Two municipalities in the Peruvian Amazon have granted native stingless bees the legal right to exist, thrive and be represented in court. This is the first time any insect has been recognized as a rights-bearing entity anywhere in the world, according to a correspondence published in Nature.

The ordinances passed in the municipalities of Satipo and Nauta-Loreto guarantee the bees’ right to exist, reproduce and flourish. This establishes a legal framework allowing Indigenous groups and conservationists to sue on behalf of the bees.

The campaign was led by Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, founder of Amazon Research Internacional. She spent years traveling into the Amazon to document the bees in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Indigenous peoples have cultivated stingless bees since pre-Columbian times, and they have cultural and spiritual meaning for Indigenous groups such as Asháninka and Kukama-Kukamiria peoples.

“Within the stingless bee lives Indigenous traditional knowledge, passed down since the time of our grandparents,” Apu Cesar Ramos, president of EcoAshaninka of the Ashaninka Communal Reserve told The Guardian. “The stingless bee has existed since time immemorial and reflects our coexistence with the rainforest.”

The Nature authors noted that stingless bees pollinate roughly 80% of tropical flora. However, they face climate change, deforestation, pesticides and competition from invasive European honeybees.

Peru’s national Law No. 32235, passed in 2025, formally recognized stingless bees as a species of national interest. This milestone helped pave the way for the municipal ordinances.

“This ordinance marks a turning point in our relationship with nature: it makes stingless bees visible, recognises them as rights-bearing subjects, and affirms their essential role in preserving ecosystems,” Constanza Prieto, Latin American director at the Earth Law Center, who helped campaign for the ordinances, told The Guardian.

The Peru ordinances are part of a broader global “Rights of Nature” movement that seeks to give ecosystems and species legal standing similar to that of people or corporations. Rivers, forests and even glaciers have been granted legal rights in countries including Ecuador, New Zealand and Colombia. But insects had never crossed that threshold before.

Shi-Jie Wang and A.J.Wubie, who co-authored The Nature piece, said legal rights matter, because they give communities a way to fight back by suing those who destroy habitat or use harmful pesticides. So far, they said, insects have had almost no meaningful legal protection.

The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, identifies more than 1,100 insect species as threatened, including more than 20 bee species. Their loss poses systemic risks to food security, forest regeneration and climate resilience.

The researchers are calling on policymakers, particularly those governing biodiversity hotspots in Asia and Africa, to adopt similar legal models for insects.

This article was originally written by Liz Kimbrough appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

Banner image: A bee emerging from a hive in Moyobamba, Peru. Image courtesy of Bill Salazar via Pixels/ Creative Commons.

• African leaders must demand an end to industrial krill fishing in the Southern Ocean while at the Our Ocean Conference this week, before irreversible damage is done, Angola’s Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources warns in a new op-ed at Mongabay.

• Antarctica and the ocean systems upon which Africa depends rely on krill — the tiny crustacean that gathers in huge swarms and which whales, seals, penguins and fish species feast upon — so letting business interests dictate how the base of this important food chain, that millions of people also benefit from, is irresponsible, she writes.

• “What happens in Antarctica affects the global ocean. That means the whales migrating along African shores, the resilience of our coastal communities, and the health and livelihoods of our coastal communities,” the minister argues. “Please join me in calling for an end to krill fishing now.”

• Carmen dos Santos is Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources for the nation of Angola.

• This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

This week, as governments of various coastal states gather in Mombasa, Kenya, for the Our Ocean Conference, Africa must demand an end to industrial krill fishing in the Southern Ocean before irreversible damage is done to Antarctica and the ocean systems upon which our continent depends. A clear call from Africa would bolster international calls for a ban on industrial krill fishing and support positive leadership developments like the European Parliament’s recent call for a moratorium on krill fishing.

The Southern Ocean regulates global ocean circulation, absorbs enormous quantities of heat and carbon dioxide, and sustains marine life across the planet. At the center of this system is Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), the tiny crustacean that feeds whales, penguins, seals and seabirds while helping lock carbon into the deep ocean.

Industrial krill fishing has expanded rapidly over the last few years, with the largest share of this extraction controlled by fleets linked to certain European and Asian countries. Most concerningly, fishing is intensifying precisely where Antarctic wildlife is most vulnerable: critical feeding grounds for whales, penguins and seals are actively targeted by the industry.

The damage is already visible. In April, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classified both the emperor penguin and the Antarctic fur seal as endangered species, citing climate change and collapsing Antarctic ecosystem conditions, including declining krill availability.

Continuing to intensify industrial krill extraction while the species that depend on krill are entering higher categories of extinction risk is not precautionary management. It is ecological recklessness.

And all for what? To feed hungry populations? To make essential products for human livelihoods? No. Most of the krill fished in Antarctica is for industrial purposes, turned into omega-3 dietary supplements, pet food and feed for industrial aquaculture including farmed salmon.

African nations can no longer remain observers while one of the planet’s last great wildernesses is being opened to escalating industrial exploitation by a handful of companies. Our continent already lives on the frontlines of climate change, and we understand fully what ecosystem collapse means for food security, coastal livelihoods and economic resilience.

In Angola, the Benguela Current sustains one of the richest marine ecosystems on Earth. Humpback whales that feed on Antarctic krill migrate along the coasts of Angola, Namibia, Gabon and South Africa. These migrations support African economies and coastal livelihoods across Africa. Whale watching alone generates millions of dollars annually across southern and eastern Africa, while healthy whale populations strengthen ocean ecosystems through nutrient cycling and carbon storage.

The international body responsible for protecting Antarctic marine life, the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), was created to safeguard one of Earth’s last great wildernesses. Instead, for nearly a decade, its member states have failed to establish new marine protected areas while industrial krill fishing continues to exponentially expand in some of Antarctica’s most ecologically sensitive waters.

It is clear CCAMLR is facing a real challenge towards implementing effective measures and taking actions, and Member States are prioritizing extraction and industry interests over conservation.

The future of Antarctica should not be decided solely by the countries profiting from its extraction. African States have a powerful voice in this debate. What happens in Antarctica affects the global ocean. That means the whales migrating along African shores, the resilience of our coastal communities, and the health and livelihoods of our coastal communities all depend on decisions being made in rooms far from the ice itself.

Africa has a stake in Antarctica’s survival, and we must now use our collective voice. Protecting Antarctica is an act of collective self-preservation.

Please join me in calling for an end to krill fishing now.

Banner image: Krill support the marine food chain around Antarctica, as they feed on phytoplankton and transfer energy and organic matter to predator species like fish, birds, seals and whales. Image by Christopher Michel via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

• Researchers have developed what they say is the first AI algorithm dedicated to detecting trafficked dead marine wildlife from 3D X-ray images.

• The system was most effective at finding species with idiosyncratic shapes, like shark fins and seahorses, but also detected sea cucumbers with 86% accuracy.

• Interpol seized more marine specimens than reptiles, birds and primates combined in 2025, but experts say the illicit trade remains underrecognized compared to tracking of terrestrial animals and their parts.

• The effectiveness of the new approach may be limited by access to 3D X-ray machines in airports and mail pathways, and when officials try to distinguish between species in the same genus.

• This article was originally written by Dan Shailer appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

On Sunday, April 26, Argentine officials stopped an unusual shipment arriving at an airport near Buenos Aires. Inside, they found so many dead and dying fish, octopuses and crabs that a national rescue center had to install 10 new emergency tanks to support the survivors. It was the third time in a year authorities had seized an illegal shipment of sea life at the same airport, the Associated Press reported.

Marine wildlife trafficking is a growing global business, driven by demand for ornamental fish, luxury foods and traditional medicines. Much of that trade is routed through airplane luggage or airmail, where the vast majority of animals, dead or alive, go undetected.

The combined use of artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D X-ray machines could change that, according to an international team of researchers. Training an algorithm on samples of seahorses, shark fins and sea cucumbers, the scientists achieved successful detection rates between 86% and 96%, according to a research paper published last week.

“As it stands, our methods of detecting something that shouldn’t be in our bags on the front line is reliant on human inspection and biosecurity dogs,” Vanessa Pirotta, a marine biologist at Macquarie University in Australia and the paper’s lead author, told Mongabay. “AI could be used to complement that. It’s not a silver bullet, but an assistant and a tool.”

Other researchers and enforcement agencies said they welcomed the research, while stressing that it would only work as a complementary tool. “Detection is the first link in a longer chain, not the whole answer,” a spokesperson from the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime told Mongabay in a written statement. “Technology can flag a bag. People, forensics and prosecutors turn a flagged bag into a sentence.”

The research follows a 2022 paper from the same team training an algorithm to spot terrestrial species.

Michelle Anagnostou, a research fellow with the University of Oxford’s illegal wildlife trade program who was not involved in the study, said innovations in detection like these were “exciting,” especially if they contribute to broader attempts to address trafficking systems at large. “We’ve been arresting people for decades and it hasn’t gotten us very far,” Anagnostou told Mongabay. She recommended thinking about it from a systems perspective, including resourcing enforcement agencies, educating the public and combating corruption and poverty in source countries.

In addition to driving biodiversity loss, illegal wildlife trafficking spreads infectious diseases, introduces invasive species and has been connected to other forms of organized crime and labor abuse. Trafficking of marine wildlife represents a growing and likely underreported share of the total illegal animal trade, according to Operation Thunder, a global crackdown effort coordinated by Interpol and the World Customs Organization (WCO). Last year, 91,000 pieces of trafficked marine life were seized, almost double the number of reptiles, birds and primates combined.

Despite this, the trade of marine animals goes underrecognized, according to Sarah Foster, a fisheries researcher at Canada’s University of British Columbia and member of the IUCN’s group protecting seahorses, pipefish and seadragons. “Our biggest challenge in ocean conservation writ large is getting people to recognize fish as wildlife, the way they care about elephant ivory or rhino horn,” she told Mongabay. “Marine [species] haven’t gotten the same attention that terrestrial illegal wildlife trade has — although I am pleased to see papers like this try and shift that, and come up with solutions.”

To train their algorithm — the first dedicated to detecting marine wildlife trafficking — Pirotta’s team collected 68 individual samples of seahorses, shark fins and sea cucumbers. Most of these were borrowed from the Australian Museum Collections, initially seized during real-world trafficking busts. One fin was collected fresh from a beached bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas). Another, of unknown species, was bought from an East Asian grocer in Sydney, along with some of the dried sea cucumber samples used in the study.

“I was just like every other tourist in Sydney going into Chinatown; it was a non-event,” Pirotta recalled. Both dried fins and sea cucumbers were easy to find. “But for me as a whale biologist it was just foreign — it was my out-of-water experience. The idea was not to support this whole market but to use a real-life example of what this could look like.”

Researchers spent six months “thinking how traffickers think,” Pirotta said, to create just under 6,000 “bags”: 3,500 with the samples hidden among and inside items typically used to disguise smuggled animal parts, including toys, clothes and tin foil. Another 2,400 bags were prepared without animal parts. These were then scanned by 3D X-ray machines produced by Rapiscan, a U.S.-based security company that funded the research.

Trained on those images, the algorithm had 95-96% success detecting shark fins and seahorses. It identified sea cucumbers 86% of the time. It threw false alarms for seahorses most often (9%), and for shark fins and sea cucumbers just 1-2% of the time.

The algorithm’s greater difficulty identifying sea cucumbers illustrates one potential limitation of this approach, according to Pirotta. “Fins and seahorses look the same, but there’s more variation [with] sea cucumbers,” she said. For that reason, an algorithm might have more trouble distinguishing between legal and illegal samples within the same species.

The algorithm also focused exclusively on small airborne luggage. “We know we’re missing a lot” in sea freight, said Anagnostou, who is currently working with AI to screen for suspect maritime shipments.

For now, the algorithm has only been tested on dead, mostly dried samples, and can only work with X-ray machines able to create 3D images in real time. “Not everyone around the world has access” to this technology, Pirotta acknowledged, but added that it is becoming more common.

Toby Breckon, a computer science professor specializing in analyzing X-ray images at the University of Durham in the U.K., told Mongabay that Pirotta was right to be optimistic about the spread of 3D scanning. “Globally all major airports have them for hold luggage now; hand luggage is coming a little more slowly but the tech is being driven by safety requirements, and this [work] could piggy back onto that.”

For Pirotta, the next step is to share the algorithm’s “recipe” to help detect additional species in other regions. “When I first started this work I never thought AI would be such an instrumental part of what I do as a scientist. Here I am talking about AI, knowing that it’s not going to be the answer to everything, but in an optimistic, progressive way.”

Banner image: A spiny seahorse (Hippocampus histrix). Seahorses are a frequently trafficked marine species. Image by © Hamadi Mwamlavya via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 2.0).

• In April, Albanian authorities allowed bulldozers to tear through the protected Vjosa-Narta delta — home to flamingos, loggerhead sea turtles and the endangered Mediterranean monk seal — without permits or environmental review, sparking mass protests that have shaken the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama.

• The construction is linked to a luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, targeting one of the last intact river-delta wildernesses in the Mediterranean, where only 4% of deltas remain undisturbed.

• As Albania’s anti-corruption authority investigates and the EU warns the development could jeopardize the country’s 2030 membership bid, conservationists say the crisis exposes a pattern of broken promises around the celebrated Vjosa Wild River National Park.

• This article was originally written by Stefan Lovgren appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

VJOSA-NARTA, Albania — In late April, heavy machinery began moving into the Pishë Poro-Narta protected landscape on Albania’s Adriatic coast without permits or public notice. Bulldozers and excavators felled coastal pine trees, flattened sand dunes, and cut new roads through previously untouched habitat. Then, barbed wire fences went up along the shoreline.

The incursion was the realization of a luxury resort development backed by Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. The development plans of Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a private equity fund, stretch from the uninhabited Sazan Island into the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape, the delta region of Albania’s Vjosa River that includes Pishë Poro-Narta.

Roughly twice the size of Paris, the Vjosa-Narta area shelters flamingos, Dalmatian pelicans (Pelecanus crispus), loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) and more than 70 endangered species, among them the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus).

Neither Affinity Partners nor the office of the prime minister of Albania responded to Mongabay’s requests for comment.

Aerial drone video of demonstrators gathering at Dalan Beach on June 6 for a rally near the site of the original resort-construction site. Footage by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

When protesters arrived at the site, security guards confronted them. Video of a demonstrator being dragged across the dunes on May 30 near the village of Zvërnec went viral. Soon demonstrations erupted in Tirana, the Albanian capital, in what has since been dubbed the Flamingo Revolution. The protests have grown larger every day, with tens of thousands demanding accountability for corruption, an end to environmental abuses, and the resignation of Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister.

On June 6, hundreds of demonstrators made their way to Dalan Beach for a symbolic rally near the site of the original incursion. The barbed wire fences had been taken down a few days earlier and the machinery was gone. But no one there believed the battle was done.

Vjosa-Narta is one of the last intact delta wildernesses in the Mediterranean. Only 4% of the region’s deltas remain in a relatively undisturbed state, and this is the largest and most biodiverse. More than 2,300 species have been documented across a mosaic of lagoons, reed beds, salt flats and coastal dunes that formed over millennia.

“I call it the place where I go to meet the gods,” Hanais Mhilli, a 36-year-old baker and part-time hiking guide living in Vlorë, a city south of the delta, told Mongabay as he joined other protesters there who were boarding a bus to the beach.

At the heart of the delta lies the Narta Lagoon, a vast, shallow body of brackish water stretching more than 40 square kilometers (15.4 square miles) where the Vjosa River meets the Adriatic Sea. It hosts more than 20,000 wintering waterbirds and ranks among the most important wetlands on the Adriatic Flyway, the migration corridor along which millions of birds travel each year between Africa and Europe.

“Here we are not just fighting for Albania’s natural heritage, we are fighting for the natural heritage” everywhere, Aleksandër Trajçe, executive director of the Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, told Mongabay. “Italy and Spain have destroyed miles and miles of coastline and now they’re trying to restore what they lost. Albania doesn’t have to make the same mistakes.”

A biosphere reserve

For more than a decade, the Vjosa River — flowing from the Pindus Mountains in Greece through southern Albania to the Adriatic Sea — was at the center of one of Europe’s fiercest conservation battles. Though dammed near its headwaters in Greece, it runs entirely free through Albania, its channels shifting and braiding across gravel beds in patterns that once characterized rivers throughout Europe.

When the river faced a cascade of proposed hydropower projects, campaigners organized and won a landmark victory in 2023 as the Vjosa became Europe’s first Wild River National Park, pioneering a conservation model in which the river itself, not just the surrounding land, is protected from development.

But the delta was left out. Campaigners feared that pushing to include it would jeopardize the entire agreement, and it remained under a weaker designation, the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape. Where the national park carries the strictest level of protection under international conservation standards, the protected landscape category permits limited development and human use.

Warning signs quickly stacked up. Maps had already been redrawn to accommodate a new international airport near the lagoon. Then, in early 2024, the Rama government amended the law on protected areas to allow construction of what it vaguely describes as high-end tourism projects, even inside protected zones. Three weeks later, Kushner’s Affinity Partners announced its plans.

“The delta was intentionally left out of the national park,” Trajçe said. “It was part of a political agenda.”

Albania hopes to join the European Union by 2030, a goal that requires closing the environment chapter of accession negotiations. This in turn requires repealing the very amendment that created the high-end tourism exception.

What Trajçe and other conservationists see unfolding now is a race against that deadline. “It’s a rush for development before they change the law,” he said. “It defies the whole purpose of a protected area.”

In September 2025, the delta received an additional layer of protection when it was included in the newly designated Vjosa Valley UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a status the EU had supported as part of Albania’s accession process. But in January, Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, visited Albania with architects and met with Rama, a trip widely interpreted as a signal that the Kushner project was moving toward construction.

Rama has made his position clear. Speaking on the sidelines of the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Montenegro on June 5, he dismissed the international attention the project has drawn. “If it wasn’t Jared, they wouldn’t give a shit,” he told Politico.

From source to sea

Conservationists say the Albanian government has also failed to honor its legal obligations under the management plan for the wild river national park. While the park has delivered important results — most of all, stopping the dam projects — violations have mounted.

Large quantities of water have been diverted from the Shushicë River, a major tributary within the national park, for irrigation, in direct violation of the plan, with further plans to pipe its water to the coast for tourism development. Crude oil has spilled into the Vjosa near the town of Poçem, where 150 active oil wells line the river’s middle stretch.

Ulrich Eichelmann, a German conservationist who heads the Vienna-based NGO RiverWatch and was a key driver behind the park’s establishment, said the government has treated the designation primarily as a marketing tool. Almost none of the activities required under the management plan have been implemented, he told Mongabay. “All they focus on is getting more tourists into the area,” Eichelmann said. “Three years after the national park was created, the river system is in a worse state than before.”

The threat to the delta is part of a broader global crisis. Deltas are among the most biologically productive ecosystems on earth, the place where freshwater and saltwater mix to create conditions of great fertility. But many deltas have been relentlessly exploited, drained for agriculture and built over for ports and other infrastructure. A 2024 assessment of all 258 river deltas discharging into the Mediterranean found that no large delta — except those in Albania — still qualifies as relatively intact.

“The delta is an integral part of the wild river,” Besjana Guri, founder of LUMI and winner of a 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize for her work to protect the Vjosa River, told Mongabay. “Ecologically, you cannot divide them.”

Euro leverage

The Flamingo Revolution shows no sign of losing momentum. The demonstrations have remained largely peaceful, drawing people of all ages — young couples, parents with children, elderly Albanians who lived through decades of communist rule — united by something that has rarely mobilized this society before.

The movement has also attracted the attention of Albania’s anti-corruption authority. SPAK, the independent prosecutorial body that has pursued high-profile corruption cases since its establishment in 2019, has opened a formal investigation into the project, examining not only environmental violations but reportedly extending into questions of land ownership changes and government decisions made in 2024 that cleared the way for development in the protected area.

