land. It can also help small farmers adapt to climate-related disasters — responsible for $2.9 trillion in losses over the last…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - Silvopastoral systems, which combine trees and pasture, are still not widely used across Latin America, mainly because of prohibitive costs and lack of technical knowledge, experts say. - In the Peruvian Amazon, ranchers are being trained to practice rotational grazing, setting up silvopasture pilots, in particular over degraded areas. Research has shown that when done correctly, silvopasture can provide extensive carbon sequestration and forage for cattle; however, the system is not fit for all ecosystems. - Ranchers need extensive financial support with silvopasture; experts say that payments for ecosystem services or tax breaks could prevent people from switching back to more lucrative monocultures that harm the environment. - Some experts are worried that promoting more efficient animal husbandry could further promote carbon-intensive meat consumption and overshadow efforts to promote plant-based diets. authors: | ||
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When Indigenous knowledge enters the scientific record 12 Jan 2026 10:41:03 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/when-indigenous-knowledge-enters-the-scientific-record/ author: Shreya Dasgupta dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. For most of Peru’s scientific history, Indigenous knowledge has existed outside the formal record. It shaped how forests were used, how species were managed, and how risk was understood, but rarely appeared in journals or policy. The boundary is shifting. One of the researchers bringing community knowledge into the scientific literature is Richar Antonio Demetrio, an Asháninka from the central Peruvian Amazon, reports contributor Xilena Pinedo for Mongabay. In March 2025, Demetrio became the lead author of a peer-reviewed paper documenting Asháninka knowledge of stingless bees, published in the journal Ethnobiology and Conservation. It was the first time a member of the Asháninka people had led a study in a high-impact scientific journal. The paper catalogs how communities identify nesting trees, harvest honey without cutting forests, and manage pests using ash. Its findings are careful and empirical. Its significance lies elsewhere. Much of the information had circulated for generations without being treated as science. Demetrio’s path to authorship was indirect. Born in the community of Caperucía in Junín province, he trained as a teacher, served as a community leader in his early 20s, and later worked as a park ranger in the Asháninka Communal Reserve. His exposure to formal research came through short courses offered by Peru’s protected areas agency and, later, through collaboration with established scientists. He did not arrive with institutional authority. He arrived with familiarity: with language, with forest species,…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. For most of Peru’s scientific history, Indigenous knowledge has existed outside the formal record. It shaped how forests were used, how species were managed, and how risk was understood, but rarely appeared in journals or policy. The boundary […] authors: | ||
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New species of burrowing snake described from coffee farm in India 12 Jan 2026 09:10:54 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/new-species-of-burrowing-snake-described-from-coffee-farm-in-india/ author: Shreya Dasgupta dc:creator: Mongabay.com content:encoded: A decade after tour guide Basil P. Das stumbled upon a small black-and-beige snake while working on his coffee farm in southern India, researchers have described it as a new-to-science species. They’ve named it Rhinophis siruvaniensis, the species name referring to the Siruvani Hills, the only place the snake is currently known from, according to a recent study, Mongabay India contributor Vandana K. reports. The hills lie in the Western Ghats, at the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu states. “When I learnt it’s a new species, I was very happy because now I am a part of its history,” Das said. While R. siruvaniensis is new to the scientific literature, it isn’t new to local cardamom and coffee farmers who have long known of its behavior and seasonal patterns. “When I told my neighbors that I had found this new snake, they told me they had seen it many times before,” Das told Vandana. Rhinophis siruvaniensis was recently described in a paper based on specimens first collected by a tour guide 10 years ago on a coffee farm in India. Image courtesy of Umesh P.K. The newly described snake belongs to a group of nonvenomous snakes called shieldtail snakes, which burrow and live underground. About 20 species of Rhinophis shieldtails are found in Sri Lanka, while six species are known from India so far. Vivek Philip Cyriac, study co-author and a herpetologist who has been researching shieldtails for more than a decade, told Mongabay India that shieldtail snakes aren’t…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: A decade after tour guide Basil P. Das stumbled upon a small black-and-beige snake while working on his coffee farm in southern India, researchers have described it as a new-to-science species. They’ve named it Rhinophis siruvaniensis, the species name referring to the Siruvani Hills, the only place the snake is currently known from, according to […] authors: | ||
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Conservation’s unfinished business 12 Jan 2026 00:31:18 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/conservations-unfinished-business/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: Conservation often presents itself as a technical enterprise: how much land to protect, which species to prioritize, what policies deliver results. A recent paper in Nature argues that this framing misses something fundamental. Many of the field’s most persistent failures, the authors contend, cannot be understood without confronting how race, power, and historical exclusion continue to shape conservation practice today. The paper, A Framework for Addressing Racial and Related Inequities in Conservation, does not claim that conservation is uniquely flawed, nor that injustice is universal across all projects. Its argument is narrower and more pointed. Modern conservation, it says, emerged from a colonial context that treated land as empty and people as obstacles. Those assumptions were never fully dismantled. They survive in subtler forms, influencing whose knowledge counts, who bears the costs of protection, and who decides what success looks like. A Purko elder collecting medicinal plants