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Conservation news

Environmental science and conservation news

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Plastic’s triumph was no accident. It built an...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/22

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. When Saabira Chaudhuri began covering consumer goods companies for The Wall Street Journal, she expected stories about marketing and product launches. Instead, she uncovered a deeper pattern: industrial ingenuity turned liability. Her new book, Consumed: How Big Brands […]

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In the heart of Bolivia, the mountain that financed...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/22

At about 4,800 meters, or nearly 15,800 feet, above sea level, Cerro Rico towers over the city of Potosí, in Bolivia’s southern highlands. Famous for its vast silver reserves, Cerro Rico — whose name means “rich mountain” in Spanish — almost single-handedly financed the Spanish Empire. In 1656, author Antonio de León Pinelo claimed that […]

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New book unearths environmental crime’s psychological...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/21

Psychologist and true crime presenter Julia Shaw joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss her latest read, examining some of the highest-profile environmental crimes and why they occur, in Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them. She details the commonalities behind six major cases, and what can be […]

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Radar study shows when offshore turbines pose...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/21

When songbirds migrate through the Americas, they often cut through sections of the North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico to save energy. A new study looks at their flying patterns in an attempt to assess how much risk offshore wind turbines and other marine infrastructure might pose to them. The authors used radar data from […]

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Scientists describe new-to-science mouse opossum from...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

Scientists have described a new species of mouse opossum discovered in 2018 in the cloud forests of the Peruvian Andes, 2,664 meters (8,740 feet) above sea level. The find was reported by Mongabay Latam staff writer Yvette Sierra Praeli. The new marsupial is named Marmosa chachapoya after the ancient Chachapoya people who once lived in […]

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Nations delay vote on shipping decarbonization rules...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

This is Part 4 of a short series on efforts to decarbonize the global shipping industry, covering a key meeting from London. Part 1 addressed international policy and politics leading up to this meeting. Part 2 looked at efficiency measures; Part 3, alternative fuels. The shipping sector was widely expected to become the first industry to […]

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Banking alliance aimed at limiting fossil fuel...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

A coalition formed to align the international banking sector’s investments with global climate goals has disbanded nearly four years after it was launched. Set up in 2021, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was a U.N.-sponsored initiative to shift bank financing away from fossil fuels — the biggest source of climate changing greenhouse gases — and […]

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US blocks a global fee on shipping emissions as...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

The U.S. has blocked a global fee on shipping emissions as an international maritime meeting ended Friday without adopting new regulations. The world’s largest maritime nations had been discussing ways to move the shipping industry away from fossil fuels. On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump urged countries to vote against the regulations. The International Maritime […]

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A closer look at Peru’s Amazon reveals new mining...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

For years, gold mining has been one of Peru’s most pressing environmental challenges, with illegal operations clearing the Amazon Rainforest and polluting rivers with chemicals. The industry continues to grow, as miners spread into new parts of the country and adopt different ways of working. One recent project that maps mining operations and their expansion […]

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Deforestation for soy continues in Brazilian Cerrado...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

Agricultural producers in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna continue to clear land for soy, which puts them in breach of the European Union’s upcoming antideforestation law, or EUDR, a new investigation shows. In September 2024, investigative nonprofit Earthsight published its “Secret Ingredient” report, which established links between chicken sold by McDonald’s and at supermarkets in Europe, and […]

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West Africa’s leopards now officially endangered...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

There are only about 350 mature leopards left in West Africa, according to the latest regional assessment by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. Leopards (Panthera pardus) in West Africa are thought to be genetically isolated from those in Central Africa, with little or no interbreeding between populations. They’re found in 11 countries: Benin, […]

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In Nepal’s hills, a fight brews over the country’s...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

KATHMANDU — When the monsoon arrives in Jhumlabang village in Nepal’s far west, 35-year-old Til Kumari B.K. spends hours in the community forest harvesting mushrooms. The rest of the year, she goes there to collect bark from the allo plant (Girardinia diversifolia), or Himalayan nettle, which is processed into a fiber for weaving fabric. During […]

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Indonesia court clears wildfire scientists in case...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

A lower court in the Jakarta suburb of Bogor ruled in October in favor of environmental scientists Bambang Hero Saharjo and Basuki Wasis, dismissing a lawsuit brought by Borneo plantation firm PT Kalimantan Lestari Mandiri over a wildfire more than seven years ago. “Hopefully this will set a good precedent to protect environmental defenders and […]

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Green turtle rebounds, moving from ‘endangered’ to...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

The green turtle, found across the world’s oceans, is recovering after decades of decline, according to the latest IUCN Red List assessment. The species has been reclassified from endangered to least concern. “I am delighted,” Brendan Godley, a turtle expert from the University of Exeter, U.K., told Mongabay. “It underlines that marine conservation can work, […]

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Nepal seeks World Bank loan to fight air pollution...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

KATHMANDU — Nepal’s government is negotiating terms for millions of dollars in loans and grants from the World Bank to fund a project to fight air pollution, even though it has already raised billions of rupees (millions of dollars) by taxing fossil fuel over the past 16 years. The proposed 20.8 billion rupee ($147.9 million) […]

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Chief Kokoi, defender of the Rupununi, died on...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

He was born where the forest gives way to the savanna, in the South Rupununi of Guyana, among horses, rivers, and the songs of the Wapichan people. From that landscape, Tony Rodney James—known to many as Chief Kokoi—drew the convictions that would guide his life: that land is not a commodity, that language carries memory, […]

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Indonesia retiree rewilds world’s largest volcano...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

SAMOSIR, Indonesia — On retirement from public life, Wilmar Eliaser Simandjorang found a quiet place on a hillside overlooking Lake Toba, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, to write about this landscape sacred to the region’s Batak people. “If we don’t pay attention to this, Lake Toba will be just a memory,” Wilmar told Mongabay […]

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New cluster of Tapanuli orangutans discovered in...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/17

CENTRAL TAPANULI, Indonesia — Since it was first described by scientists in 2017, the Tapanuli orangutan, one of the world’s rarest great apes, was believed to live only in the Batang Toru forest of Indonesia’s North Sumatra province. But new findings reveal that the species (Pongo tapanuliensis) also inhabits a peat swamp forest some 32 […]

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Vast freshwater reserves found beneath Atlantic seafloor

Conservation news ·

2025/10/16

Scientists recently discovered vast freshwater reservoirs beneath the Atlantic seafloor, stretching off the U.S. East Coast from the states of New Jersey to Maine. The find was “a beautiful scientific accident,” Brandon Dugan, a professor of geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines, U.S., and co-chief scientist on the expedition, told Mongabay in a video […]

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As wolves roam California, livestock losses remain...

Conservation news ·

2025/10/16

This is the second part of Mongabay’s series on the expanding wolf population in California. Read the first part here. In May 2025, five counties in northern California — mostly rural farm and ranch land — declared an unprecedented state of emergency. It wasn’t a natural disaster or civil unrest that led to panic, but […]

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