The EU’s position has sharpened significantly, too. The European Commission has publicly and repeatedly warned Albania that it must terminate the strategic investments law that gives favored projects fast-track treatment, bypassing environmental safeguards. Failure to do so, the commission made clear, could put Albania’s path to EU membership at risk.

“Can the EU really allow Albania to destroy this unique ecosystem on the last stretch before it becomes a member state?” asked Eichelmann before heading out to join other demonstrators on the ninth day of protests in Tirana. “I don’t think so.”

Banner image: A flock of flamingos wades in the Narta Lagoon, an important wintering site for the species. Image by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.

• Brazil’s Supreme Court upheld a law removing 862 hectares (2,130 acres) from Jamanxim National Park, clearing a legal obstacle for the proposed Ferrogrão grain railway.

• The lower house in Congress also approved a measure reducing another Jamanxim conservation unit; although, the bill still must be voted on in the Senate.

• The project threatens Indigenous territories and key habitats for jaguars, giant otters and primates in an Amazonian region already facing extensive land grabbing and deforestation.

• Experts warn the ruling could make it easier to reduce protected areas elsewhere in Brazil for future infrastructure and development projects.

• This article was originally written by André Schröder appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

A ruling by Brazil’s Supreme Court has given new momentum to one of the most controversial infrastructure projects in the Brazilian Amazon: The Ferrogrão railway. The plan is to link Sinop, in the grain-producing state of Mato Grosso, to the port of Miritituba in Pará, a key commodity export hub on the Tapajós River. Conceived by the agribusiness sector to reduce grain transportation costs, Ferrogrão is a priority project for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration, despite warnings about its potential impacts on Indigenous territories and protected forests in an Amazon region already under significant socio-environmental pressure.

In May, the justices upheld a 2017 law that removed 862 hectares (2,130 acres) from Jamanxim National Park, a conservation unit located in Pará state, to allow Ferrogrão to pass through the protected area. The initiative had been challenged on the grounds that Brazil’s Federal Constitution requires a formal law to reduce the size of protected areas, rather than the conversion into law of a provisional measure issued by the executive branch.

“The STF decision does not give the green light to the Ferrogrão project, which still must undergo environmental studies and the licensing process,” said Alice Dandara de Assis Correia, an attorney at Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), a nonprofit that advocates for environmental and Indigenous rights. “But the courts have ruled that specially protected areas can be altered through an expedited process, an extremely dangerous shortcut that could pave the way for Congress to approve similar changes in other protected areas facing pressure from economic interests,” she told Mongabay by phone.

The justices said the law reducing the size of Jamanxim doesn’t automatically authorize the construction of the Ferrogrão, which remains subject to approvals and permits from federal agencies. Environmental groups and Indigenous peoples, however, view the decision as a setback for environmental protection. In their view, the ruling shows that protected areas can be reconsidered in the face of projects backed by agribusiness and other interests, increasing legal uncertainty.

Brazil’s Ministry of Transport welcomed the decision as a victory for Ferrogrão, saying that upholding the law reducing the protected area was “an important step toward strengthening and advancing the project.” The ministry reaffirmed that it is proceeding responsibly, in compliance with legal requirements, while continuing to refine the studies needed for the project. The Brazilian Association of Soy Producers, the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock and other agribusiness organizations also celebrated the decision.

In an email to Mongabay, Brazil’s federal environmental agency, IBAMA, declined to comment on the decision and said it is awaiting updated information from the Environmental Impact Assessment and Environmental Impact Report for the project as part of the licensing process.

The Amazon grain railway

Proposed by multinational companies to the Brazilian government in 2014, Ferrogrão is part of the Arco Norte project, a set of infrastructure initiatives aimed at improving logistical efficiency in northern Brazil and reducing shipping costs. The 933-kilometer (580-mile) railway, designed to transport soybeans and corn, would cut through protected forests and Indigenous territories, making it one of the Amazon’s most contested infrastructure projects.

Despite warnings about its socio-environmental impacts, the project has retained support across successive administrations. “The Brazilian government has taken a leading role in the Ferrogrão project because it recognizes its importance to the country’s agribusiness logistics sector,” Marcus Quintella, director of FGV Transportes, a higher education institution and think tank focused on transportation, logistics and urban mobility, told Mongabay by phone. “This political support is essential for the environmental permitting process to move forward, though significant uncertainties remain.”

Ferrogrão is still in the technical, economic and environmental viability study phase, the first of several steps required before the railway can proceed. In March, following a warning from the Federal Public Ministry about financial irregularities, socio-environmental risks and the lack of consultation with Indigenous peoples, Brazil’s Federal Court of Accounts kept its review of the project on hold, citing significant institutional, legal and financial risks.

For the review to resume, the National Land Transport Agency, an independent agency responsible for regulating road and rail networks, and the Ministry of Transport must submit updated studies based on adequate public engagement, including consultations with Indigenous peoples. The Ferrogrão route could affect 48 Indigenous territories.

According to Quintella, the Supreme Court’s decision may help advance Ferrogrão, but several uncertainties continue to hinder the project. “To make this major railroad project viable, investors need assurance that environmental permitting and other sensitive issues will be resolved.”

In 2025, Brazil weakened its environmental licensing framework, creating self-approving licensing and handing decisions to politicians.

A study published in November 2024 by the Amazônia 2030 project said that Ferrogrão is economically unviable and suffers from serious structural flaws, in addition to its significant socio-environmental impacts. The report said construction costs had been drastically underestimated and that the project would require more than 32 billion reais ($6.4 billion). The need for taxpayer money to support a project originally presented as a private-sector initiative has also raised concerns within Brazil’s rail sector, with companies already operating in the country assessing how the new railway could affect existing routes.

Conservation at risk

One day before the Supreme Court decision, the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s lower house of Congress, approved a bill to reduce the size of Jamanxim National Forest, a different conservation unit in the same region of Pará. As a result of the proposed change, approximately 486,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) were reclassified as an Environmental Protection Area, a category with lower environmental protections. The bill also allows mining.

The bill must still be approved by the Senate before being submitted to President Lula for sanctioning or vetoes.

According to experts, weakening protections is particularly concerning because the Jamanxim region has experienced extensive land grabbing and deforestation since the paving of BR-163, the main highway linking Brazil’s grain-producing central-west region to the Tapajós River corridor. These protected areas have played an important role in safeguarding jaguars, giant otters, primates and many other threatened species.

“This part of the Amazon, already under significant pressure from soybean transportation, is now seeing protected areas being compromised to make way for agricultural expansion,” Dandara, the nonprofit attorney, said. “Jamanxim National Park and Jamanxim National Forest were established as environmental compensation for the BR-163 highway. It is unwise to weaken these protections in light of plans to build a railroad that will exacerbate environmental impacts in the region.”

A technical note from the Climate Observatory, a network of civil society groups working on climate change, states that the bill approved by Brazilian lawmakers could increase deforestation and biodiversity loss and worsen the climate crisis. The group also says that the regularization of areas associated with land grabbing and illegal mining within federal conservation units could encourage the illegal occupation of state-owned lands and increase the risk of deforestation in other forested areas.

• Catherine Craig’s conservation work began with field biology, from chimpanzees at Gombe to decades of research on spiders, silk, and insect behavior.

• In Madagascar, she developed a conservation enterprise built around native silk-producing caterpillars, border forests, and new sources of income for farmers and artisans. The project’s endurance depended on Malagasy leadership, patient work with communities, and a willingness to adapt when markets, weather, and local needs changed.

• After more than two decades, Craig stepped back from daily leadership, leaving the program financially secure and increasingly governed by the people who built it locally.

• Craig spoke with Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett Ayers Butler in June 2026.

• This article appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

When Catherine Craig first went to Gombe in 1972, she was not thinking about silk. She was an undergraduate in a four-seat plane with Jane Goodall, flying over the Tanzanian forest where Goodall’s work on chimpanzees was changing how scientists understood animals. Craig spent six months there, learning to recognize individual chimpanzees and helping track mothers and infants through the steep woodland above Lake Tanganyika. The forest stayed with her. So did the sight of people living nearby with few choices, and the later realization that even forests thought to be protected could disappear.

Her path back to conservation was indirect. Craig became a biologist of spiders and silk, earning a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution from Cornell and later joining the biology faculty at Yale. For two decades, she studied webs, foraging behavior, insect flight, and the properties of silk. It was work at the level of fibers, mechanics, and evolution. Yet the question that had formed at Gombe remained: how could habitat be protected where people had few ways to earn money?

The answer she pursued was both plain and difficult. If farmers could earn income from native silk-producing caterpillars and the plants that fed them, then habitat might become something worth tending. The idea drew on her scientific expertise, but it also required skills that science had not taught her: product design, marketing, patience, and the ability to listen across languages, cultures, and expectations shaped by past disappointments.

Craig first examined wild silk projects in India, Indonesia, and Madagascar. India showed that silk, enterprise, and conservation could be linked. Indonesia showed the importance of product development. Madagascar offered the combination she was seeking: extraordinary biodiversity, deep poverty, and a cultural history of silk textiles. It was also a country where many conservation projects had struggled, often because local people had been asked to carry the costs of conservation without seeing enough of its benefits.

In 2004, Craig began fieldwork in Madagascar, first at Ranomafana and later near Makira Natural Park in the northeast. She focused on border forests rather than the protected area itself. That distinction mattered. The farmers she hoped to work with lived outside the park, in places where conservation policy, subsistence needs, and economic uncertainty met each day. Wild silk caterpillars were often found in edge habitats, secondary growth, and small farms. That made them suitable for a model built around people’s existing landscapes, rather than around keeping people out.

The program that emerged, Conservation through Poverty Alleviation, International, or CPALI, was never just about collecting cocoons. It involved finding caterpillars and their host plants, raising native species, planting trees, training farmers, and building a workshop where women could turn cocoons, raffia, dyes, and other materials into saleable goods. The products had to be distinctive enough to reach buyers in wealthier markets. The enterprise had to return enough value locally to justify the effort. None of this happened quickly.

Craig is candid about the limits of her early assumptions. She arrived with technical knowledge and confidence. She had to learn that conservation enterprise is not a tidy extension of biology. Markets shift. Equipment breaks. Electricity is unreliable. Shipping is costly. A design that works in New York may not be practical in Maroantsetra. A project that seems logical to an outsider may not fit the rhythm of village life. Farmers needed to see a demonstration site. Elders needed to be consulted. Participation had to happen on local timelines.

Much of the project’s endurance came from the Malagasy team that formed around it. Mamy Ratsimbazafy, first hired as a field assistant and translator, became a central figure and later the director of the local partner organization, SEPALI Madagascar. Lalaina Raharindimby helped lead the women’s artisan program and product development. Over time, the work expanded beyond silk to include raffia, natural dyes, weaving, agroforestry, and biochar. When vanilla prices rose, some farmers left silk for the more lucrative crop. When vanilla prices later fell, the cocoon market offered a fallback for those who remained. The episode showed the fragility of rural livelihoods, and the value of working in a biodiverse landscape with more than one possible product.

Craig’s story is also one of institutional humility. She came to believe that many conservation programs falter because they fail to ask people what they need, or because they treat communities as instruments of a biodiversity plan. In her telling, respect showed up in daily choices. It meant spending money locally, working without project vehicles or boats, renting village houses, using public transport, and remaining long enough for people to believe the project would not disappear after a few years.

After more than two decades, Craig stepped back from day-to-day leadership. She concluded that her management had begun to limit the program’s independence. The transition is among the most important parts of the story. Many founder-led projects weaken when the founder leaves. Craig says she is proud that the work is now financially secure and governed by Malagasy leadership, with CPALI’s role shifting toward fundraising, advising, and helping connect the team to markets.

Craig’s upcoming book, Nature’s Threads, offers an account of what it took to make a small conservation enterprise persist. The work survived market shocks, cyclones, a coup, floods, a pandemic, and the slow work of building trust. Its lessons are hard-won: conservation linked to livelihoods needs time, local authority, product development, and a market willing to pay for more than a raw material. It also needs people willing to stay after the first plan proves incomplete.

An interview with Catherine L. Craig

Mongabay: What drew you into conservation and development work?

Catherine L. Craig: I have worked in the field for over 30 years on research projects from chimpanzees to woodpeckers, to ctenophores, spiders and silkworms. I have always loved doing field work since my first days at Gombe in East Africa and it has given me a very broad perspective on animal habitats and habitat loss. When working in forests in Costa Rica and Panama, I found a sense of peace and joy I have not achieved in any other environment. I strive to contribute to forest and habitat health and animal conservation in any way that I can.

Mongabay: Was there a particular moment or experience that shaped your decision to focus on linking livelihoods with conservation?

Catherine L. Craig: When working in the tropics it was clear that poverty was a major factor driving habitat loss and animal exploitation. For example, people living in isolated areas have no means of earning income. that can be used for health care, purchasing goods or food, When I initiated our program, I hoped that income from silk would provide these funds. Although it took a long time to get the program off the ground (20 years!), we seem to have achieved those early goals, and my successor has been able to expand our income generation programs to include biochar, raffia production and weaving.

When I arrived in Maroantsetra I introduced a project that could provide new livelihoods for farmers and future artisans. I planned to work in the park’s border forests but not in the parks. I knew it would “work” because silk production was very successful in Asia. I had already spent a field season at Ranomafana where we identified possible silk caterpillars and their host plants. But I had no idea how long it would take to implement the project and develop a business. I had no idea of what products we could produce that would be profitable enough to support the local people. For some odd reason none of those problems discouraged me and I simply blundered ahead.

Mongabay: What led you to Madagascar specifically, rather than another country or region?

Catherine L. Craig: I wanted to design a conservation-enterprise to ensure long-term biodiversity protection that was sustainable and not dependent on grants and donor funding. I was looking for a site that had both high biodiversity and high poverty. Madagascar is a biological hotspot as well as one of the 10 poorest countries in the world. Hence, both of my criteria were met.

Mongabay: When you first arrived, was there anything that surprised you? And how did your thinking evolve over time?

Catherine L. Craig: I was surprised to find that all of the conservation organizations were located in Antananarivo with local offices at their field sites. Most of the researchers were PhD students working on their thesis and not trained conservationists trying to implement programs. I was surprised to learn that millions of dollars had already been spent by USAID but the loss of species had continued unabated. I was also surprised to learn that most of the people introducing programs did not seem to respect local communities or include locals in planning field programs.

The impact of those factors came to light when I was trying to convince Mamy, my field assistant and now director of our partner organization, SEPALIM, to take charge. I don’t think that he really believed that I wanted him to be in charge. It seemed he thought that I was going to set up a program and leave him stranded and in charge of it without adequate support. Even though I always implemented his ideas, he did not believe that I considered them equally important, or more important, than mine. I think that all these ideas were the result of not being respected by foreigners. I felt like I was fighting a deep-seated resentment.

Mongabay: You’ve worked on this project for more than two decades. What kept you committed to it over that span?

Catherine L. Craig: In the area where I worked many organizations had come and gone, leaving local communities in despair. I did not want to be just another organization that left Madagascar after 3-5 years having made promises, perhaps even delivered some successes, but that did not sustain a program due to lost interest, completion of research objectives, or simply depletion of funds. My team told me that they expected me to leave after 3-5 years. They were waiting for me to fail. Continuing the project for 20 years and leaving a new director who had funds to expand our work made all the difference.

In addition, all the local work in was done by our partner organization, the local nonprofit that Conservation through Poverty Alleviation, Sehatry Mpamokatra Landy Ifotony, (SEPALI Madagascar). It was staffed by Malagasy who lived in the communities full-time, renting village houses for the team to stay in, using the local businesses, public water taxis and land transport. We did not have project vehicles or boats. In essence, we spent all our funds locally. I think that those factors demonstrated our commitment to the communities.

Mongabay: How did your role change over time, from leading the work to stepping back and supporting others?

Catherine L. Craig: My role changed from a) learning about the area, b) selecting team members and identifying sites, c) making local decisions about directions that the program should take, d) identifying new ways to motivate the farmers, e) hiring trainers to teach artisans the skills they needed to make products (dyeing, sewing, new weaving skills). Finally, after 18 years I decided that my management was hindering program independence and success. I would continue to search for buyers and marketing SEPALIM’s products and providing opportunities for Mamy and Lalaina to travel to US markets. But the Malagasy were ready to completely take over the program in Madagascar. CPALI’s job would focus to find funding and finding a new director/fundraiser.

Finally, given the importance of marketing, I knew that the program would not survive if Mamy and Lalaina did not speak English and travel to the US to meet buyers. Fortunately, they both had studied some English in school, and thanks to the generous gift of a television from one of our donors, they were able to learn English and are now fluent.

Mongabay: What have you learned from working with local communities that you think is often overlooked in conservation projects?

Catherine L. Craig: I learned patience; to allow farmers to participate in program planning and allow them to implement new farming practices on their own timeline. It was also important to introduce the project to village elders for approval before introducing it to the farmers and their families. Finally, establishing a farm demonstration site where farmers could see and understand what their silk farms might look like and we also established a workshop to train the farmer’s wives to make saleable products. The workshop program and the farming program tied together cocoon production and product development.

Mongabay: Looking back, what aspects of the project are you most satisfied with?

Catherine L. Craig: I am proud I left the project financially secure and governed by the Malagasy. I am also proud that the team has chosen to continue to pursue the workshop projects, caterpillar farming, agroforestry and biochar production for sustainable energy and that the artisans have begun to organize and develop new products, dyes and weaving skills.

Mongabay: What were some of the more difficult periods, and how did the project navigate them?

Catherine L. Craig: The most difficult times during the project occurred when the price of vanilla sky rocketed. That caused our farmers to drop silk production and turn to producing vanilla. As a result, Mamy decided to find new areas where vanilla could not be produced (largely due to low humidity) but where new species of silk moths produced cocoons. This clearly demonstrated the value of working in an area of high biodiversity as well as identifying a natural product produced by diverse species. When the vanilla markets subsequently bottomed out, not all farmers returned to farming silk but for those who did, our cocoon market provided a lifeline.

Mongabay: What gives you hope when you think about the future of conservation and community-based approaches?

Catherine L. Craig: After seeing how our farmers (led by Mamy) and artisans (led by Lalaina) responded to international market fluctuations that they had no control over, I can see that they have come to value local biodiversity and its sustainable use as a source for new products. I know that they are searching for new endemic resources that can be expanded for local use such as plant fibers for weaving, natural dyes, and foods. These are not products that are farmed industrially but collected using traditional methods. The team gives me hope that more sustainably farmed products will continue to be identified, for example plants for natural dyes, foods and beverages. Also encouraging is the fact that all of these are produced in the border forests that surround the Makira.

I’m also encouraged by other projects that have economic approaches and involve local communities. In the early 70’s, Janzen and Hallwachs initiated a project that became known as the Guanacaste Conservation Area project. They developed a program to train local people as parataxonomists who identify, conserve and catalogue hundreds of species of Lepidoptera and their host plants. The project provides income to local people, education opportunities and supports local biodiversity.

Kris and Doug Thompkins developed a larger-scale approach to conservation, rewilding. Rewilding is re-creating a fully functional ecosystems by introducing wildlife that to sites where it was previously driven to extinction. By assisting local communities in maintaining the borders of restored ecosystems they insure the local knowledge drives land care.

In North America and first income countries, Natural Capital Projects have been successful. These demand a financial infra-structure, communication and transport that are not available in lower income countries like Madagascar but that are successful in high income countries.

Mongabay: For people entering this field today, what advice would you offer based on your experience?

Catherine L. Craig: There are many different approaches to conservation and they all depend on the situation and project scale. For my work I was not affiliated with a large organization and did not have access to the amazing technologies, like drones for surveying, that are now available. Future conservationists should consider what kind of conservation approach is most effective for the area they will be working in and what they want to accomplish. I was lucky to have two small grants from the National Geographic Society and the Rufford Foundation, and most importantly, long term, private donors. I chose to work with local communities where I thought my limited funds might have an impact and they did. The first step was to convince villagers of the value of the resources that surrounded them and that they had not previously considered. I was surprised to learn how thoughtful, encouraging and supportive the elders were and I think that made a big difference to other villagers. People entering a new area should make sure that they consult with village elders or community leaders. If the project is not approved by village elders, the team will need to outline a new project or work with a different community.

