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Conservation news

Environmental science and conservation news

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Hope for the iconic Yangtze sturgeon (cartoon)

Conservation news ·

2025/09/29

After losing two of the Yangtze River’s native wildlife icons — the baiji (a river dolphin) and the Chinese paddlefish — to dams and overfishing, and almost losing the Yangtze sturgeon, China seems to be taking measures to correct the course. The demolition of dams along the Chishui He, a major tributary of the Yangtze River, […]

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Rare photos capture fishing cat preying on monitor...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/29

In July, naturalist Soumyadip Santra was on a trip to the Indian Sundarbans, part of the world’s largest mangrove forest, when he witnessed an unusual scene: a fishing cat jumped on an adult monitor lizard and dragged it away toward some bushes. Santra’s photographs of the fishing cat in action captured a rare bit of […]

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Counting kings: How annual lion surveys reveal the...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/29

On a dawn drive through a savannah reserve in Zambia, a ranger slows the truck and points to a faint trail in the dust. It is not the spoor of an antelope or a stray cow. It is the print of a lioness moving with her cubs toward a waterhole. In another era, such sightings […]

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Study spotlights West Papua habitat as whale sharks...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/28

A new study reports that the Bird’s Head Seascape off Indonesia’s West Papua serves as a vital habitat for juvenile male whale sharks, but lift-net fisheries, tourism boats and emerging mining activities in the region underscore the urgent need for stronger protection and management. The population demographics of the whale shark (Rhincodon typus) within the […]

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Arturo Gómez-Pompa, biologist who revealed the human...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

In the steaming lowlands of Veracruz and the Yucatán, where strangler figs knot the canopy and howler monkeys bellow at dawn, a man with a field notebook kept noticing what others overlooked. Arturo Gómez-Pompa believed tropical forests were not untouched wilderness but “landscapes of memory,” shaped for millennia by Indigenous hands. Long before “biodiversity” became […]

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Peru court upholds 28 years in prison for loggers in...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

After 11 years, the Alto Tamaya Saweto community has finally received confirmation of convictions in the 2014 murders of Indigenous Ashéninka leaders Edwin Chota, Jorge Ríos, Leoncio Quintanísima and Francisco Pinedo. The killings occurred along the Peru-Brazil border, where the leaders had been actively campaigning against illegal logging in their territory since 2008. On Aug. […]

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Every stage of fossil fuel life cycle harms people &...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

A new report traces the life cycle of fossil fuels — from exploration and extraction to combustion and decommissioning — and found stark consequences at each stage for the health of people and the planet alike. “By examining fossil fuels’ health hazards across their entire life cycle, this report makes an important addition to our current understanding […]

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Hema Sane, botanist who lived without electricity,...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

In a crumbling four-story wada in Pune’s old quarter, where temple bells compete with motorbike horns and hawkers press against the walls, an upstairs room stayed stubbornly off the grid. There, surrounded by sparrows and squirrels, a small woman in a plain cotton sari wrote longhand by daylight or by the glow of a kerosene […]

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After global aid cuts, nonprofits seek new energy and...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

NEW YORK (AP) — The many conferences on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly’s annual gathering of world leaders offer a unique forum for companies and philanthropies to help shape an uncertain future. In the face of significant foreign aid pullbacks from the U.S. and other wealthy countries, humanitarian actors described more pragmatic and […]

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The fate of flying rivers could decide Amazon...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

Experts often warn about the “tipping point” for the Amazon, a scenario in which the rainforest collapses into a drier, less biodiverse savanna ecosystem. But the term “tipping point” is sometimes misunderstood or generalized, some experts say, suggesting that there will be an instant change to the biome from one day to the next. In […]

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Brazil leads push for novel forest finance mechanism...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

As nations struggled during Climate Week (Sept 21-28) in New York City to increase their emission-reduction pledges to slow the alarming rate of global warming, Brazil stepped forward to support and showcase a novel, innovative plan of its own design to incentivize the protection of carbon-absorbing tropical forests around the world. Representatives from more than […]

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Long-lost white shark tag traces remarkable journey...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

In May 2012, a satellite transmitter was attached to a subadult female white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) by OCEARCH as part of its shark expeditions in Gansbaai, a fishing town in Western Cape, South Africa. Twelve years and 37,178 kilometers (23,101 miles) later, a fisherman in Indonesia handed over the tag to Project Hiu, a local […]

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How we probed a maze of websites to tally Brazilian...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

Mongabay recently published an investigation revealing widespread Brazilian government purchases of shark meat to feed schoolchildren, hospital patients, prisoners and more. The series has generated public debate in the South American country, which, perhaps surprisingly, is the world’s largest consumer and importer of shark meat. The procurements raise concerns because sharks are being overfished — […]

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Grue jay or Bleen jay? Researchers confirm hybrid...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/26

Researchers have for the first time confirmed that a blue jay and a green jay have mated in the wild to produce a rare hybrid with mixed features. Spotted by a birder named Donna in her backyard in San Antonio in the U.S. state of Texas, this hybrid may have resulted from the two jay […]

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Brazil’s first private Amazon road paves new trade...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/25

A road that once opened the Amazon to destruction is being expanded, and critics fear history will repeat itself.

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Ethnologist Martín von Hildebrand awarded Lovejoy...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/25

The second recipient of the Thomas E. Lovejoy Prize, launched in 2024, was announced Sept. 23 at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, during New York’s climate week. Martín von Hildebrand, an ethnologist and anthropologist, won the award for his decades of work with Indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon, helping them secure […]

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As Sri Lanka struggles with ghost nets, volunteer...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/25

COLOMBO —Galle Face Beach in Sri Lanka’s commercial capital, Colombo, is a popular spot among city dwellers, watched over by lifeguards assigned by the coast guard unit of the Sri Lanka Navy. But one Sunday morning, lifeguard Chamara Vipulasena’s rescue wasn’t a human swimmer, but a sea turtle entangled in a drifting fishing net. Vipulasena […]

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Indigenous groups criticize Ecuador’s $47 billion oil...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/25

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Ecuador’s plans to offer dozens of blocks of land for oil exploration for more than $47 billion has prompted opposition from seven Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Those groups say 18 of the proposed blocks overlap their ancestral territories and that they were not consulted. Government officials say their plan is […]

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Burkina Faso’s women farmers reviving the land with...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/25

CASSOU, Burkina Faso — With her daba in hand, her back bent from decades in the fields, Maan — meaning “grandmother” in the local Nuni language of Burkina Faso’s Centre-Ouest region — isn’t ready to put down her hoe just yet. On this July afternoon, as the sun blazes overhead, the septuagenarian works cheerfully alongside […]

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From Chile to Greece, ‘ghost gear’ from fish farms...

Conservation news ·

2025/09/25

Each year since 2021, Pia Reveco and her husband have set sail from Puerto Montt to spend the Chilean summers navigating Patagonia aboard their sailboat. Last year, they traveled along the fjords and mountains of the Golfo de Penas; three years ago, they reached Laguna San Rafael National Park, where a glacier resembling an ice […]

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