in the Loita Hills Forest, Kenya. Photo credit: Rhett A. Butler. The authors, led by Moreangels Mbizah of Wildlife Conservation Action in Zimbabwe, trace conservation’s institutional roots to the late nineteenth century, when protected areas were established across colonized landscapes through forced removals and restrictions on customary land use. Indigenous peoples and rural communities were often excluded in the name of preserving “pristine” nature. Although conservation has evolved since then, the paper argues that these early patterns still shape present-day practice through what it calls “path dependencies”: inherited norms that continue to privilege outside expertise and centralized control. One consequence, according to the…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - A recent Nature paper argues that many persistent failures in conservation cannot be understood without examining how race, power, and historical exclusion continue to shape the field’s institutions and practices. - The authors contend that conservation’s colonial origins still influence who holds decision-making authority, whose knowledge is valued, and who bears the social costs of environmental protection today. - As governments pursue ambitious global targets to expand protected areas, the paper warns that conservation efforts risk repeating past injustices if Indigenous and local land rights are not recognized and upheld. - To address these challenges, the authors propose a framework centered on rights, agency, accountability, and education, emphasizing that more equitable conservation is also more durable. authors: | ||
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A catastrophe that might offer a glimpse of hope for Indonesia (commentary) 11 Jan 2026 13:06:47 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/2026/01/a-catastrophe-that-might-offer-a-glimpse-of-hope-for-indonesia/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Aida Greenbury content:encoded: It was 27 December 2004. I was sitting at my computer in my office in Jakarta, Indonesia, my mind busy with plans for the New Year party I had organized with friends in the city, when my phone started ringing nonstop. First came a call from colleagues, frustrated that our North Sumatra office wasn’t picking up. Then others told me to check the news online. What I had expected would be an exciting end-of-year celebration slowly revealed its darker reality. A megathrust earthquake had triggered a massive tsunami that devastated Aceh in Sumatra. Officials estimated that more than 200,000 people died. In November 2025, the nightmare returned. The 2025 wet season began earlier than usual in Indonesia. In September, the Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency warned that hydrometeorological hazards, including floods and landslides, could strike parts of the country, with November to December identified as the peak rainy season for Sumatra and Kalimantan. Most people did not take the warning seriously. Videos of urban flooding circulated on social media. But one eerie video caught my attention on 26 November 2025. The blurry footage showed dozens of people squatting on a forested hill in heavy rain, wrapped in makeshift raincoats. “Please help us. We are in the middle of the forest, surrounded by landslides,” the person recording shouted, just before the phone network died. A day earlier, on 25 November, more than 50 people had been trapped in a forested area of Tapanuli, North Sumatra, for two nights after floods and…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: - A sequence of disasters in late 2025, including floods, landslides, and a rare cyclone in Sumatra, killed more than 1,100 people and devastated communities and wildlife in landscapes already weakened by forest loss. - Public anger and political attention have converged, with deforestation emerging as a central topic of national debate and senior Indonesian leaders acknowledging failures in forest protection and governance. - Amid tragedy, there are signs of possibility, as investigations, policy commitments, and evidence of resilient wildlife suggest Indonesia still has a narrow window to change course and protect its remaining forests, argues Aida Greenbury, a sustainability leader and forestry expert with decades of experience in Indonesia’s forest sector. - This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay. authors: | ||
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Bob Weir, a musician who took the environment seriously 11 Jan 2026 04:03:36 +0000 https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/bob-weir-a-musician-who-took-the-environment-seriously/ author: Rhett Butler dc:creator: Rhett Ayers Butler content:encoded: Bob Weir, who died on January 10th, was best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. For decades he was also an unusually persistent environmental advocate, one who treated land, forests, and climate not as metaphors but as material systems under pressure. His activism ran alongside his music for most of his adult life and often demanded more from him than the comfortable alignment of celebrity and cause. Weir’s environmental engagement sharpened in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the destruction of tropical rainforests and old-growth forests entered public debate with new urgency. In 1988, the Grateful Dead helped convene a press conference at the United Nations to draw attention to rainforest loss, working with Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network (he would later become an honorary member of the board of directors), and Cultural Survival. Weir spoke plainly about the issue. It was, he said, “not really an aesthetic issue,” but one of survival. Forest loss, he argued, was already reshaping climate and weather systems, whether people lived near rainforests or not. In 1992, his concern became more pointed. While on tour, Weir wrote an op-ed for The New York Times opposing a bill that would have opened millions of acres of Montana national forest to logging, mining, and road-building. He called it a public land giveaway and challenged claims that industrial logging protected jobs. “Two or three guys can clear-cut a forest in a day,” he said later, describing a system that stripped land quickly while…This article was originally published on Mongabay description: Bob Weir, who died on January 10th, was best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. For decades he was also an unusually persistent environmental advocate, one who treated land, forests, and climate not as metaphors but as material systems under pressure. His activism ran alongside his music for most of his adult […] authors: | ||
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