If others were to take my approach, i.e. establish enterprise based approach, they need to be familiar with the resources in the area, the kinds of products that can be made from them and have some idea of what successful markets they will target. Does the resource have economic value? Can it be farmed or scaled while preserving or, better, enhancing the landscape? Can you partner with others to transform the resource into a marketable product? The most important factor of all is choosing a product that is accessible and that community members are interested in.

Mongabay: Now that you’ve stepped back from day-to-day leadership, how do you see your role, and what do you hope the project becomes in the years ahead.

Catherine L. Craig: Many new, locally based nonprofit, conservation programs have been established in Madagascar in the past 20 years. I hope that the SEPALIM program and approach will continue to grow, to influence new programs, to work in new areas, test new products, and succeed in developing new sustainable enterprises that support Madagascar’s rich biodiversity and local communities. Our current new director, Rachel Kramer, is working with Mamy Ratsimbazafy and Lalaina Raharindimby doing just that. I would be happy to serve as a senior advisor assisting others who are interested in developing sustainable enterprise programs specific to new habitats.

• U.S. Department of Defense grants for critical minerals between 2021 and 2025 was nearly $550 million, up from just $31.3 million in the previous five-year period, an investigation has found.

• Lithium projects received the largest share of U.S. defense grants, followed by neodymium and boron combined projects, graphite and aluminum.

• Members of communities affected by some of these projects told Mongabay that U.S. state backing has meant projects are being fast-tracked without the necessary social and environmental checks or meaningful consultation.

• Experts say that increasing geopolitical pressure is transforming mineral supply chains, as well as trade patterns and relationships between countries, and could decrease the availability of minerals needed for the green energy transition.

• This article was originally written by Aimee Gabay appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

Over the past decade, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) spending for critical minerals transformed from virtually nonexistent into a major revenue stream, with the last five years delivering a dramatic surge in both contract volume and dollar value. The Pentagon and other defense-adjacent agencies’ growing appetite for these projects is already visible in affected communities.

Several of these communities impacted by DoD-funded projects told Mongabay that state backing has fast-tracked approvals without essential environmental safeguards or meaningful consultation by companies.

For this research, Mongabay aggregated information from the USAspending database — an official open data source of federal spending information — about U.S. Department of Defense grants spending on critical mineral projects for military purposes between 2015 and 2025.

This figure excludes Pentagon contracts, which is a major way that the Department of Defense (DoD) spends its money. The actual amount is likely larger given that some projects may not be public due to national security reasons, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

We decided to focus only on grants, as other types of contracts are generally non-binding and do not guarantee federal spending.

Mongabay found that the federal agency provided an estimated $621 million on grants for critical mineral projects for defense purposes over the period, according to the USAspending database. Between 2021 and 2025, the DoD secured 24 agreements worth nearly $550 million (549.7 million) — up from just $31.3 million for three contracts in the previous five-year period.

It poured the most funding into lithium projects ($124.6 million), followed by neodymium and boron combined projects ($94 million), graphite ($48.8 million) and aluminum ($45.4 million).

Lithium batteries are required for almost every weapon system used by DoD, particularly for portable equipment as it provides more energy for less weight. Neodymium and boron are used in magnets which are important for missiles, smart bombs, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and fighter jets. Graphite and aluminum are critical for building lighter, stronger and more technologically advanced military applications.

Indigenous peoples and other local communities Mongabay spoke to said that the government has implemented special permitting measures to shorten the authorization process for some of these projects in their territories or near their homes. Inupiaq communities affected by the Graphite Creek Project in Alaska, for instance, said the community has received no information about the project from the company and they have not been consulted. Meanwhile, Graphite One, the company that owns the open-pit graphite mine, said it has had multiple meetings with local stakeholders to share information.

Community members said they are worried that accelerated permitting processes, without proper consultation, will lead to the destruction of critical habitats for animals they depend on for subsistence, as well as destroy sacred sites and other culturally significant areas for communities.

Mongabay emailed the DoD press office for comments but received no response by the time of publication.

How U.S.-backing impacts social and environmental safeguards

Out of the 27 funding grants analyzed by Mongabay, 74% of funding was allocated for projects based within the U.S. The current administration has been very vocal about its wish to reduce its dependence on critical mineral imports, signing an Executive Order to prioritize, expedite and advance domestic projects.

“Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production,” the Executive Order states. “It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”

In 2015, the U.S. Congress established FAST-41, a federal program to improve transparency, coordination and speed of environmental review and authorization process for large infrastructure projects. While the program states it does not change any regulatory requirement and public consultation, it also highlights that, in some cases, projects are approved up to 18 months faster than projects not included in the portfolio.

A White House statement published in 2025 said the current administration plans to consider more projects for FAST-41. At present, the portfolio contains 18 mining projects. Several of these projects receive funding from the DoD or other defense-adjacent agencies. One such project is Graphite Creek. The DoD invested $37.3 million in the project in 2023 and received non-binding Letters of Interest from the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. (EXIM), the country’s official credit export agency, for up to $2.07 billion.

Lucille Carter, the vice president of community relations at Graphite One, told Mongabay over email that the project will provide a domestic supply of high-grade flake graphite, which is essential for many defense applications, as well as large-scale energy storage and electric vehicles.

Adelaine Ahmasuk, a member of the affected Siqnasuagmuit community near Kauwerak in Alaska, told Mongabay that Graphite One never consulted her community about the project, which will impact hunting and fishing areas, as well as sites across the Kigluaik Mountains, which they consider sacred.

“We rely on money to get by, but most of our meat, most of the food, most of the berries that we eat, is what we harvest from the land,” she said over a phone call. “If this mine were to happen, and if it were to drive animal populations down, to drive the moose away, we would have nothing left to sustain us, because we really rely heavily on being able to hunt and put away wild game, berries and greens.”

Ahmasuk said many community members, especially those in remote areas, have limited knowledge about what the project will entail, as the company has not approached them. Many don’t have access to technology, which adds additional challenges, especially given the expedited approval processing time due to its FAST-41 status.

“We, our community and our region, need more time to be prepared,” she explained. “People don’t even understand the impacts of hard rock mining. The [community] don’t understand how big a scale this is proposed to be. It’s supposed to be the largest domestic production of graphite in the U.S. This FAST-41 does not work [for us]. Consultation and consent are already being neglected.”

The company has not yet begun mining, but sources say it has already caused some problems.

“Right where the graphite is, there’s an ancient mound of rocks,” Ahmasuk explained. “Those are where Eagle Woman fell from the sky and landed on our mountains. We created these rock mounds to honor her. We also have rock mounds that are like little checkpoints for when we journey through the mountains. Graphite One put a helicopter pad directly on top of one of them.”

Carter told Mongabay that although formal government-to-government consultation is the responsibility of permitting agencies, since 2014, the company has held more than 75 meetings with local stakeholders to share information, seek feedback and improve the project based on local knowledge wherever possible.

“Graphite One cares deeply about being good neighbors to the communities near our project and sharing the benefits it can provide with local residents,” she said. “We understand and respect the fact that there will always be individuals who have concerns about our work, but we do everything we can to involve those individuals in our process and incorporate their feedback into our work.”

In the U.S. state of Nevada, some neighboring Indigenous peoples and Human Rights Watch have raised concerns about the Thacker Pass lithium mine on ancestral lands, owned by Lithium Nevada LLC, a subsidiary of Lithium Americas Corp. The DoD provided the company with a $11.8–million grant in 2024, and members of the Indigenous and human rights group said the company has not carried out meaningful consultation with all affected tribal members.

The community told Mongabay over email that they feel ill-informed about the process and are concerned about the environmental and cultural impacts, such as ecological damage that can affect how they interact with the land, practice hunting and gathering, as well as teach traditions and practice their religion.

“The state-backing of lithium mining is a serious concern as it allows permitting processes easier and more extraction-friendly,” they said. “We hope our community concerns are taken seriously and are not just a box to check-off. We are concerned easy permitting will make the McDermitt Caldera, our ancestral homelands, a mining district and the State will have no intention to restore the ecosystem.”

Lithium Nevada LLC did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment by the time of publication.

Geopolitical pressure

In recent years, several governments around the world have been pushing for a new agenda of military rearmament and a boost in defense industries, including Germany and France. Lorah Steichen, a researcher at the Transition Security Project, a research center that focuses on the global strategies of the US and UK militaries, told Mongabay over a video call that this has been especially true in the U.S., under the Trump administration.

Steichen pointed to a series of strategies the government has pursued to tighten its grip over mineral supply chains. This includes the use of the Defense Production Act (DPA), a law that grants the president powers to expand and accelerate the supply of minerals and services for defense purposes, as well as industrial policy strategies, such as price floors for some minerals, stockpiling and increased spending on mineral projects.

The U.S. has invested in several mineral projects outside the U.S., although this only represented 26% of the grants Mongabay identified. All of these projects are in Canada, including the La Loutre graphite project owned by Lomiko Metals.

La Loutre is set to be constructed in Quebec’s Laurentians region, an ecologically diverse and water-rich area that is home to moose (Alces alces), gray wolves (Canis Iupus) and the endangered wood turtle (Glyptemys insculpta), most of which are found around Mont-Tremblant National Park. Lomiko Metals received $8.3 million in investment for the project from the DoD in 2024, under the Defense Production Act Title III (DPA Title III), to increase supplies for defense applications and electric vehicles.

Louis Saint-Hilaire, a resident of Duhamel, a town and municipality 5 kilometers (3 miles) west of the proposed La Loutre mining site, told Mongabay over a video call that a referendum was held in August 2025 across five affected municipalities, supervised by Élections Québec, the administration of the electoral and referendum system in Quebec. He said more than 95% of the population voted against the project, with a participation rate of almost 60%.

“It’s not the vision of this population to be a mining region at all,” Saint-Hilaire said. “They come here because it’s quiet, because nature is preserved, and there is a lot of very clean water. In fact, this project, one of the two big pits, there’s a watershed that goes right in the middle of it.”

The location of the proposed La Loutre mine is on the traditional territory of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg (KZA) First Nation in southern Quebec. Mongabay reached out to communities for comment but did not receive a response before publication.

Émile Cloutier-Brassard, the head of mining projects at Eau Secours, a nonprofit dedicated to the protection and responsible management of water in Canada, told Mongabay over email that mining activities in this region will likely contaminate waterbodies via its mine waste, especially given the size of Graphite Creek and the fact it is an open-pit mine.

“De-watering the pit itself — to allow its excavation and to keep it safe for the workers — will create a drop of water table levels that might go down by a few meters as far as 2-3 km [1.2-1.9 mi] from the pit (and sometimes even farther),” he said. “It implies that private wells might go dry, and that wetlands, rivers, lakes and other waterbodies might go partially or totally dry, as they’ll be deprived of their underground water source.”

Experts in sustainable development, international law and mining and energy transitions that Mongabay spoke to pointed out that the push to increase military budgets and rearmament is a response to increasing geopolitical pressure, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Iran war.

Phil Johnstone, a research fellow at the University of Sussex in the U.K., as well as the University of Tartu in Estonia and Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said over a video call that, as a result of this pressure, we will likely see a transformation of mineral supply chains, with an increase in demand for minerals that are critical for defense industries, but also changes in the measures and governance mechanisms used to acquire those minerals.

This could lead to a decrease in the availability of minerals needed for the energy transition, he said.

“Military demand is more likely, in situations of crisis, to have a priority,” said Anabel Marin, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the U.K. and a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) in Argentina, echoing Johnstone’s statements. “The demand that responds to military priorities also reshapes trade patterns, relationships between countries, and it is shaping the way in which minerals are being extracted, the logic under which minerals are extracted.”

Experts also pointed out the similarity between the current race to secure access to minerals and other races to secure access to natural resources considered critical throughout recent history. An example is the rubber rush driven in part by the demand for rubber during World War I, and again during World War II, for vehicles and tanks.

The consequences of this rush were experienced by Amazonian communities, including in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. The rubber barons subjected Indigenous communities to debt slavery, accelerated the decline of Indigenous peoples and, in extreme cases, exterminated entire villages.

Luis Eslava, a professor of international law at La Trobe University’s Law School, Australia, told Mongabay over a video call, “It is really important to remember that there has not been a moment where law has not been part of the equation, even when we think about earlier forms of exploitation during the heyday of the colonial period.”

“There was always a mechanism, legal mechanisms put in place in order for them to establish agreement on the ground, sign concessions, extend the jurisdiction of the British empire into new lands,” he said. “This is important because it reminds us that part of the problem has always been how law has been used in order to lubricate this process of extraction.”

Banner image: Wild horses gallop on the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Indian Reservation near McDermitt, Nevada. Image by AP Photo / Rick Bowmer.

• The Rural Women’s Assembly, which claims a membership of 170,000 women across Southern Africa, promotes agroecology as a strategy for its members’ autonomy and resilience.

• One obstacle to the association’s members choosing this agricultural pathway is that relatively few women own the land they cultivate, limiting their decision-making power.

• Rural development specialist Richard Mkandawire says enabling women who work the land to control it is key to resolving food security issues.

• This article was originally written by Charles Mpaka appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

CHIRADZULU, Malawi — In Chiradzulu district in southern Malawi, 60 women who are members of the Rural Women’s Assembly grow fruits and vegetables alongside their staple crop, maize. In recent years, there’s been growing demand for their organically produced crops from buyers in the nearby city of Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial capital.

The assembly’s chair in Chiradzulu, Diana Sitima, runs a 3.5-hectare (8.6-acre) organic farm here. She says when she started the farm in 1993, she used to take the produce to consumers in Blantyre.

“Now they are coming to us. They say our produce has a good taste,” Sitima says.

According to the women, the biggest obstacles they face as farmers is that they lack land titles and capital to invest in their farming. As members of the RWA, these are the issues they discuss at their meetings and bring to their local council and central government for solutions.

In 1998, not long after she got married, RWA member Lonely Kholowa’s parents gave her a piece of land to cultivate. But after her father passed away in 2009 — her mother had died seven years earlier — her father’s older brother grabbed the land, arguing that according to their culture, she belonged to the family of her mother who came from Machinga district in the east of the country.

Today, Kholowa farms land in her husband’s village elsewhere in Chiradzulu. “I don’t have land of my own. The land we have belongs to my husband and his relatives. If something happens to him, I have nothing,” she says.

“I have always wanted to save money to buy my own piece of land, but it’s difficult.”

Sitima and her husband had other income that allowed them to save and borrow money to buy their piece of land. She understands the importance — and the difficulty — of securing ownership of farmland.

“I own my land so I am stable. I started farming as a business way back, borrowing money from institutions. I have dealt with some of the challenges. But not many women farmers in the district have the advantages that I have; so we discuss how to deal with these challenges,” Sitima says.

Defending women’s land rights

The regional assembly to which Sitima and the other Chiradzulu women belong was born in 2009, when 250 women from nine Southern African countries — including small-scale farmers, land rights activists and labor unionists — met in South Africa to discuss their struggles.

The three-day gathering, organized by the Land Access Movement of South Africa, Women on Farms Project and Trust for Community Outreach and Education, led to the formation of a membership-based network with the aim of championing sustainable food systems, food sovereignty and climate justice, and amplifying women farmers’ voices on issues of access to land.

Today, the RWA claims a membership of nearly 170,000 women in 11 countries. “I think we’re probably the biggest rural movement of women across Southern Africa,” says Mercia Andrews, an activist, founding member of the network, and its current regional convenor.

The RWA’s members take the position that women’s right to own land is inseparable from their rights to food and water. In a phone interview, Andrews tells Mongabay that across Southern Africa, women’s access to land should be protected by law.

“Yet, the reality is different. The reality is that traditional authorities and families make local rules and keep women off land,” she says.

“So we challenge those kinds of patriarchal conditions and we get women to engage robustly with the traditional authority. We want to look at how we can also take legal action now,” she says.

Andrews says overcoming obstacles to women owning land are a main focus of the women’s assembly. “We have part-control over systems of production, but if you don’t own the land, then you’re only partially controlled, because then the income, what you plant, how you plant, is often dependent on what the husband says.”

This feminist movement of rural women also promotes agroecology, which Andrews explains allows the assembly’s members to eschew synthetic farm inputs and turn instead to farmer-saved seeds and environmentally friendly methods.

“As opposed to buying pesticides and fertilizers and GMO seeds as inputs, we also begin to look at how we can use natural pesticides, fertilizer, etc. to repel insects,” she says.

She adds RWA members emphasize restoring and building resilience on their farms, through building terraces and water troughs, agroforestry, and other methods to restore degraded soils and build a resilient agricultural system.

In Chiradzulu, the women learn about these methods at Sitima’s farm, where nitrogen-fixing trees such as gliricidia and horticultural crops grow together. The farm no longer uses synthetic fertilizers, whose prices have risen steadily year on year in Malawi, relying instead on manure from the farm’s livestock.

Andrews says the RWA promotes farming methods that are in harmony with nature and protect soils from degradation. She says the growing market for organically produced foods allows the assembly’s women farmers to charge a premium for the product of their agroecological farming.

Practical lessons

The Rural Women’s Assembly launched its Malawi chapter in 2016. Today, it has more than 2,000 members, according to national coordinator Alice Kachere.

Notwithstanding the success of people like Sitima, agroecology is still not widely practiced by women or other farmers in Malawi. Sitima says the connections she made through the assembly allowed her to learn from the experiences of women farmers from elsewhere in the region.

“Their ideas helped us start planting bananas around the fish ponds to preserve water, and introduce plantains to capitalize on growing demand,” she says.

It has taken 20 years for Sitima to develop her agroecological farm into a profitable enterprise, one that’s able to attract customers to buy things like sweet potatoes and pigeon peas, vegetables and avocados, and eggs and chickens from her throughout the year.

It acts as a training center not only for women farmers in the village, but for students from colleges from across the country.

Movements like the RWA help women act together to overcome shared challenges and create opportunities for more productive farming, according to Lesley Hope, an agricultural economist at the University of Energy and Natural Resources in Ghana, who has conducted research into women farmers and agroecology in sub-Saharan Africa.

But despite the decades-old campaign for women’s rights to land, access remains deeply linked to patrilineal inheritance systems in most societies, giving men the control while limiting women’s productivity, Hope tells Mongabay in an email.

“Control of resources by African women is largely socio-cultural and linked to system of inheritance. The patrilineal system of inheritance gives the control of resources to men and thus men determine the extent to which females can use the resources,” she says.

This illustrates how culture powerfully determines women’s access and control over resources, she says.

Over the decades, Hope says, NGOs, governments and financial institutions have supported women farmers with financing and training in adoption of farming technologies such as agroecology. But while these actions have empowered women, there’s need for more work on land reforms across sub-Saharan Africa to give more women access and control, she says: “This is quite difficult given the cultural underpinnings of land ownership, hence the need involve traditional leaders to make this possible.”

Richard Mkandawire, a rural development expert and former senior adviser at the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development, points out women provide much of the farming labor in Africa, so ensuring their ownership and control of land could strengthen food security and agriculture-based economies on the continent.

“Because they work the land more, they understand it better than men do. Therefore, if we want to resolve the food insecurity issues on the continent, we need to have women have control of land being the primary means of production,” Mkandawire says.

He says movements such as the RWA are important for women to have a collective voice on challenges that affect their productivity as farmers.

In Chiradzulu, Sitima says she believes owning land was the most important step toward her success, and wishes more women farmers in the district had land titles.

“We’re now a fully integrated farm. I think we have achieved this because of stability. When you are renting land or expect someone to push you out anytime, you can’t implement your ideas,” she says.

Banner image: A woman holds up land tenure certificates in Chipata, Zambia (2017). Image by USAID via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

World Oceans Day is celebrated every June 8 to raise awareness about the conservation of Earth’s oceans. In honor of World Oceans Day 2026, the United Nations is focused on marine protected areas (MPA), and the goal of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

The world collectively reached a third of the goal in April 2026, MPAs now cover 10% of oceans. Another 20% will need to be protected over the next four years to reach the 30% goal.

New Marine Protected Areas

The latest additions of MPAs included 284 marine or coastal protected areas in Indonesia and Thailand. This year, Ghana also declared its first MPA, the Greater Cape Three Points MPA, after more than 15 years of efforts. And in September 2025, Pakistan protected the key biodiversity hotspot of Miani Hor Lagoon, home to dalmatian pelicans (Pelecanus crispus) and great black-headed gulls (Ichthyaetus ichthyaetus).

French Polynesia, a Pacific territory controlled by France, declared the world’s largest MPA in June 2025. It covers the archipelagos’ entire exclusive economic zone; 4.8 million square kilometers (roughly 1.9 million square miles) of ocean gained official protection with overwhelming local support.

Some MPAs allow bottom trawling

While there has been progress, experts have also highlighted that some MPAs do not have enough protection. Throughout Europe, many MPAs still allow bottom trawling, a damaging fishing practice that drags weighted nets across the seafloor. Though bottom trawling targets just a few commercially viable species, a recent study found such nets collect roughly 3,000 distinct marine organisms, including threatened ones.

A recent win in a Dutch court may curb the practice in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, public pressure is gaining traction in the U.K., where “paper parks,” or MPAs with minimal actual protection, have garnered infamy.

Campaigns for new MPAs

One of the world’s largest new protected areas was put on hold in Chile following an administrative change. On March 10, the outgoing president of Chile expanded two MPAs to include 337,000 square kilometers (130,000 square miles) of mega-biodiverse ocean habitats. They received the highest levels of environmental protection for one day. Then the new president suspended the MPA on his first day in office. The administration says that it’s a routine suspension, but local artisanal fishers have expressed frustration with the delay.

In South Africa, a campaign to protect the Great African Seaforest, the world’s only expanding kelp forests, is taking shape. The underwater forest stretches for around 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) along South Africa’s Atlantic coast but is only partially protected. Campaigners and scientists are now pushing to expand these protections.

Banner image: Jannes Landschoff diving in the Great African Seaforest. Image courtesy of Jannes Landschoff.

• Across 50 years and multiple countries, it’s clear that Mennonite colonies are systematic agents of deforestation in Latin America, yet they are seldom engaged by policymakers or NGOs seeking to reduce forest loss.

• In part this is due to the colonies’ closed nature but also because their habit of buying in frontier regions is effectively banned by law in Brazil — a nation which dominates the Amazon policy sphere — but a new analysis posits that engagement with these groups is necessary and potentially fruitful.

• “Mennonite pioneers have transformed the South American forest frontier with remarkable, and unfortunate, efficiency. The question now is whether the legal, regulatory, and civil society frameworks of the countries where they now reside can engage them as partners in a different kind of transformation,” the author argues.

• Timothy J. Killeen is an ecologist and conservation biologist with a background in disciplines including genetics, botany and taxonomy. Since the 1980s, Killeen has studied the rainforests of Brazil and Bolivia, where he lived for more than 35 years. He is the author of “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon.”

• This article is an analysis. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

In the global debate over tropical deforestation, the usual cast of villains is well established: agribusiness, global supply chains, cattle ranchers, and governments granting land concessions for political support. One actor rarely appears in this narrative yet has played a consequential role in transforming the South American lowland frontier: The Mennonite agricultural colonist. For more than five decades, Mennonite communities have functioned as systematic agents of agricultural frontier expansion in the Gran Chaco and Andean Amazon, methodically clearing forests, draining wetlands, and catalyzing waves of deforestation that extend far beyond any individual colony.

Mennonite communities operate within the law. They purchase land through formal channels, build permanent communities, and transfer agronomic knowledge to surrounding populations. Their values emphasize hard work, communal solidarity, and a theological relationship to land as stewardship. None of this changes the ecological outcome: Wherever a Mennonite colony is established, forests fall.

Faith, mobility and colony formation

Mennonites are an Anabaptist denomination rooted in the 16-century Reformation, distinguished by pacifism, communal life, and cultural separation from mainstream society. Conservative congregations — whose ancestors moved from Russia to Canada, then to Mexico, Belize and South America — are organized around a local congregation that functions simultaneously as a religious community, governance structure, credit cooperative and social welfare system. When a colony is established, it is an orderly community with collective decision-making, shared infrastructure, and a coherent plan for the future.

The pattern of colony formation is consistent. A community council identifies a large block of land in a frontier zone where land is cheap. The block is purchased in a single transaction from an intermediary, subdivided into plots, distributed to member families, and cleared simultaneously. Roads follow a grid, a church and school rise at the center, and within a few years, the former forest is a functioning agricultural landscape: Flat fields, straight roads, grain silos and dairy facilities. The indirect effects extend far beyond colony boundaries. Access roads open surrounding forest to other settlers, and commercial infrastructure (fuel depots, grain stations, machinery dealers) creates conditions under which non-Mennonite farmers also thrive. A Mennonite colony is not merely an agricultural enterprise; it is a catalyst for the deforestation of surrounding landscapes.

Bolivia provides the most extensively documented case of Mennonite-driven frontier transformation. The first colony, Tres Palmas, was established in 1954 near Santa Cruz, when the Bolivian government actively recruited immigrants to develop the lowland interior. Initial settlements occupied the alluvial plains at the biogeographic intersection of the Amazon, Gran Chaco and Chiquitano Dry Forest. As original colonies filled and the children of founding families sought land, daughter colonies pushed progressively further into the forest.

By the 1990s, Santa Cruz hosted dozens of colonies ranging from 3,000 to more than 50,000 hectares (approximately 7,500 to 125,000 acres). Satellite imagery documents the characteristic signature: Rectangular clearings in geometric grids, advancing into native forest. Direct deforestation attributable to Mennonite colonies is estimated at about 1 million hectares (almost 2.5 million acres).

From the late 2000s onward, Mennonite farmers have expanded into Chiquitania, a region defined by the Precambrian shield and Jesuit-era Indigenous towns. As skilled agriculturalists, they have used technology to overcome the limitations of the region’s acidic red soils, accelerating deforestation in a landscape renowned for its culture and biodiversity.

Beside their agricultural acumen, another distinctive feature of Mennonite frontier expansion is its formal, legal character. Colonies do not invade public lands or forge titles; they purchase through formal transactions from sellers whose own acquisition may — or may not have — been legitimate. Land tenure on the forest frontier is almost always fraught with a history of fraud, as ‘land grabbers’ appropriate public lands by combining bureaucratic tactics, political connections and falsified documentation.

The pioneer colony acquires its landholding at the end of a chain of transactions whose earlier links almost always include illegal activity. Colony councils are sophisticated buyers, and they fully understand the questionable provenance of their purchase. They also know that on the forest frontier, physical possession and conversion provide protection that the legal title by itself does not provide.

The ecological impact is amplified by their intensity of land use. Unlike most Amazonian frontier farms, where low cattle-stocking rates allow scrub to persist along fences and streams, or where rotational fallow permits the establishment of secondary forest, Mennonite farms leave no habitat remnants. The geometric grid imposed on the land takes no account of watercourses, wetlands, or seasonal streams, which are channeled, filled, or farmed over, disrupting hydrological connectivity across watersheds. The colony provides no refuge for forest-dependent wildlife. It is a complete substitution of the original ecosystem.

Mechanized grain production — primarily soy, sorghum, sunflower and wheat, with dairy and beef cattle on pasture and silage — is supported by inputs indistinguishable from large-scale agribusiness. Glyphosate, fungicide, and insecticide regimes create a chemical environment hostile to the invertebrate, amphibian, and small-vertebrate communities that might persist in lightly managed farm landscapes. Water quality in drainage channels reflects this intensity, with downstream implications that are poorly studied but unlikely to be benign.

Demonstration, expansion and frontiers

Mennonite communities are sophisticated adopters of agricultural technology, despite a theological commitment to traditional social structure. Mechanized tillage, precision planting, herbicide-based weed management, hybrid seeds, and GPS-guided equipment are standard. Self-sufficiency is an aspiration; in practice, colonies use credit, and sell into regional and global commodity markets. Families and communities actively plan for intergenerational demand for land. Expansion is not incidental to Mennonite agriculture: It is a structural attribute.

This technological competence has a dual character. Diffusion of Mennonite techniques to surrounding communities has raised the productivity of migrant smallholders who might otherwise remain subsistence farmers. Mennonite colonization has contributed to rural development in regions where state programs have been chronically ineffective, but the darker dimension is that non-sustainable practices (chemical inputs, monoculture, intensive land management) are transmitted alongside the gains in productivity. The colony functions as an agricultural extension service for frontier conversion, teaching the surrounding landscape how to farm with total agronomic intensity.

The pattern is now repeating in new geographies. At least five Mennonite colonies have been established in Peru’s lowland departments of Ucayali and Loreto, located on virgin rainforest where large-block acquisition requires fraud and the collusion of local elites, who conspire to deliver land to buyers uninterested in — or unconcerned for — the Indigenous claims long ignored by the Peruvian state.

Colombia’s Orinoco savannas have similarly attracted Mennonite interest, with four colonies established in departments inaccessible until the peace accord of 2016. The imperfect peace, however, has created conditions highly favorable for illegal or quasi legal land transactions amenable for Mennonite buyers. The consistent logic is ‘comparative land economics’ where Mennonite communities seek cheap frontier land, which by definition is land whose ecosystem values are not reflected in rural real estate markets.

Watch the Mongabay investigation “How did a religious group take over part of the Amazon?” here:

The Brazilian exception and the Andean policy blind spot

One of the most telling features of this story is a conspicuous geographical absence. Despite hosting the largest share of the Amazon basin and a soy and beef sector that has itself driven massive deforestation, Brazil has no Mennonite colonies. Brazil’s constitution and a 1971 law impose strict limitations on rural land ownership by foreign nationals. The large-block purchase that a Mennonite colony requires is either prohibited outright or subject to regulatory hurdles that make it impractical.

This exclusion has compounded a broader policy blind spot because Brazil dominates the Amazonian policy space, so conservation organizations, bilateral agencies, and multilateral institutions address deforestation primarily through the lens of Brazilian experience. Because the Mennonite phenomenon does not exist in Brazil, it has never been a policy priority. Even in Bolivia, no entity has seriously tried to understand or address one of the country’s major drivers of deforestation.

The most striking feature of the policy response to Mennonite-driven deforestation is the near-total absence of any attempt to directly engage these communities. Conservation organizations and development agencies — that have invested significant resources in changing the behavior of cattle ranchers and agro-industrial corporations — have made no sustained effort to engage Mennonites. The explanations are multiple: Cultural insularity, language barriers, theological distrust, and the simple fact that Mennonites do not appear in standard institutional diagrams of deforestation actors.

Yet the case for engagement is strong. Mennonite communities are, by their own belief system, stewards of the land. Progressive Mennonite organizations in North America have been active in sustainable agriculture, and the Mennonite Central Committee has incorporated environmental stewardship, defined as “care of creation” into its vision statement. Whether these initiatives can engage the conservative communities of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia has never been seriously tested. Colony councils have genuine decision-making authority, and agreements negotiated with a council are implemented consistently across an entire colony, making them far more effective interlocutors than other migrant smallholder communities.

What now?

The empirical record across 50 years and multiple countries is clear: Mennonite colonies are systematic agents of deforestation. Their formal legality and communal respectability do not reduce their ecological footprint. The near-total conversion of colony landscapes — no riparian zones, no remnant forest, no fallow cycles — makes Mennonite-driven deforestation among the most complete and least reversible forms of habitat loss on the continent. The Brazilian exception demonstrates that law can be an effective barrier, but that requires a legal system that seeks to constrain their behavior.

For example, if undeveloped public forest was permanently removed from the rural real estate market, new Mennonite colonies would then be forced to purchase previously deforested landholdings. In Bolivia and Colombia, there is an excess of degraded pasture available, much of it suitable for regenerative agriculture that would benefit the land, the watershed, and the Mennonite colonists themselves. They may be proficient conventional farmers, but their practices do not meet the widely accepted standards of sustainability.

Addressing the Mennonite dimension of South American deforestation requires action on multiple fronts: Reform of rural real estate markets and the closure of the forest frontier; inclusion of Mennonite-controlled territories in national deforestation monitoring; application of the conservation requirements that apply to all other private landholders; and a sustained, culturally-informed engagement program with colony councils that takes seriously both the ecological urgency and the theological framework within which these communities understand their relationship to land.

Mennonite pioneers have transformed the South American forest frontier with remarkable, and unfortunate, efficiency. The question now is whether the legal, regulatory, and civil society frameworks of the countries where they now reside can engage them as partners in a different kind of transformation.

• In March, Mongabay’s Elizabeth Claire Alberts and CNN International’s Kara Fox co-published an investigation into China’s deep-sea mining fleet’s ambitions and the alleged military dual uses of its oceanographic research ships. This project was supported by the Pulitzer Center, where Alberts was a 2024-2025 Ocean Reporting Network fellow.

• A key finding was that eight Chinese ships involved in deep-sea mining research only spent about 6% of their sea time over the last five years in internationally designated seabed mining areas, while spending the rest of the time elsewhere, including areas identified by Western experts as strategically important for military reasons.

• The investigation illustrates that the nascent deep-sea mining industry not only poses potential environmental risks, but also presents geopolitical implications.

• This article explains how Alberts and Fox worked together to undertake this investigation, which has drawn international attention and was cited or republished by outlets including The New York Times, Inkstick Media and Island Business.

A version of this story was originally published by the Pulitzer Center, which supported Elizabeth Claire Alberts as an Ocean Reporting Network fellow.

We didn’t set out to investigate China’s deep-sea mining fleet, but as our research into the burgeoning industry developed over our yearlong partnership, it became clear that an investigation into the fleet’s alleged military dual use was emerging as an important, untold story.

Shortly after we embarked on our joint project, geopolitics around the deep-sea mining landscape began to shift dramatically. In February 2025, China signed an agreement with the Cook Islands government to collaborate on deep-sea mining research and exploration. At the same time, it was pursuing a similar deal with the archipelago nation of Kiribati, marking a notable expansion of Chinese influence in the Pacific.

China holds the largest number of exploration contracts issued by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the U.N.-affiliated deep-sea mining regulator, and is also its biggest financial contributor. It also operates the world’s largest oceanographic research fleet. Against this backdrop, we kept returning to a central question: was China’s pursuit of deep-sea mining driven solely for accessing mineral resources, or was it also shaped by broader geopolitical strategy? Through extensive reporting, we learned that China’s interest in seabed mining was motivated by both of these things, and that some of its vessels were engaged in both deep-sea mining work and militarily strategic surveillance.

Meanwhile, deep-sea mining efforts have been gathering pace in the United States. In March 2025, The Metals Company, a Canadian company, announced its intention to file a mining application in the U.S., despite already holding an exploration license with the ISA. Critics argue that such a move would violate international law and constitute a breach of obligations to the ISA. A month later, the Trump administration issued an executive order calling for the U.S. to unilaterally accelerate its deep-sea mining plans in both national and international waters, citing as one of its main reasons the need to “counter China’s growing influence over seabed mineral resources.”

Navigating the data

Working as a collaborative team, we merged our distinct expertise to uncover this complex maritime story.

Together, we analyzed five years of MarineTraffic shipping data, submitted public records and freedom of information requests, and established relationships with experts who provided crucial feedback. Backed by data editors from our news organizations and the invaluable help of the research and data team at the Pulitzer Center, we transformed raw data and expert reviews into a comprehensive, verified investigation.

We started with what was already in the public domain, engaging with experts who had written about the alleged dual nature of China’s oceanographic fleet. This included Darshana Baruah of Indo-Pacific Defence and Strategy at IISS–Asia in Singapore; Liselotte Odgaard of the Washington, D.C.-based Hudson Institute; and Pooja Bhatt of the Jindal School of International Affairs in India. We also engaged with researchers from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), whose foundational work on the military dual use of China’s oceanographic fleet in the Indian Ocean in 2024 provided valuable insights. Their expertise also helped us hone our approach for this investigation.

Next, we needed to identify China’s vessels involved in deep-sea mining research. We did this by looking at ownership information from Chinese deep-sea mining companies, state media and Chinese news sources, and a recent publication by Ryan D. Martinson of the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute. There are more than 40 ships in China’s deep-sea mining research fleet. Through our reporting, we landed on a list of eight vessels, based on data showing they had spent time in ISA exploration sites contracted to Chinese companies (and one reserve area designated by a Chinese company to the ISA) over the past five years.

We analyzed five years of vessel-tracking data from MarineTraffic, a global maritime intelligence platform, to identify these vessels’ voyaging patterns and any activity that suggested unusual activity to further investigate.

We focused on the following criteria for our analysis:

• Visits to known Chinese military ports;

• Voyages and loitering in other countries’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs);

• Periods when vessels turned off automatic identification system (AIS) tracking, a radio signal with identification and location data that larger vessels are supposed to broadcast when at sea.

We used QGIS, a geographical data visualization and analysis tool, to map out our initial data points, and also accessed vessel tracking data on the newly launched Deep Sea Mining Watch platform, which provided a user-friendly interface to support our own work.

This vessel tracking data revealed several notable insights.

Over the past five years, these eight vessels spent a combined 814 days operating in or near areas licensed or reserved for exploration by the ISA, underscoring China’s strong interest in deep-sea mining. At the same time, the data led to a key finding in our investigation: only about 6.4% of the vessels’ total operating time was spent within ISA-designated exploration zones. The vast majority of their activity occurred outside these areas.

But what were these ships doing in other parts of the ocean?

We identified activity that appeared to be worth investigating, such as a vessel lingering in another country’s EEZ or appearing to disable its AIS, the mandatory, automated maritime transponder tracking system. These are referred to as AIS-off events. We cross-referenced those timings with any news or developments that might already be in the public domain, looking for information in local media or from reputable local analysts to gain more clues.

We also took a selection of routes, movements and AIS-off events to more than a dozen naval, civil and academic analysts, showing them the maps, including some in real time, so they could verify what we had identified and provide additional context and insight into the routes’ significance.

For data on the AIS-off events and movement near undersea cables, we obtained additional data support from Starboard Maritime Intelligence, a platform used by government agencies, defense forces and critical infrastructure operators.

At the same time, maintaining a strong focus on the environmental implications of the deep-sea mining industry was essential to our story, particularly for the readers at Mongabay. We drew on existing scientific research and interviews with environmental experts, who outlined potential impacts on both the seabed and the wider marine environment, some of which could be long-lasting or irreversible. This included sonar that affects whales, and risks to little-known species deep in the ocean.

Lessons from the voyage

Ultimately, distinguishing whether Chinese vessels are conducting scientific research or gathering military intelligence relies on expert interpretation of the data. To back up our findings, we took our reporting to our various experts, sometimes many times, to check and recheck. We were sure to seek any insights that might challenge our thesis.

One of the most important parts of our work was taking preliminary findings to multiple subject-matter experts to fact-check data and uncover new leads.

At times, our experts offered conflicting interpretations of the data, so we would return to the drawing board to reevaluate, remembering that it is far better to have a finding challenged — or even dropped — at the prepublication stage than to face a correction later.

We found that if a lead was shrouded in conflicting opinions, we should walk away from it altogether.

We also engaged experts during the hypothesis stage to build rapport and set the tone for our investigation. By the time we had specific data points to highlight, our sources were already invested in the project, with many proving incredibly helpful in providing deep-dive feedback.

We sought a global and multidisciplinary panel, consulting more than a dozen experts across several continents, balancing naval intelligence with academic rigor to ensure a 360-degree view. But one limitation was that we couldn’t include everyone in the final copy. We struggled with this, as all of our experts had such rich and important perspectives to bring, but we were ultimately bound by the limitations of space.

We also acknowledged that we didn’t need to be data scientists to produce data-driven journalism; the collaboration on this story was key. We partnered with colleagues in both of our newsrooms who were able to support our technical needs and who helped with mentoring on some steps throughout the process.

While we used QGIS after training with the Pulitzer Center’s data team, tools like the Deep Sea Mining Watch platform, as well as Kpler’s MarineTraffic and Google Earth also offered powerful, accessible alternatives.

Working as a collaborative team

We were introduced through one of Elizabeth’s colleagues, Erik Hoffner, Mongabay’s impact editor, who had met Kara at a Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference in Philadelphia in 2024, during her Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism. After an initial call, we quickly decided that we wanted to work together, driven by a shared interest in telling stories about deep-sea mining. At the same time, we recognized that CNN and Mongabay are very different platforms, and that a single, identical story may not necessarily work for both.

While our published pieces ended up being similar, we worked toward what was most appropriate for our respective platforms and audiences. The CNN story took a deeper dive into the geopolitics, particularly surrounding China’s vessel movements in the South China Sea. Mongabay devoted more attention to China’s overall role in deep-sea mining, analyzing vessel activity in mining zones, highlighting the extent of Chinese exploration areas, and expanding on the environmental stakes.

Our two stories also presented this work differently, with CNN’s production a visually rich, highly interactive feature, and Mongabay’s incorporating beautifully designed static graphics throughout, with some interactivity focused on one of the vessels.

Working collaboratively came with its challenges, especially when balancing the demands of our respective newsrooms, but what carried the project through was clear and consistent communication, mutual respect for each other’s work, and a shared determination to see the project to completion. It also helped that we genuinely enjoyed working together.

Banner image: Model of Jiaolong, one of China’s biggest manned submersibles, at the Five-Year Achievements Exhibition. Image by N509FZ via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The original investigation was co-published on Mongabay and CNN International.

Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff writer for Mongabay and was a 2024-2025 fellow with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network. Find her on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Kara Fox is a senior reporter at CNN International and a guest contributor to the Pulitzer Center.

• Thomas Crowther’s Nature’s Echo argues that feedback loops shape everything from ecosystems and climate systems to human psychology and social change.

• Drawing on ecology, cosmology, and restoration science, the book reframes conservation as the cultivation of self-reinforcing systems rather than isolated interventions.

• Crowther suggests that optimism, behavior, and narrative are not peripheral to environmental outcomes, but part of the forces that influence them.

• In an interview with Mongabay’s founder and CEO, Crowther discusses how these ideas inform his thinking on restoration, regenerative movements, ecological resilience, and the role individuals play in larger systems of change.

Thomas Crowther’s career has been shaped by large claims about small things. A seed, a patch of soil, a soundscape, a moment of fear, a local restoration project: each, in his telling, can become part of a larger system of cause and effect. His new book, Nature’s Echo, is built around that idea. Feedback loops, he argues, are not just a feature of ecology. They are among the forces that formed stars, spread life across Earth, drive climate change, and may yet help repair damaged ecosystems.

Crowther, a British ecologist, became one of the best-known figures in global ecology while at ETH Zurich, where he founded the Crowther Lab and built a large interdisciplinary research group. His work helped popularize the idea that ecosystem restoration could play a major role in addressing climate change, especially after a 2019 Science paper on the potential for additional tree cover drew worldwide attention, as well as criticism from scientists who warned against simplistic tree-planting narratives. His work also helped give rise to the World Economic Forum’s Trillion Trees initiative, and he has served as co-chair of the advisory board to the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. He is also the founder of Restor, an open-data platform that connects conservation and restoration initiatives around the world.

That public profile has made Crowther both influential and contested. In 2024 he was also at the center of a dispute over his departure from ETH Zurich. The university said its decision followed an internal review that raised concerns about professional boundaries, compliance procedures and conflicts of interest. ETH did not reach definitive conclusions on some interpersonal allegations. Crowther has denied personal misconduct, said any procedural failures were unintentional, and acknowledged that he “sometimes blurred the lines between friendship and leadership.” Some former employees welcomed ETH’s findings, while many current and former members of his lab publicly contested the process, describing the investigation as flawed and defending the lab as supportive and inclusive.

The interview that follows is not about that episode. It is about the ideas in Nature’s Echo, and about how Crowther now thinks science, restoration and social change fit together. Still, the controversy gives some of the book’s themes a sharper edge. His book is concerned with how narratives form, how perceptions shape responses, and how systems can move rapidly from one state to another. Those are ecological questions. They are also human ones.

Crowther says his own interest in nature began before he had any sense that he might become a scientist. As a child on holiday in France, he recalls ignoring the other children and watching lizards basking on a wall. When an adult wondered aloud what was wrong with him, his father defended him: “He just loves nature. There is nothing wrong with that.” Crowther says the moment reinforced an obsession. In the book and in conversation, that childhood fascination has become a way of reading the living world as a system of relationships, signals and consequences.

“Feedback loops are pretty magical patterns,” he says. “They happen when a process causes something that reinforces that inciting process.” The definition is simple, and it carries much of the book’s argument. Crowther sees such loops in the formation of stars, the spread of life, the destabilization of the climate, and the recovery of landscapes. Once a loop begins, it can gather force. That force can be destructive, as with warming that accelerates further warming. It can also be regenerative, if the incentives, benefits and emotions point in another direction.

This gives his account of conservation a different emphasis from many restoration narratives. He does not argue that restoration is simply a matter of planting trees or fencing land. “You cannot just stick trees in the ground in places where local people don’t want them,” he says. Recovery, in his view, becomes durable when nature improves people’s lives and those improvements create a reason to protect more nature. A restored forest may support crops, health or local income. Those benefits can then create the conditions for further recovery.

He applies the same logic to positive tipping points. Renewable energy, electric vehicles, regenerative farming, plant-based diets and upcycled clothing matter to him not only as technologies or consumer choices, but as signs of systems beginning to reinforce themselves. Once an option becomes cheaper, easier, more effective or more enjoyable, he argues, growth no longer depends only on exhortation. It starts to draw strength from adoption itself.

Crowther is also interested in less visible signals of ecological change. Bioacoustics, he says, offers a way to measure the complexity of an ecosystem by listening to its frequencies of life, from birds and insects to wind and rain. Sound, for him, is not only data. It also opens the imagination. Healthy ecosystems, he argues, have soundscapes that people instinctively recognize and prefer.

The most personal parts of Nature’s Echo move from ecology into psychology. Crowther opens the book with a story about being bitten by a snake in a rainforest and wrongly believing it was venomous. Fear made his arm go numb, which made the danger feel more real. The loop fed itself until the mistake was corrected. For Crowther, the episode became a way of thinking about environmental fear. Panic, he argues, can narrow agency. Optimism, when grounded in real possibilities, can do the opposite.

That is the central thread of the conversation: humans are not outside nature’s feedback loops. They are part of them. Crowther’s answer to ecological despair is not reassurance, and it is not denial. It is attention to the places where restoration is already becoming self-reinforcing, and to the choices that help such loops gather strength. As he puts it, “Feedback loops do not care about scale.” Small actions, if they connect to the right dynamics, may not remain small for long.

An interview with Thomas Crowther

Rhett Ayers Butler for Mongabay: What first drew you into this field? Was there a moment when you realized you wanted to understand nature at this systems level?

Thomas Crowther: I never really wanted anything else. From as long as I remember, I had always longed to work with wildlife. But I didn’t think that I would be able to get involved in the scientific process, although I knew that I would take any chance that I could.

If you need a specific day, there was one moment that stands out. When I was young, our family used to go to stay with another family in France for our holidays. While all of the other children from both families used to play in the garden, I used to spend most of my time sitting alone and staring at a wall where lizards liked basking in the sun. One day, I remember the grandmother of the other family asking, ‘What do you think is wrong with him?’ I vividly remember my dad saying, “What do you mean? Nothing is wrong with him! He just loves nature. There is nothing wrong with that! We should all be reminded of how incredible nature is.” I remember feeling quite emotional. And I think it reinforced my obsession.

Mongabay: Your book frames the world through feedback loops—ecological, social, even psychological. What led you to see these patterns as the central lens for understanding nature?

Thomas Crowther: Feedback loops are pretty magical patterns. They happen when a process causes something that reinforces that inciting process. I used to just find them fascinating, because they help to explain the intricate patterns that we see in the natural world. But as I started writing the book, I began to realize that they were actually responsible for all of the most powerful forces that the universe has ever seen. After the Big Bang, they allowed stars to form, they allowed life to spread across the planet, and they are driving climate change. And they also hold all of the potential to regenerate our planet if we allow them to.

When you start noticing them, you can’t stop seeing them everywhere. They are why it gets harder to sleep the more anxiously you need to sleep, or why exercising makes it easier to do more exercise. When you start following these lines of causality, they seem to make sense of everything that came before, and they also help you to imagine how things might change in the future. And when you realize their power to shape the future, they bring with them an incredible sense of agency, as you realize that your actions have an astonishing potential to build a regenerative world.

Mongabay: You open with a personal story about perception and the body’s response to belief. How did that experience shape the way you think about cause and effect in complex systems?

Thomas Crowther: Yes, I was bitten by a snake in a rainforest. And the misguided fear that it was venomous made my arm go numb, which reinforced my belief that it was venomous. My panic also caused those around me to panic, driving a hectic series of events that started to get out of control. It really viscerally showed the power of feedback loops to shape our physical future.

As a society, if we face our environmental future with fear and anxiety, then our reactions run the risk of exacerbating the problem. As defensiveness and antagonism increase, military spending goes through the roof, which only justifies the need for more fear. Instead, if we can find a way to react from a place of optimism for a brighter future, then those are the qualities that will be amplified through feedback loops. And there are so many ways to engage. If we can face our uncertain future with enthusiasm for the environmental opportunities that can improve our health, wealth, fun, or fashion choices, then we will find the intrinsic motivation to do them more. And the more we enjoy them, the more we will engage, which should only enhance the enjoyment. Feedback loops like this help us to see how we can collectively manifest a different future.

Mongabay: Much of environmental science focuses on collapse. You emphasize “snowball effects” and tipping points—both negative and positive. Where do you see the most realistic opportunities for positive tipping points today?

Thomas Crowther: Positive feedback loops are universal forces that can build out of anything. Of course, we tend to focus on the loops that are building in destructive directions because they are overwhelming at the moment. It is natural that we do this, because our sympathetic nervous system is designed to focus on threats rather than opportunities. But around the world, positive feedback loops are also building in incredibly positive directions, and once they start building, they only grow with runaway momentum.

The classic examples are the growth of electric vehicles and renewable energy, which is becoming cheaper and more effective than the alternatives. When solar energy becomes cheaper than fossil fuel energy, then it is inevitable that more people start using it, which only lowers costs more, driving more uptake. Once a feedback loop like this builds momentum, it can tip entire industries into new states. But we are also beginning to see similar patterns in regenerative farming, where the introduction of biodiversity is improving farmers’ yields. And even things like upcycled clothes and plant-based diets are becoming more fashionable and desirable than the alternatives. Whenever the regenerative solution becomes easier, cheaper, better, more effective, or enjoyable than the alternatives, then its continued growth is not only possible — it is inevitable.

Mongabay: The book suggests that stability in ecosystems comes from a balance between reinforcing and stabilizing forces. How should that idea change the way we approach conservation or restoration?

Thomas Crowther: Positive feedback loops are the agents of growth and momentum. If we want to drive change, we can only achieve success if you can tangibly see that positive feedback is possible. If you want to restore a forest, you cannot just stick trees in the ground in places where local people don’t want them. However, if there is intrinsic motivation to restore vegetation because it brings tangible local benefits — like improved vitality of crops, health, or economic stability — then recovery will happen under its own steam. Wherever nature improves the livelihoods of local people, then there is more incentive to protect more nature, which supports even more livelihoods. When this loop starts building momentum, you cannot stop nature from recovering across landscapes under its own self-reinforcing momentum.

At the same time, if we want a system to stay stable, this cannot happen without negative feedback loops. In nature, the balance of the system cannot happen without the classic negative feedback loops of predation, parasitism, and competition. For an ecological system to remain in balance, you often need to make sure the top predators are present, because these are the organisms that regulate the species below them in the food chain, keeping the entire system in balance. We have seen it over and over again, where the restoration of a few predators can transform entire landscapes, reviving resilience that can last in the long term.

Mongabay: There’s a growing use of bioacoustics to understand ecosystems. In a world defined by feedback loops, what does “listening” to nature reveal that we might otherwise miss?

Thomas Crowther: One of the biggest challenges in nature protection is the task of measuring the full complexity of an ecosystem. Sound is an incredible way to characterize ecological complexity, because it allows us to characterize all the frequencies of life, but also those of the abiotic characteristics like wind and rain. All of these things will vary between a healthy ecosystem and an unhealthy one, so sound recording provides an incredible depth of information.

But for me, the most exciting thing about bioacoustics is that it also serves to open up our imagination. When you hear the soundscapes of ecological health, it taps into something deeper within all of us. We all share an innate preference for the soundscapes of healthy nature over the sounds of degradation. It is no surprise that meditation and relaxation soundtracks always sound like beautiful bird sounds. These are the complex ecosystems that allowed us to survive for thousands of years. And so our preferences for these beautiful soundscapes are baked into our genetic makeup.

Mongabay: You’ve moved from ETH Zurich to the Branch Institute. It’s early, but how is that transition progressing so far? And does it reflect a change in how you want to engage with science and impact?

Thomas Crowther: The start of the Branch Institute has been a whirlwind. The lab in ETH Zurich was one of the best times of my life because we were all close friends, having fun and working together toward a shared mission. But we were an enormous group, all crammed within one lab, and we could not do some of the more applied conservation work. However, since evolving into the Branch Institute, we have been able to continue working together, and we have been able to expand and grow naturally. Now our research group actually reflects the scope of our research topic.

Mongabay: The book moves from physical systems to human belief and perception. Why is it important to include psychology and narrative when talking about ecology?

Thomas Crowther: So much of the discussion around climate change is about the physical threats or how insurmountable they are. These feedback loops are overwhelming planetary forces. They can lead to a loss of agency, as we believe we are passive bystanders to inevitable collapse.

But this belief itself is also the subject of feedback loops that shape our perception of reality. And it has the potential to shape our physical future through self-fulfilling prophecies. If we convince ourselves that we are doomed to a bleak future, then growing levels of fear, anxiety, defensiveness, and antagonism will only continue to limit progress. However, if we can allow our attention to nourish the incredible regenerative opportunities that can improve our lives, livelihoods, and emotional well-being, then we have the agency to build incredible momentum in a different direction.

Mongabay: You describe how small actions can scale through feedback loops. For readers, what are examples of “small decisions” that genuinely have system-level consequences?

Thomas Crowther: A feedback loop is a process that drives inevitable momentum without effort because everything builds on all that came before it. Subtle asymmetries in the early universe can build momentum to form stars, and slight genetic fluctuations can give rise to the creation of entire species. And exactly the same forces are able to build from our authentic joy and appreciation for regenerative solutions.

You may enjoy running to work or eating vegan for the taste benefits. You may enjoy ecotourism holidays for the feeling of freedom, or upcycling your clothes to impress your Instagram followers. Each of these actions has a small benefit. But the enjoyment you gain from them is the most important thing because it will be the fuel for feedback loops that can grow with unstoppable power. Because the more you enjoy them, the more you will do them, which only makes it easier to enjoy them more and so on. And when others around you see the joy you are taking from those actions, they are more likely to get involved. That is how movements are slowly building with unstoppable momentum.

Mongabay: What gives you hope right now—not in an abstract sense, but based on patterns or trends you’re seeing in real systems?

Thomas Crowther: We are all aware of the threats that our planet is facing. But I am lucky enough to work with a platform called restor.eco, which connects millions of regenerative nature projects around the world. When you see farmers and indigenous populations getting improved livelihoods as a result of nature recovery, you can see how feedback loops can grow. When nature revival improves the lives of people, then you cannot stop it from growing across entire landscapes. This regenerative movement now spreads across 170 million hectares of land, as people and nature are beginning to thrive together.

Thomas Crowther: When you see feedback loops like that gaining steady momentum, you start to realize how the smallest actions can grow into planetary-scale forces. Every one of us can engage in regeneration with the tiniest of actions, and if we can nourish them with our joy and attention, then they too can grow into immense forces of positive change.

Mongabay: For people hoping to work in conservation or ecological research, what mindset or skill set matters most in a world shaped by complex systems rather than linear cause and effect?

Thomas Crowther: I think my answer would be the same as for any field of work: if you can tap into authentic joy and enthusiasm for what you do, then you can achieve amazing things. If you love nature, then it will be easy to find the intrinsic motivation to fight for its protection. The environmental movement needs every kind of skill set. Whether you are good at writing, fieldwork, campaigning, statistics, storytelling, or any other task, you are desperately needed in this movement. The key challenge is to find your enjoyment of the process and dive in with everything you have got.

Mongabay: If readers take away one idea from Nature’s Echo, what would you want it to change about how they see their own role within these feedback loops?

Thomas Crowther: If there’s one thing I hope readers take from Nature’s Echo, it’s that we are not outside nature: we are a fundamental part of nature’s feedback loops, shaping them whether we intend to or not.

Our tiniest actions can cascade into planetary changes, rebuilding landscapes and strengthening the conditions for further recovery. Feedback loops do not care about scale. They amplify the qualities of whatever we put into them. If we face the future with panic, that is what will be amplified. But if we can face the future with joy and enthusiasm, then those are the qualities of what will emanate.

That’s why optimism isn’t naïve. It is a tangible prerequisite to environmental success. Once you see these reinforcing loops, you realize that we are not passive witnesses to planetary collapse. We can become active participants in the greatest regenerative opportunity our species has witnessed.

• A growing interest among wildlife traffickers’ interest in golden lion tamarins threatens one of Brazil’s iconic endangered animals.

• Seizures in Togo, Suriname and in the Brazilian Amazon reveal sophisticated criminal networks that control international routes, sometimes using forged documents.

• Behind one of these criminal organizations is a man with multiple forged passports that subjected 20 tamarins to a 40-day voyage across the Atlantic.

• Some tamarins are smuggled; traffickers also use loopholes in wildlife trade rules to launder wild-caught animals within captive-bred shipments.

• This article was originally written by Fernanda Wenzel and Marco Mantovani appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

Smuggled in cars, aboard airplanes, or on sailboats crossing the Atlantic Ocean, tiny golden-furred monkeys are being wrenched from their Brazilian forest homes and trafficked overseas by sophisticated criminal networks.

These golden lion tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia) are moved through Latin America and Africa, with strong indications that they are bound for the Asian black market. Collectors are willing to pay as much as $100,000 for this friendly animal, which is one of Brazil’s conservation symbols. Some of the tamarins die before reaching their destination. Those that survive may end their journey emaciated, sick and sometimes, mutilated.

“It is frightening in the sense that [tamarin trafficking] is a threat we believed was relatively under control,” said Luis Paulo Ferraz, executive secretary of the Golden Lion Tamarin Association (AMLD), which has led an international effort to preserve the species since the 1990s.

In recent years, his team has increasingly encountered people venturing deep into the forests of Rio de Janeiro state to capture these animals. “Our field team started coming face to face with these guys, to the point that I became deeply concerned about having my staff working in areas where criminals were operating.”

The golden lion tamarin, featured on Brazil’s 20-real banknote, drew the attention of the Brazilian Federal Police in 2023 after seven of these monkeys and 29 Lear’s macaws (Anodorhynchus leari), another species native to Brazil, were seized at a captive facility in neighboring Suriname.

In February 2024, authorities in Togo were startled to find the same two species — 20 tamarins and 12 macaws — aboard a sailboat that had broken down while navigating along the West African coast.

A few months later, a driver traveling along a highway in the Brazilian Amazon, the BR-364 in Rondônia state, was stopped by the Federal Highway Police. While searching his vehicle, they discovered that he had eight golden lion tamarins and three black-tufted marmosets (Callithrix penicillata) in cages in the back seat.

In testimony, the driver said he’d been paid 25,000 reals (about $4,500) to pick up the animals in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, and transport them to the city of Pacaraima, on the border with Venezuela. He said that he had recently transported another six golden lion tamarins along the same route.

The Federal Police concluded that the case was yet another link in the intricate global wildlife trafficking network. “Pacaraima is a well-known exit point for wild animals leaving the country, a route for international trafficking,” Raphael Goncalves da Silva, a federal police official who worked on the case, wrote in the indictment order against the driver.

In 2023, the golden lion tamarin population was estimated at about 4,800 individuals. It’s endangered, with limited habitat, confined to a handful of preserved areas in the coastal lowlands of the São João River Basin, in the Atlantic Forest.

Coveted for their striking color, these monkeys have been pulled from the wild as far back as the 19th century, when they were displayed as exotic pets by the European aristocracy.

These captures, combined with the progressive destruction of the Atlantic Forest, nearly wiped out the population. By the 1960s and 1970s, fewer than 200 remained in the wild. An international effort enabled the species’ recovery, which included transferring tamarins from zoos around the world back to Brazil. But this tiny monkey is once again falling prey to international wildlife trafficking.

“It seems to me that, for some time now, something has reignited interest in these animals,” said Juliana Machado Ferreira, executive director of the wildlife trafficking watchdog Freeland Brasil, which was directly involved in the Togo and Suriname investigations.

Forty days of horror

It was an ordinary Saturday in Lomé, the capital of Togo, when residents of a coastal community noticed unusual activity at sea. Two men had abandoned a sailboat and were headed ashore in a lifeboat, carrying cages containing small golden monkeys.

As soon as they reached the beach, one of the men loaded the animals into a taxi and then climbed onto a motorcycle taxi himself. The two vehicles sped away, leaving behind the other man and the rest of the sailboat’s crew, who were dealing with the vessel’s mechanical problems.

“They were making a big mess out of it,” said Ofir Drori, who took part in the rescue operation and is the founding director of the EAGLE network (Eco Activists for Governance and Law Enforcement). “They just arrived on a normal beach with villages and tried to get out of there, but they were attracting a lot of attention,” said Drori, who said his organization has helped secure the arrest of more than 3,000 wildlife traffickers.

Alerted by residents, Togo’s Coast Guard came to the beach and arrested those remaining in the boat, bringing to an end a 40-day journey that had begun on the other side of the Atlantic, in the Brazilian city of Salvador, Brazil. Onboard the vessel, authorities found 12 Lear’s macaws.

The crew of this vessel, the Bella Vita, illustrates the multinational nature of the operation. According to information from Brazil’s Federal Police, Julio Ricardo Gonzalez Polonioli, the sailboat’s owner and captain, was a Uruguayan resident of Salvador. Under his command was Brazilian national Silvier de Almeida da Silva, a sailor and owner of a Brazilian boat maintenance and repair company in São Paulo state. The crew also included Surinamese national Iwan Brigadirie, who was responsible for caring for the animals on board.

Those onboard were arrested. Meanwhile, a man of unconfirmed nationality named by Brazil’s Federal Police as the group’s leader, Alexander Levin, was attempting to cross the border into Ghana, taking the golden lion tamarins with him. He was detained before he could reach the neighboring country, and 17 animals were recovered. Another three monkeys died during the journey.

Those that survived were in terrible condition: emaciated, soaked in seawater, and missing large amounts of fur. They stared in apparent terror through the bars of their cages, and were in extremely bad shape, according to Drori. “We were really fearing for them to die fast.” According to IBAMA, they also had colds and were suffering from mange.

The animals were rescued by Brazil’s then-ambassador to Togo, Nei Bitencourt, who died in 2024. He sheltered them in an improvised hospital set up in his own home.

In February 2024, the tamarins and the macaws were brought back to Brazil to go through a recovery process.

Mongabay reached out to sailboat owner and captain Polonioli and crewmember Brigadirie for comment, but received no response.

Brazilian national Silvier de Almeida da Silva spent nine months in jail in Togo before being brought back to Brazil with support from the Foreign Ministry. In a message to Mongabay, da Silva’s attorney, Telêmaco Marrace, said his client only wanted to gain sailing experience and did not know he was doing anything illegal.

“He had no idea, because documentation for these animals was presented to him. Perhaps the documents were false and he was deceived,” the lawyer said in a WhatsApp audio message to Mongabay. According to Marrace, his client is currently responding to criminal charges in Brazil related to the case.

A master of forged passports

The plan to venture into the open sea aboard a sailboat loaded with rare animals went wrong. However, had it not been for the vessel’s mechanical problems, Levin likely would have reached his destination unnoticed, crossing borders far from the scrutiny of ports and airports.

“His plan was brilliant,” Drori told Mongabay. “If it wasn’t for this malfunctioning, all these golden tamarins would have found themselves already with collectors around the world.”

Levin, whom the Federal Police described as the “individual responsible for the acquisition and subsequent commercialization of the trafficked animals,” ultimately escaped from Togolese authorities, under unclear circumstances.

Nearly everything about him is shrouded in mystery, beginning with his nationality. Levin is thought to be 59 years old, but where he’s from is less clear-cut. He was carrying five forged passports when he was detained in Togo: one from Israel, one from Kazakhstan, one from Russia and two from Belarus. The Brazilian Federal Police refer to him as an “Israeli,” but Levin has described himself on social media as “a Russian of Jewish blood.” Court documents from Canada, meanwhile, state that Levin was born in Ukraine and emigrated to Canada in 1982. US authorities, on the other hand, described him as a Canadian citizen.

In 2014, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison in Canada for kidnapping his 2-year-old daughter, whom he had with a Brazilian woman. Levin abducted the child during a family trip to Ukraine and boarded a flight with her to the Philippines, where he left her in the care of a stranger. Upon confessing to the crime, described as “barbaric” by the Canadian courts, he claimed he wanted to punish his partner for an alleged affair. After nearly four months, the girl was rescued and returned to her mother in Brazil.

Levin had already accumulated convictions for lesser crimes, including theft, use of forged documents and unauthorized possession of a firearm.

In 2017, he again made headlines after being detained with a forged Israeli passport while attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico. In his luggage, authorities found additional fake passports and equipment used to forge documents.

Levin’s current whereabouts remain unknown, but the Togo case led to a Brazilian Federal Police operation that resulted in the arrest of 10 people on March 12, 2026. Most of them had previous wildlife trafficking offenses and operated in Bahia state, where Lear’s macaws are found. Some of them were later released, but remain under investigation.

According to the Federal Police, the suspects played different roles within the criminal organization. Some captured the animals; others transported them or acted as intermediaries with buyers inside and outside Brazil.

Documents submitted as evidence in the ongoing court case outlined the international scope of this network. “The investigation attributes transnational operations to the group, with branches abroad, mobility, access to resources and the potential use of forged documents and multiple identities, citing the international escape of a foreign leader following the seizure in Togo.”

Traffickers exploited regulatory loopholes

Levin and his associates were carrying CITES permits issued by the government of Guyana “which were identified by that country’s competent authority as inauthentic,” according to the lawsuit currently before Brazilian courts.

As a species at risk of extinction, the golden lion tamarin is subject to CITES strictest rules. The treaty, signed in 1973 to establish standards protecting wildlife from unsustainable trade, currently includes 183 countries and the European Union. Togo, Guyana and Brazil are all signatories.

Animals listed under the most protective category, Appendix I, cannot be exported for commercial purposes, but only for scientific and conservation objectives. The golden lion tamarin is listed on Appendix I.

CITES, however, provides exceptions for commercial breeding facilities that are registered with the convention’s secretariat. Appendix I animals from those breeders may be sold — provided they are accompanied by a favorable finding issued by environmental authorities in the country of origin.

However, there are no facilities registered with CITES for the commercial trade of golden lion tamarins.

CITES provides an additional exception for animals born in noncommercial facilities, which is the case for most accredited zoos. In such cases, a document certifying that the animal was born in captivity is sufficient for a permit. Although the rule was designed for animals bred for noncommercial purposes, such as conservation, education or training, CITES itself created a loophole by allowing the provision to apply to the eventual sale of animals by these institutions.

This latter exception is especially problematic, said Taylor Tench, a senior wildlife policy analyst at the Environmental Investigation Agency in the US (EIA US). “It is confusing — largely up to the interpretation of the exporting country,” said Tench, whose organization investigates and campaigns against environmental crime. “It’s been a longstanding issue at CITES, unfortunately.”

The convention’s loopholes create opportunities for traffickers, who trade animals poached from the wild, move them across borders and sell them as captive bred. According to Ferreira from Freeland Brasil, many of these schemes involve registered breeders who use legitimate documents to “launder” and traffic illegally acquired wildlife.

Endangered animals are sometimes exported using documents issued for another, less protected animal, since customs officials often can’t easily distinguish between species. Smugglers may also mix protected wildlife into a legal shipment. “And then nobody checks which animals are actually there — or you pay [the inspector] not to check,” Ferreira said.

Crossing Amazon borders

Some countries are especially attractive to traffickers as hubs where they can launder and redistribute animals, either because of weak environmental laws or the ease of corrupting public officials. In South America, Guyana and Suriname serve as exit points for animals captured in Brazil, according to a reportfrom USAID, IUCN and the wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC.

To reach these neighboring countries, smugglers coming from Brazil cross borders in the Amazon aboard boats and small aircraft, often sharing routes with those trafficking drugs or illegally mined gold.

Suriname came into the spotlight with the 2023 rescue of golden lion tamarins and Lear’s macaws in the capital, Paramaribo. “With this case, it became evident that Suriname is becoming a route for wildlife trafficking,” an official connected to wildlife trafficking investigations in the country, who requested anonymity, told Mongabay.

Brazil repatriated the seven golden lion tamarins and five of the Lear’s macaws. The rest of the macaws — there were 29 in total — were stolen from a garage of Suriname’s National Forestry Service (LBB) hours before the arrival of the Brazilian repatriation team.

Mongabay sent emails asking for more details from the Surinamese Public Ministery (Openbaar Ministerie),the environmental authority (Nationale Milieu Autoriteit) and the Ministry of Land Policy and Forestry (GBB), but received no response.

Another incident involving golden lion tamarins occurred about a year later. This time, a man driving along a highway in southern Suriname claimed he had bought a pair of tamarins from two Indigenous people who were selling them by the roadside. When environmental authorities learned of this, they investigated the area where the animals were allegedly sold. There, they found illegal airstrips — possibly used by drug traffickers. “So our theory is that wildlife could also be coming in the same route,” the anonymous source told Mongabay.

Golden lion tamarins that are fortunate enough to be rescued go through a long rehabilitation process before they can return to the forest — if that’s possible. Some of the animals brought back from Togo and Suriname have already been released into the forests of Rio de Janeiro after receiving care from the Golden Lion Tamarin Association team.

“They have a remarkable capacity for resilience,” said Ferraz from the Golden Lion Tamarin Association. “These animals are heroes of conservation — they are survivors.”

Some of them, however, will have to spend the rest of their lives in captivity. That’s the case for a tamarin that lost one of its hands during the journey aboard the sailboat.

The Thailand-India connection

Once they leave South America, animals often pass through multiple countries before reaching their final destination, whether into the hands of collectors or commercial facilities. Increasingly, Thailand has emerged as one of these hubs, especially as a gateway to the Indian market.

A survey by TRAFFIC recorded the seizure of 7,272 animals hidden in the luggage of passengers traveling between the two countries between January 2022 and May 2025. According to the organization, the data reveal “the massive scale and global reach of wildlife trafficking via air between India and Thailand.”

Four golden lion tamarins rescued in Togo and Suriname were released in August 2025 in a forest in Rio de Janeiro. Image courtesy of Ricardo Peng/ICMBio.

Freeland also monitors commercial flights between the two countries. In just six months, from May to October 2025, the organization identified 11 seizures involving more than 600 animals on flights between Bangkok, Thailand’s capital, and the Indian city of Mumbai.

“Trafficking has been increasing in India over the past three or four years, with animals coming through Thailand, Indonesia and Myanmar,” said primatologist Dilip Chetry, who works with the conservation NGO Aaranyak in the Indian state of Assam. Primates make up to most of the seizures in northeastern India, he said.

Threatened species like the golden lion tamarin likely end up in the hands of Asian collectors who are willing to pay thousands of dollars for this rare animal, according to specialists from Brazil’s federal environmental agency, IBAMA, and organizations that combat wildlife trafficking.

An operation carried out by the Brazilian Federal Police suggested that part of the sudden interest in the species may also be linked to the emergence of the private Indian mega-zoo Vantara. On May 1, 2026, federal agents seized cell phones and a computer from renowned bird expert Tony Silva, a U.S. citizen, at São Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport.

Silva was convicted of bird trafficking in the United States in the 1990s and spent nearly seven years in prison. This time around, he was allegedly brokering the purchase of animals illegally captured in Brazil for Vantara, according to an anonymous source who spoke to Mongabay. Among the main targets were golden lion tamarins and Lear’s macaws — one of the rarest birds in the world. That investigation is ongoing.

The zoo opened in March 2025 in Jamnagar, in India’s Gujarat state, founded by billionaire Anant Ambani, the son of India’s richest man, who runs the business conglomerate Reliance Industries. The Vantara complex sprawls across 14 square kilometers (5.4 square miles) and purportedly houses more than 150,000 animals from 2,000 species.

When Mongabay reported on the arrest, a Vantara spokesperson denied the allegations in an email. They said Tony Silva had been involved with the organization as “an independent contractor for limited consultancy.”

When Mongabay contacted Vantara for comments on this report, a representative said Vantara has no connection to the acquisition of illegal animals, and that such allegations have been examined by various authorities that found no irregularities.

“Needless to say, any suggestion that the seizure of Tony Silva’s equipment at GuarulhosAirport indicates that the increase in the trafficking of golden lion tamarins may be related to Vantara’s ongoing acquisition of animals is entirely false and baseless,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. (See the full response below).

Vantara’s full response:

Thank you for reaching out and for giving us the opportunity to respond. We confirm receipt of your email.

We would like to begin by extending a sincere and open invitation please visit Vantara and see for yourself how we operate. We welcome journalists, researchers, and conservationists to witness firsthand our facilities, our processes, and our commitment to animal welfare. We believe that transparency is the best answer to any question, and our doors are open to you.

We would also like to respectfully clarify that Vantara has no connection to the acquisition of illegal animals, and any suggestion to the contrary is incorrect. All such allegations have been thoroughly examined by various authorities, including the apex court, namely the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India, and no irregularities have been found.

Needless to say, any suggestion that the seizure of Tony Silva’s equipment at Guarulhos

Airport indicates that the increase in the trafficking of golden lion tamarins may be related to

Vantara’s ongoing acquisition of animals is entirely false and baseless.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to arrange a visit. We look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Team Vantara

Banner image: Twenty golden-lion-tamarins were found aboard a sailboat on the coast of Togo in 2024; three died. Image courtesy of EAGLE Network.

• According to the European Commission’s own research, leather could account for up to 17% of the deforestation footprint tied to European Union Deforestation Regulation-covered imports. This is roughly 390 square kilometers (149 square miles) of forest lost a year, an area twice the size of the Italian city of Pisa.

• Despite the evidence, Brussels moved earlier this month to drop bovine hides from the scope of the EUDR. The commission says it considered “qualitative considerations” in its decision.

• The move comes after intense lobbying by the leather industry. The main groups representing the sector held at least 22 meetings with European lawmakers since 2021, according to lobbying records, with more than a third occurring in the past year as the regulation neared implementation.

• Environmental campaigners argue that removing leather would create a loophole: beef remains covered, but leather — a high-value product in the same supply chain — could still enter EU markets without the same traceability obligations.

• This article was originally written by Elisângela Mendonça and Emmanuelle Picaud appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

The clock is ticking in Brussels. By June 1, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive body, is set to receive feedback on its proposal to remove leather, hides and skins from the EU’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Officials, however, are trying to push this amendment even after the commission’s own research confirmed that cattle hides also drive forest loss, a Mongabay analysis shows.

According to the commission’s Staff Working Document, research designed to support proposed regulations, leather can be associated with up to 390 square kilometers (149 square miles) of deforestation per year. That area is roughly twice the size of the city of Pisa, in the heart of Italy’s leather production and trade.

This means that bovine hides could account for up to 17% of the total 2,280 km2 (880 mi2) deforestation risk linked to all commodities covered by the new regulation. Although the evidence is part of the documentation, the commission decided to ignore it and balance out “quantitative and qualitative considerations,” it said in the document.

The commission’s Staff Working Document was published May 4, alongside a delegated act, as part of a proposed simplification package Brussels is putting forward ahead of the EUDR being enacted at the end of the year. After the public consultation, the commission could formally adopt the draft delegated act. Then the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union generally have two months to object. If they don’t, the changes will automatically be enacted.

In its working documentation, the commission argues that leather should be excluded because of its “lower economic value.” It also says leather’s complex, fragmented supply chain makes it difficult for companies to trace and obtain the information required under the EUDR. And it warns that keeping leather in the regulations could create “unbalanced” obligations between EU producers and importers of finished goods, and extending the rules would be too burdensome and impractical.

But in doing its calculations for the Staff Working Document, officials assessed two different scenarios: treating leather as a low-value byproduct of the beef industry, or as a coproduct in the cattle supply chain. Depending on the approach, the environmental benefits of including leather in the EUDR were estimated at 979 million to 1.96 billion euros ($1.1 billion to $2.28 billion) per year.

In either case, compliance costs were projected to be far lower — around 16.7 million euros ($19.4 million) annually, according to the commission’s own estimates.

The European Commission did not respond to Mongabay’s questions in time for publication of this story.

The move follows intense lobbying by the leather industry. Trade associations representing the sector — Italian tanneries union UNIC, and the Confederation of National Associations of Tanners and Dressers of the European Community (COTANCE) — have held at least 22 meetings with EU lawmakers and officials since 2021. More than a third of them took place in the past year as the deforestation regulation neared implementation, Mongabay reported.

Charlotte Izard, a parliamentary assistant to Marie Toussaint, a member of the European Parliament (MEP) from the French Greens and European Free Alliance, said the issue about leather has never been raised before as a crucial point during the trilogue negotiations — when the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission meet to debate legislation. “We knew that Italy was complaining, but the country was the only Member State to do so as far as we know.

“We’re angry,” Izard added. “The commission should explain this. We must ask why it decided to withdraw this co-product [from the list of commodities], and what political pressure they have received to do so.”

Critics warn that removing leather from the EUDR’s oversight would leave a gap in the regulation, allowing a high-value product from the cattle chain to keep flowing into EU markets without the same scrutiny applied to beef.

It’s clear that the European Commission acknowledges the environmental impact of leather, but it has also considered that companies in the sector “would not be economically incentivized to comply,” as the “economic costs would be too high,” said Klervi Le Guenic, campaign officer for forests at French nonprofit Canopée.

“[If] you are looking for scientific answers to this decision, I don’t think there are any,” Le Guenic added.

Science as a shield

In early April, Luis Planas Herrera, representing Jessika Roswall, the European environment commissioner, said the executive’s priority is an “objective assessment” that is “science-driven,” according to a Politico report.

The same framing has been widely promoted by the leather sector in Brussels, from public events promoting the industry’s sustainability to formal communications. Earlier this month, trade association COTANCE described its position as grounded in “academic intelligence” and “scientific evidence.”

In feedback submitted to the European Commission on the proposed EUDR changes, COTANCE reiterated that bovine hides should be treated differently because they are “just a by-product” of beef production and therefore not a driver of deforestation, citing “scientific studies.”

The industry has consistently made this argument. Last year, several tannery associations represented by the International Council of Tanners wrote a letter to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, pointing out the socioeconomic impacts of including the commodity in the scope of the EUDR and arguing that leather is not a direct driver of deforestation, according to “technical analysis.”

The position has also found political backing. In early April, Italian MEP Dario Nardella, of the Socialists and Democrats group, supported the industry’s stance, calling leather vital for jobs and communities in the Tuscany region of Italy and describing it as a circular sector that “transforms waste” into a durable material rather than driving deforestation.

Industry evidence under scrutiny

In all these instances, the claimed scientific basis circulating widely in the debates rests heavily on a single industry-funded report produced by Italy’s Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, in Pisa.

Unlike typical academic work, the Sant’Anna study was published in 2024 directly by the leather trade associations rather than in a scientific, academic or peer-reviewed journal. Titled “Socio-economic and environmental analysis of the effects of Regulation 2023/1115/EU on the European leather sector,” the paper does not appear in scientific citation indexes, which would indicate whether other scholars have cited the work. The lead author, Fabio Iraldo, did not respond to questions for this story.

Peer review is widely considered one of the essential aspects of establishing the credibility and reliability of scientific research, forming one of the core principles promoted by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a nonprofit that supports integrity in scholarly publishing. The Sant’Anna report does not appear to have entered that process.

Kieron Flanagan, a professor of science and technology policy at the University of Manchester in the U.K., said peer review is not the only indicator of whether research should be trusted, since it’s not a perfect method because it’s subject to flaws. He added, however, that single studies are not supposed to be decisive in science.

The trade association COTANCE, which has promoted the Sant’Anna study multiple times, did not respond to inquiries for this story.

Flanagan said he believes the danger in Brussels is pretending that a decision like this can be settled by science alone.

He said regulators “cannot wait 10, 20 years for a scientific consensus to emerge.” Instead, they should make tentative decisions that can adapt as the evidence evolves — and be transparent that there are “complex social, environmental, economic and political trade-offs to be made,” not “purely scientific” verdicts.

“There’s this tendency of politicians to say: ‘Oh, we were acting on scientific advice.’ It’s a way of deflecting responsibility, this is essentially a political choice,” he said.

What scientists informing the European Commission say

Peer-reviewed research paints a starkly different picture of cattle and leather’s role in forest loss.

A recent study in the journal Nature Food found that cattle production for meat and leather was the single largest driver of commodity-driven deforestation worldwide between 2001 and 2022. The paper, authored by Chandrakant Singh and Martin Persson at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, estimated that cattle ranching accounted for 42% of global commodity-driven forest clearance.

The European Commission has relied on research by both authors in assessments linked to the EUDR. The studies included in the commission’s Staff Working Document are considered robust by policymaking experts and other scholars. They have been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals and cited dozens of times as reference.

Separately, a study published in 2024 on leather imports into the EU estimated the industry’s hunger for hides is responsible for up to 31,000 hectares (nearly 77,000 acres) of lost forest annually.

Old playbook, new sector

Some observers see echoes of earlier industry strategies, such as Big Oil, in the leather lobbying efforts.

In the 1970s, internal documents show that Exxon scientists modelled the climate risks of fossil fuels even as company-backed messaging cast doubt on those findings — a pattern documented in a 2023 study in the journal Science. Tobacco firms used similar tactics to muddy the evidence linking smoking to cancer.

“It’s quite reminiscent of the way the fossil fuel industry has historically tried to sabotage the development of renewable energy — commissioning poor‑quality studies to back talking points and undermine laws that would clean up supply chains,” said Luciana Téllez Chávez, a senior researcher and campaigner at the nonprofit Human Rights Watch.

“All the scientific evidence leads to the fact that leather has an impact on deforestation,” said Catarina Vieira, a Dutch MEP who supports EUDR implementation. “At the beginning, leather was included in the regulation because of this, so it would be incoherent to remove it.” Vieira started a social media campaign last week to encourage European citizens to press the commission to change its stance. “This exemption, if it is acted on, sends a bad signal. Someone has to lobby to make it come back. NGOs already do it, but citizens can do it too,” she added.

Citations:

Singh, C., & Persson, U. M. (2026). Global patterns of commodity-driven deforestation and associated carbon emissions. Nature Food, 7(2), 138-151. doi:10.1038/s43016-026-01305-4

Laroche, P. C., Gómez-Suárez, M., Persson, U. M., Pendrill, F., Schwarzmueller, F., Schulp, C. J., & Kastner, T. (2024). Accounting for trade in derived products when estimating European Union’s role in driving deforestation. Ecological Economics, 224, 108288. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108288

Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., & Oreskes, N. (2023). Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections. Science, 379(6628). doi:10.1126/science.abk0063

Banner image: Plenary session of European Parliament, March 2026 in Brussels, Belgium. © European Union 2026 – Source: EP. CC-BY-4.0

• Aquaculture and other factors like climate change pose a potentially mortal threat to wild Atlantic salmon, so a new bill in the Icelandic parliament should be rejected, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard argues in a new op-ed.

• More than 65% of Icelanders polled agree with him in opposing open-net salmon farming, which the bill would allow to expand despite the fact that it employs a small fraction of those working in the tourism sector, and which relies heavily on the nation’s natural beauty and healthy wildlife populations.

• “Icelandic ministers can listen to reason and citizens and set an example of responsibility, rather than giving in to the worldwide aquaculture industry,” Chouinard writes.

• This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

In a little more than 50 years, the population of wild North Atlantic salmon has plummeted by 75%. Today, it is estimated that fewer than 60,000 exist in and around Iceland. Unless we do something soon, we may be condemning what Icelandic environmentalist and wild fish advocate Orri Vigfússon has called the “king of fish” to extinction.

Warmer waters caused by climate change already pose a potential mortal threat to wild salmon (Salmo salar). If Iceland’s legislature passes the latest draft of its aquaculture bill and opens the country to more salmon farms, the fish will be headed toward disappearance even faster.

I’ve visited Iceland regularly since 1960 and have personally seen the decline of wild salmon in the rivers. Expanding open net-pen fish farming in Iceland would compound an already critical problem and open the country to disaster, both for wild fish and the environment.

It is no secret that these farms are ecological scourges, even when they function as designed. But when they fail, the effects are catastrophic.

If you’ve never seen an open net-pen salmon farm before, picture an array of massive floating cylindrical cages that run 30-50 meters (about 100-160 feet) down from the surface of the water. There may be 16 pens on a farm, each holding 100,000 salmon or more.

Feeding such huge numbers of carnivorous fish takes millions of pounds of food made with fishmeal and oil sourced from wild populations of other fish. We are decimating populations of sardines, herring and others to feed farmed salmon in pens that are polluting waters all over the world with heavy metals, microplastics, pesticides, antibiotics and waste.

Then there’s the issue of salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis).

These tiny crustaceans feed on salmon and are a normal part of life in the ocean. The issue comes from when a pen full of fish turns into a feeding frenzy for lice. Infestations cause widespread injuries, and if left untreated, massive die-offs. Outbreaks of lice in farms also affect wild salmon up to 60 kilometers (37 miles) away. Young fish are particularly vulnerable and can be weakened by the parasites or killed outright.

The treatments aren’t much better. Getting rid of sea lice usually involves pumping toxic chemicals into the water that kill the lice or inhibit molting, and these chemicals can also affect lobsters, crabs or other crustaceans living downstream.

In other words, we are annihilating stocks of wild fish (that humans can eat), killing crustaceans, contributing to antibiotic resistance, and polluting our waters, all to keep cheap salmon on menus and in grocery stores around the world.

And when those fish escape, all hell breaks loose.

In 2017, tens of thousands of farmed fish escaped into the wild when multiple cages in a salmon farm in Washington state in the U.S. broke apart. When these events happen, the sheer number of escaped salmon can overwhelm their wild counterparts in the hunt for food and habitat.

If the farmed salmon, which are bred to be docile and fatten up as quickly as possible, mix into wild populations and breed, it effectively undoes generations’ worth of evolution by adding those blunted genes into the highly evolved wild pool. The Washington farm collapse was so bad that in the aftermath, the state passed a law to phase out open net-pen salmon farming altogether.

A similar event happened in Iceland in 2023, but the latest version of the aquaculture bill the Icelandic parliament is considering does little to prevent such a disaster from happening again. If anything, it makes it more likely.

This bill may seem like a local issue on the surface, but pollution and harm from these farms flows into other ecosystems. Opposing aquaculture farms, which 65% of Icelanders do, is a rejection of nature-destroying development and clear support for protecting a keystone species: wild salmon.

It makes financial sense, too.

More than 34,000 people are employed in the tourism industry in Iceland, which brings in more than $7 billion that stays within the country and communities. Compare that with the largely Norwegian-owned aquaculture industry, which employs just hundreds and exports both the fish and revenue that net-pen fish farms generate.

Patagonia, the company I founded in 1973, has supported efforts to protect the planet and life on it for decades. You could say the first grant we ever issued was to save wild fish. Since then, we’ve produced media projects like Laxaþjóð | A Salmon Nation about the threats open net-pen fish farms pose to Iceland and built meaningful partnerships with wild fish advocacy groups like the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, WildFish and the Icelandic Wildlife Fund.

In 2024, I said the efforts against salmon farms were like a war, but I believed we could win. I still believe that.

Icelandic ministers can listen to reason and citizens and set an example of responsibility, rather than giving in to the worldwide aquaculture industry, which also faces a worrying list of accusations.

Iceland can stand up for nature and protect what makes the country truly special.

Yvon Chouinard is the founder of clothing brand Patagonia.

Banner image: Still image from the film “A Salmon Nation” courtesy of Patagonia Films.

• In western Uganda, especially in districts bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo, human-bat interactions are frequent and can increase viral spillover risk, experts say.

• The Bundibugyo ebolavirus, a genetically distinct Ebola strain first identified in Uganda’s Bundibugyo district in 2007-2008, is driving the current outbreak.

• Experts warn that current Ebola vaccines and treatments, largely developed for the Zaire strain of ebolavirus, may offer limited protection against the Bundibugyo strain, underscoring major preparedness gaps.

• Field research highlights how humans may be exposed to these viruses including through hunting and consumption of bats in some communities, raising concerns about potential transmission of zoonotic pathogens.

KAMPALA — In the hills and trading centers of western Uganda, bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo, authorities are racing to limit the spread of Bundibugyo ebolavirus, a rare species of Ebola for which there is currently no vaccine or cure.

The number of suspected cases in the DRC is fast approaching 1,000, with Uganda reporting seven cases, as of May 25. The first cluster of cases of the ongoing outbreak was detected in early May in Ituri province in the DRC, which shares a border with Uganda. The close community and economic ties between people residing on both sides of the border has complicated efforts to contain the outbreak, with Uganda taking measures to stem the flow of people.

The Ebola virus driving the current outbreak is named for Uganda’s Bundibugyo district, where it was first detected almost two decades ago. (International health bodies including the World Health Organizationhave since moved away from naming disease-causing pathogens after places, citing stigmatization.)

Most Ebola outbreaks to date have been caused by the Zaire ebolavirus, which also drove the 2014-2016 epidemic centered on West Africa. The Bundibugyo ebolavirus has been linked to two outbreaks in the past. The second outbreak emerged in the DRC in 2012 remained limited to the country, before subsiding later that year.

This time may be different, since cases have emerged in Uganda, and the risk of regional spread is high. On May 23, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) identified 10 other African countries at risk from this Ebola outbreak: Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia.

Bats are considered the most likely reservoir species for Ebola, including the Bundibugyo ebolavirus (Orthoebolavirus bundibugyoense), which is one of six species of the Ebola virus known to scientists.

In the border districts of western Uganda, bats are part of everyday life. They hang from fruit trees in household compounds, roost in ceilings above family homes, and fly through villages at dusk largely unnoticed.

Human interaction with bats is not associated with health risks among many residents, but scientists say these interactions can create conditions for spillover into human communities.

“The borders between Uganda and eastern DRC are extremely porous. People move freely, and diseases can move just as easily,” said James Natweta Baguma, a researcher affiliated with Makerere University School of Public Health in Kampala, the capital.

The Bundibugyo ebolavirus was first identified during an outbreak in Bundibugyo district in Uganda between 2007 and 2008. According to Pontiano Kaleebu, director of the Uganda Virus Research Institute, when the virus samples from the 2007 and 2008 outbreak were tested, the virus was identified as Ebola, but found to be genetically different from the Zaire and Sudan strains.

“It belongs to the same filovirus family, but it is slightly different,” Kaleebu said. “The disease presentation is largely the same, including the clinical picture and incubation period, but diagnostics require some differences because of genetic variation.”

Scientists say those genetic differences directly affect how outbreaks are diagnosed, treated and controlled.

Boghuma Titanji, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Disease at Emory University School of Medicine in the U.S., said this variant differs genetically from the Zaire ebolavirus by roughly 32%.

“It’s most closely related to the Ebola virus isolated from Côte d’Ivoire, but it still diverges significantly from that species,” Titanji said.

That divergence is especially important because most existing Ebola vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments were developed specifically for Zaire ebolavirus.

“Vaccines for Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan, which target the virus envelope glycoprotein, are unlikely to be effective [this time] because this protein target is so different for Bundibugyo ebolavirus,” Titanji said. “The same goes for monoclonal antibodies developed for treatment of individuals with Zaire virus.”

The viral glycoprotein is central to how vaccines and antibody therapies recognize and neutralize the virus. But because Bundibugyo’s glycoprotein differs substantially from the Zaire strain, scientists still do not know whether current vaccines would offer meaningful protection.

“We do not know whether the immune response generated by Zaire virus vaccines will be sufficiently cross-reactive to offer meaningful protection against Bundibugyo ebolavirus,” Titanji said.

She noted that answering this question would require studies during an active outbreak, a process often constrained by emergency priorities such as contact tracing, containment, and treatment setup.

Kaleebu said the Bundibugyo strain can still be identified rapidly once samples reach laboratories, often within four hours using appropriate diagnostic tools.

“If you have the right test, you can detect it like any other Ebola virus,” he said.

However, scientists warn that preparedness gaps surrounding Bundibugyo ebolavirus have existed for years.

“We have known about the existence of this virus and its ability to cause outbreaks for almost two decades,” Titanji said. “Yet market incentives did not exist for this to translate into vaccines and therapeutics.”

She added that reductions in international health funding have further strained surveillance systems in parts of Africa that rely heavily on external support for outbreak logistics and operations.

Scientists still do not fully understand where Ebola viruses persist in nature. Although bats are widely considered the most likely reservoirs, researchers caution that the precise way it survives and circulates in nature — including its natural host, how it moves between animals, and how it is transmitted to humans — remains unclear.

“The biggest unknown is where these viruses hide and in which animals,” Kaleebu said. “Many people say bats, but there is still no conclusive proof.”

“There are more than 1,000 bat species globally, and several are common in western Uganda,” said Baguma, the public health researcher.

Even so, field observations in western Uganda show frequent and sustained human contact with bats.

“In Bundibugyo, bats are everywhere — in people’s houses, compounds, and trees,” Baguma said. “For many communities, living closely with bats is considered normal.”

The researchers also found that bats are a part of the local diet. “People hunt and eat bats because they are an accessible source of protein,” Baguma said. “For many households, it is easier to catch bats than to buy beef or goat meat.”

He said some members of the Indigenous Batwa community maintain forest-based hunting and food practices reflecting long-standing cultural and livelihood ties to the forest. There is a painful legacy of government efforts to resettle communities, sometimes forcibly, which has eroded the trust required to work with forest-dependent peoples.

“Some still go into forest areas to hunt bats, monkeys, and other wildlife,” Baguma said.

Scientists say these interactions create multiple pathways for potential spillover, including direct handling of bats, consumption of bat meat, contact with bat saliva on fruit, and bats roosting inside homes.

Communities in the region distinguish between larger fruit bats, often seen feeding in trees and more commonly eaten, and smaller insect-eating bats, which roost in ceilings and are usually avoided due to smell and droppings.

Beyond daily exposure, cultural beliefs also shape risk. “Some people believe eating bat meat improves sexual performance or brings wealth,” Baguma said. “Others believe that having bats in the house is a sign of prosperity.”

At the same time, some beliefs discourage contact, including the view that pregnant women should avoid bat meat. “These beliefs work both ways,” Baguma said. “Some increase risk, while others may reduce interaction.”

Public health experts say one of the biggest challenges is perception. Many residents do not believe bats pose danger because they have lived alongside them for generations without visible illness.

“Some people tell you, ‘If bats carried diseases, we would already be dead,’” Baguma said.

That perception worries scientists, particularly as Ebola outbreaks continue across the region. Uganda last experienced a major Sudan Ebola outbreak in 2022, while the DRC continues to report periodic flare-ups.

According to researchers, outbreak response often begins only after infections are confirmed, while long-term prevention in high-risk communities remains inconsistent.

Baguma said that in some high-risk areas, prevention measures are not consistently observed, describing the situation as “almost living on God’s grace,” and noting that the observed behaviors do not reflect strong efforts to prevent outbreaks.

For Titanji, Bundibugyo ebolavirus underscores broader gaps in preparedness that have persisted since its discovery nearly two decades ago.

“A truly species-specific preparedness strategy would require vaccines and therapeutics targeted to the known Ebola viruses,” she said.

She warned that emerging pathogens continue to expose a structural weakness in global health systems.

“We will always be caught short-handed,” Titanji said, “unless there is greater investment in early detection systems capable of identifying these threats before they grow.”

For now, scientists say prevention remains the strongest defense: rapid detection, community awareness, reduced wildlife contact, and stronger surveillance in regions where humans and wildlife continue to interact closely.

“We still need stronger public education through radio, television, and community outreach,” Baguma said. “People need to understand that these risks are real before the next outbreak begins.”

Banner image: The nonprofit ASD Monde is providing handwashing kits to schools in Nyiragongo territory, North Kivu province, in the eastern DRC. Image courtesy of ASD Monde.

Creating opportunities for early- and mid-career environmental journalists to gain experience reporting critical ocean issues and solutions in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia is both a global hotspot for marine biodiversity and the world’s leading seafood consumer per person. This resilient region is facing mounting pressures from climate change and marine pollution on top of decades of overfishing and harmful fishing practices like bottom trawling. With the effects of ocean degradation becoming more apparent, high-quality environmental journalism is more important than ever, but journalists in the region often lack resources and opportunity to cover this topic. In response, Mongabay has established the Southeast Asia Ocean Reporting Fellowship. It will provide opportunities for early- and mid-career journalists from coastal countries in Southeast Asia to report on critical ocean challenges and their solutions in the region, gaining valuable training, experience and credibility that will help them advance their careers in journalism and communications. Ultimately, we aim for fellows to join our growing global network as regular Mongabay contributors.

The fellowship

The Southeast Asia Ocean Reporting Fellowship extends Mongabay’s Y. Eva Tan Conservation Reporting Fellowship to focus on a specific theme and region. This fellowship has helped bolster the capacity of environmental journalists in a field where such experience can be hard to acquire. Mongabay fellows and interns have gone on to establish careers as professional journalists, communications professionals at scientific institutions and conservation NGOs, and at Mongabay itself.

In 2026, the Southeast Asia Ocean Reporting Fellowship Program will support up to five fellows from the region in our Global Bureau. (Note that Mongabay Indonesia hosts a fellowship program in Bahasa Indonesia; refer to that webpage for latest opportunities.)

Fellows will gain valuable experience working with editors at our international news outlet to create a portfolio of original publications that should help them advance their careers in journalism. Fellows will develop their ocean reporting skills, from generating story ideas, pitching, finding and interviewing sources, news writing, and investigative techniques, to current issues in journalism ethics, safety and security. They will also learn about a range of specific topics pertaining to oceans in Southeast Asia such as fisheries, marine pollution, climate change, implementation of global biodiversity targets, protected and conserved areas and community-led conservation. In addition to hands-on editorial support from Mongabay staff through all stages of the publication process, the fellows will also learn from each other and build their peer support and professional networks for future job opportunities.

Logistics

The Southeast Asia Ocean Reporting Fellowship is expected to run from September 1, 2026, to February 28, 2027. We will accept applications for this cohort from May 14 to June 25 (23:59 UTC).

Each fellow will receive $500 USD per month for the duration of the six-month fellowship, or $3,000 USD in total. During that time, fellows will work directly with the fellowship editors to produce stories. They will have opportunities to collaborate with several Mongabay editors, particularly those in Southeast Asia and the Oceans Desk.

Throughout the fellowship, each fellow is expected to commit to 10 hours per week and to produce a total of four to six stories in English to be published on Mongabay’s website.

Work is remote — Mongabay does not have an office.

Eligibility

• As this fellowship is run in English, applicants must be able to report, write and communicate at a high level of English.

• Applicants must be from and based in a coastal Southeast Asian country, with a particular focus on Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. High-income countries in Southeast Asia (Singapore and Brunei) are not eligible.

• Applicants must be early- or mid-career environmental journalists with at least two years of reporting and writing experience. We especially welcome applicants with identities and backgrounds that are under-represented in journalism in the region.

• Applicants must be able to work remotely and commit to 10 hours per week.

• There is no formal educational requirement to apply for the program. The fellowship is not linked to any university.

• All application materials must be submitted in English.

• Applicants must write their application materials themselves. Applications prepared with generative AI will be disqualified.

• All materials must adhere to the guidelines below and on the application form; applications that do not follow the guidelines will be disqualified.

Desired Experience & Qualifications / Judging Criteria

• At least two years of experience with reporting and writing news articles;

• Demonstrated interest in ocean issues and in environmental journalism as a career;

• Talent in writing and ability to identify what information is newsworthy;

• Proven reporting, writing and communication skills in English;

• Capacity to fulfill all of the fellowship requirements and reporting plans.

Application Requirements

On the application form, you will be asked to fill out basic contact information, answer a few questions about your interest, and upload the following documents:

• Resume (2 pages maximum)

• Cover letter(1 page maximum) introducing yourself and answering the following:

  • How does environmental journalism fit into your career goals?

  • Why should Mongabay select you for this specific fellowship?

• Two original English-language writing samples in a journalistic style that reflects your best work and skills. At least one must be a published clip and preferably at least one is related to ocean conservation or other ocean-related issues. AI-generated written samples will be disqualified.

Selection Process

Selections will be made by an internal Mongabay team, and applicants will receive a notification regarding the status of their application at least three weeks prior to the start of the cohort. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so please submit yours as early as possible. For inquiries or if you have technical difficulties with the application form, please contact Holly Jonas at holly@mongabay.com.

Apply here!

• Voters in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia will soon choose presidents whose policies could shape the future of roughly 82% of the Amazon rainforest.

• Environmental issues have been largely absent from recent presidential debates, even as droughts, floods, deforestation, illegal mining, and organized crime increasingly threaten public well-being and national economies.

• Protecting the Amazon should be treated as an economic, social, and public health priority, argues Peruvian American ecologist Enrique Ortiz, because the forest helps sustain water supplies, food production, energy systems, and climate stability across South America.

• This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

In the coming months, voters in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia will elect new presidents. Together, these three countries contain roughly 82% of the Amazon rainforest, making their elections consequential far beyond national borders. The future of the world’s largest tropical forest — and, by extension, global climate stability — will depend in large measure on the choices their citizens make at the ballot box. More than 35 million people living in the Amazon region of these countries also depend directly on those outcomes.

Brazil, home to about 62% of the Amazon, offers a stark example of how presidential policies can shape the fate of the forest. The country has experienced dramatic swings in deforestation over the past two decades. While commodity prices, global markets, climate conditions, and geopolitics all play a role, government policy has often been the decisive factor. In 2004, for example, Brazil lost more than 10 million acres of Amazon forest. By 2012, stronger environmental measures had gradually reduced that loss to less than one-sixth of that level. Those efforts relied not only on stricter enforcement, but also on cooperation with agricultural and business sectors long associated with deforestation. More recent data suggest Brazil’s renewed environmental policies have again reduced forest loss by more than 30% from the previous year.

Peru and Colombia reveal similar links between political leadership and environmental outcomes. In Peru, ongoing political turmoil and institutional instability have coincided with record levels of Amazon deforestation over the past two years. In Colombia, recent declines in deforestation remain fragile, influenced as much by the actions of armed criminal groups and narcotrafficking networks as by state policies toward them. Across all three countries, national decisions regarding agribusiness, cattle ranching, infrastructure expansion, and extractive industries have had profound impacts on the Amazon. The same is true for weak enforcement against illegal gold mining, logging, wildlife trafficking, and the criminal economies increasingly intertwined with them.

Yet despite the stakes, the environment has remained largely absent from recent presidential debates and policy statements. This omission is difficult to justify as climate-related disasters — severe droughts, catastrophic floods, and extreme weather — increasingly damage national economies and threaten public well-being. The Amazon is not simply a remote wilderness full of a rich biological diversity; it is a pillar of regional prosperity. Its forests regulate rainfall, stabilize water supplies, and sustain agricultural productivity across South America. In Brazil alone, where roughly 70 to 90% of soy production depends on rainfall rather than irrigation, the connection between forest health and economic stability is unmistakable.

The integrity of the Amazon is therefore not only an environmental issue, but also an economic, social, and public health imperative for these three countries. The growing threats to food and energy security need to be tackled alongside environmental concerns. Future presidents must commit to concrete policies that curb land grabbing, illegal mining, and organized environmental crime. They must balance economic development and public safety with forest conservation, strengthen protections for Indigenous and local communities defending their territories, and safeguard the water and climate systems on which both rural and urban populations depend. The energy systems in cities like São Paulo, Bogotá and Lima, although not located in the Amazon watershed, depend largely on the services the Amazon rainforest supplies.

Ultimately, the responsibility lies with voters in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. Democratic elections offer citizens the opportunity to demand leaders with credible plans for protecting both people and nature. The Amazon’s future — and part of the planet’s future — may depend on it.

Banner image: Emergent tree in the Amazon rainforest. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler

• A stretch of high-altitude terrain in central Kyrgyzstan has been officially designated as the Ak Ilbirs ecological corridor, connecting protected areas to give snow leopards and other wildlife room to move as climate change alters their habitat.

• Unlike typical protected areas, the corridor allows herding, forestry and other land uses to continue under a monitoring system that tracks compliance with grazing rules and other requirements.

• Designed using climate models projected through 2070, the corridor captures more than 60% of suitable habitat for snow leopards, argali sheep, Asiatic ibex and gray wolves.

• To ease pressure on pastures, local NGOs are training herders in alternative livelihoods, such as beekeeping and fruit and vegetable cultivation, while volunteer rangers monitor wildlife and watch for illegal activity.

• This article was originally written by Liz Kimbrough appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

Snow leopards haunt the rocky ridgelines of Central Asia, vanishing into terrain so rugged that researchers rarely catch more than a brief glimpse on camera traps. Locals call them “ghosts of the mountains.”

Their elusive nature, paired with the remote landscapes the cats inhabit, make them notoriously difficult to count. An estimated 3,500 to 7,500 snow leopards (Panthera uncia) remain across 12 countries. The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, lists the species as vulnerable to extinction. Kyrgyzstan, where the snow leopard is a national symbol, is thought to be home to around 300.

Now, a stretch of high-altitude terrain in central Kyrgyzstan has been stitched into an ecological corridor linking several of the country’s protected areas. The Ak Ilbirs corridor covers roughly 800,000 hectares (nearly 2 million acres) of pastureland, forest and other ecosystems across 14 rural municipalities. Ak ilbirs translates to “white leopard” in Kyrgyz.

Set up in 2025, it’s the first corridor in the region designed with the future climate in mind, project officials say. People still live, herd and work inside it, and the rules are built around them as much as around the wildlife.

“Projects like this are good for hope, because you can see changes at the policy level and changes in people’s mindsets on the ground,” Maarten Hofman, associate program management officer at the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), told Mongabay in a video call. “You can see people from many backgrounds coming together and working in one direction.”

The corridor was formalized by the Central Asian Mammals and Climate Adaptation project, or CAMCA, a multiyear initiative led by UNEP that brought together Kyrgyz government agencies, scientists from Humboldt University of Berlin, and two local conservation groups: CAMP Alatoo and the Ilbirs Foundation.

Michele Bowe, a member of the IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas who advised on the project, said it stands out in a region where this kind of approach is still new. “What really sets this corridor apart, and makes it unique in Central Asia, is the close involvement of local communities, facilitated by CAMP Alatoo and the Ilbirs Foundation, in its development.”

A species under pressure

Snow leopards are a sign of a healthy mountain ecosystem. As top predators, they depend on thriving prey populations, mainly wild ungulates like argali sheep and Asiatic ibex, and the habitat that sustains them sustains everything else.

But Central Asia’s high-altitude habitats are facing pressure. Glaciers that feed mountain springs are shrinking. Rainfall is less predictable. Pasture quality is declining, and as it degrades and springs dry up, herders push their livestock higher into the mountains, competing with wild prey for forage. When wild prey runs short, snow leopards turn to hunting domestic animals, leading to retaliatory killings by herders.

“The degradation of high-mountain pastures will inevitably lead to a decline in biodiversity and, ultimately, affect the well-being of snow leopards,” Zharkyn Esenalieva of the Ilbirs Foundation told Mongabay in an email.

Herders are not the enemy of snow leopards, Hofman said, but climate change and overgrazing are increasing the risk of conflict.

Poaching is also a threat. Poachers hunt snow leopards for their pelts, bones and other body parts, which are smuggled for use in traditional Chinese medicine or for decorations. In 2024, Kyrgyzstan raised the fine for killing a snow leopard to 2 million som (roughly $23,000) as a deterrent.

Designing a corridor with climate in mind

To address these threats, scientists at Humboldt University of Berlin mapped where four target species — snow leopards, argali sheep (Ovis ammon), Asiatic ibex (Capra sibirica) and gray wolves (Canis lupus) — currently roam.

They used camera-trap images and wildlife sightings from Kyrgyzstan’s national biodiversity monitoring database, combined with environmental factors like elevation, slope, vegetation cover, and proximity to roads and settlements. They also ran climate models for 2040 and 2070 using data from the CHELSAglobal climate data set, and held workshops with local partners to ground-truth the results.

“We applied a combination of expert local knowledge, climate predictions and technical expertise to build the narratives for the future scenarios,” Julieta Decarre, the project’s lead modeler at Humboldt, told Mongabay in an email.

Under middle and higher carbon emissions scenarios, more than 60% of suitable habitat for these species falls within the corridor, she said. That means the corridor is designed not only to protect wildlife today but to keep working as temperatures, rainfall and weather extremes shift over the coming decades.

Only a year has passed since the corridor was established, and no dedicated studies have yet documented snow leopards moving between the protected areas, but a dedicated corridor monitoring program is underway.

“Observations by shepherds have already indicated that wildlife presence in the corridor areas is higher than outside, and with time, we will hopefully be able to confirm movement through direct wildlife monitoring with camera traps and other methods,” Hofman said.

A new kind of protected area

The Ak Ilbirs corridor carries official protected area status, but it functions differently from most. Many protected areas keep people out; the corridor does not.

“The ecological corridor in Kyrgyzstan is based on a regulatory rather than a restrictive approach,” CAMP Alatoo director Murat Zhumashev and his colleague Salamat Zhumabaeva told Mongabay in an email. “It builds on existing environmental legislation, but unlike strictly protected areas, it does not involve land withdrawal or the introduction of strict prohibitions.”

Instead, decisions about grazing, forestry, tourism, mining and roads inside the corridor must account for the wildlife it was built to protect. Roughly a quarter of pasture areas are set aside as no-grazing zones, and seasonal grazing bans are in place during key periods, including December through January and March through April. Grazing rules require leaving around 40% of vegetation cover as a food base for wild animals. Herders are also asked to keep their dogs under control to avoid disturbing wildlife.

Herding has shaped these landscapes for generations, but today’s grazing pressure can exceed the land’s capacity to absorb it. Seasonal closures and a monitoring program that helps communities track grazing pressure, Bowe said, “will hopefully help to ensure that land management within the corridor is sustainable.”

Rather than banning grazing outright, the corridor is monitored. CAMP Alatoo worked with local governments and herders to develop a system that tracks compliance with grazing rules, using field observations, GPS and data collected directly from pasture users.

In a 2025 test run across more than 78,000 hectares (about 193,000 acres) in eastern Kyrgyzstan, rules were followed in 92.5% of cases, even in areas where herders and livestock owners had limited awareness of the corridor’s requirements.

Protecting livelihoods alongside wildlife

Designing the corridor was the easier part. Convincing the people who graze livestock inside it to cooperate took longer.

At the outset, herding communities responded with caution, Hofman said. Many feared the corridor would function like a strictly protected area, bringing bans on the land they depended on. CAMP Alatoo and local authorities responded with extensive consultations and developed pasture-use plans jointly with herders rather than imposing them from above.

Gradually, the dynamic shifted. “This is partly because communities themselves are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, such as droughts, changing precipitation patterns and declining pasture productivity, which has led to a greater understanding of the need to balance livestock grazing with the sustainability of natural resources,” Zhumashev and Zhumabaeva told Mongabay.

“These communities have been working for thousands of years with livestock, and they are now, because of climate change and other factors, seeing themselves forced to change their ways,” Hofman said. “You need people who are open for these changes. We have seen that people are willing and can do this, can take this risk.”

Some herders appear to be adjusting. Those who graze their animals inside the corridor have reported seeing more wildlife within its boundaries than outside, Decarre said, a sign that coexistence is taking hold.

The shift asks a great deal of communities whose livelihoods have been built around livestock for generations. To ease the transition, the CAMCA project has trained residents in beekeeping, orchard cultivation, greenhouse vegetable growing, and ecotourism.

A survey of more than 150 households found that families involved in conservation had more diversified incomes and depended less on livestock than those sticking with traditional herding. Short-term economic gains were modest, but families reported a broader financial cushion and less pressure to keep expanding their herds.

Patrols and perseverance

The corridor is patrolled by volunteer rangers organized into community-based groups. They install camera traps, monitor pasture conditions, track wildlife movements, and watch for illegal activity.

“Thanks to their strong knowledge of the landscape and close ties to local communities, they help promote and support conservation practices on the ground,” Zhumabaeva said.

The Kyrgyz government has not been able to fund the patrols but has granted rangers the authority to manage the corridor and arrest poachers, according to UNEP. Training and equipment have come through the CAMCA project. Finding steady funding and integrating rangers into government programs are current priorities for CAMCA and its partners.

“People’s mindsets are changing. They’re understanding the importance of protecting their environment,” Baatyrbek Akmatov, one of the rangers who patrols Baiboosun Community Reserve in northern Kyrgyzstan, told UNEP.

The Ilbirs Foundation has proposed extending the corridor northeast toward Kazakhstan and southwest toward Kyrgyzstan’s At-Bashy range, eventually providing continuous habitat from Kazakhstan to China, but says realizing that vision will depend on funding and political will.

For now, the scientific groundwork is in place, and snow leopards are still moving through a landscape where people have agreed to leave them room.

Bowe said the model could carry lessons beyond Kyrgyzstan. She credited the country for changing its legislation to recognize ecological corridors within its protected area system, calling it a recognition that “ecosystems can be conserved without excluding access to natural resources for the people who rely on them for their livelihoods.”

Other Central Asian countries are completing similar legislative reviews, she said. “There is much to be learned from the Ak Ilbirs model. Sometimes strength is found in flexibility and not necessarily in rigidity.”

Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.

Banner image: A snow leopard (Panthera uncia) caught on camera trap by Ilbirs Foundation.

• In Malaysia’s Penang state, conservationists and residents are collaborating to reduce conflict between humans and endangered dusky langurs displaced by urban development and habitat loss.

• The Langur Project Penang built a canopy bridge to help langurs safely cross a busy road and access more habitat, reducing time spent in residential areas and lowering complaints from residents.

• Malaysia’s wildlife agency receives thousands of wildlife complaints annually, and often responds with trapping, relocation or culling; but conservationists argue education and coexistence measures can be more sustainable responses to increasing human-wildlife encounters.

• The project’s success has depended heavily on local support and citizen scientists, with some residents gradually shifting from frustration toward compassion and acceptance of living alongside wildlife.

• This article was originally written by Philip Jacobson and Isabelle Leong appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

TANJUNG BUNGAH, Malaysia — The 50-year-old mango tree growing through Tan Soo Siah’s second-story terrace is a favorite stopping place for the family of endangered monkeys that has taken up residence in a small park near his home in Malaysia’s Penang state.

“Since everybody chases them away, I try to let them have a rest here,” says Tan, 64, who likes to watch the dusky langurs (Trachypithecus obscurus) from his bedroom window, peeking up at them playing in the foliage.

Not everyone in Taman Concord, a residential community home mostly to retirees like Tan, is as taken with the langurs as he is. Around three years ago, the monkeys were inciting complaints from seniors who were fed up with langurs leaping across their houses, damaging their rooftops and denuding their gardens.

Perhilitan, Malaysia’s wildlife agency, was summoned. The agency’s typical methods for dealing with “conflict” animals include installing deterrents, trapping and relocation, and, as a last resort, culling.

This time, Perhilitan called the Langur Project Penang (LPP), a social enterprise founded by Malaysian primatologist Yap Jo Leen.

Yap’s team of citizen scientists spent months diagnosing the problem, tracking the monkeys’ movements and interviewing local residents. The group ultimately built a canopy bridge made from old fire hoses to help the langurs safely cross a busy road and expand their range, relieving pressure on Taman Concord.

Today, Tan and his neighbors are learning to live with the langurs, who regularly use the bridge, known as Numi’s Crossing, named for a young langur that met his end after repeatedly falling from slippery power lines during LPP’s fieldwork.

‘I don’t keep the window open anymore’

Peninsular Malaysia has lost more than half its forest cover since 1900, as its human population has climbed from 1.7 million to 25 million. What jungle remains is increasingly fragmented by roads and buildings, pushing wildlife into ever more frequent contact with humans.

Perhilitan receives around 5,000-13,000 wildlife complaints a year. Invariably topping the list of species people call them about is the long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis), the gray-brown monkey commonly found near roadsides and tourist sites. Its boldness around humans has earned it the reputation of being a nuisance, but the species is in fact listed as endangered on the IUCN’s Red List.

Last year in Port Dickson, a fast-growing beach town south of Kuala Lumpur, Azizah Abbas was alone in her home reciting the Quran when she heard a loud noise in the next room. She went in to find a pair of macaques devouring her Eid cookies. Horrified, the 84-year-old picked up a wooden stick and chased them around the living room, resulting in two broken bowls before they scampered out the window they’d come in through.

“I don’t keep the window open anymore,” says Azizah, who’s also resigned herself to no longer cultivating fruit in her garden in favor of bitter-tasting plants like betel (Piper betle) and sacha inchi (Plukenetia volubilis) that the macaques won’t eat.

Langurs are shyer than macaques, preferring to spend more time in the trees, but they aren’t above the occasional foray into human settlements. Perhilitan recorded 196 dusky langur complaints in 2021, the last year it published data.

One of those complaints led to a now-notorious incident at a school in Port Dickson, where wildlife officers allegedly shot and killed 20 dusky langurs, including a mother and baby. Perhilitan says it only killed seven aggressive monkeys after trapping efforts failed. This past February, Malaysia’s Court of Appeals ruled the killing of the entire group to be unlawful, in a suit filed by animal welfare advocates.

Perhilitan culls tens of thousands of long-tailed macaques every year, according to its annual reports. The agency culled 904 langurs in 2010, the only year it has published culling figures for langurs.

Dusky langur numbers are suspected to have declined by more than 50% over the past three generationsthroughout the species’ range in Singapore, Peninsular Malaysia and the south of Thailand and Myanmar, pushing it into endangered status.

‘Safe haven’

Taman Concord is a grid of some 150 low-slung rooftops in the center of Tanjung Bungah, a suburb of state capital George Town tucked between the northern coast of Penang Island and a ridge of forested hills to the south.

When Yap Jo Leen and her citizen scientists arrived in Taman Concord in 2023, residents were asking if the langurs had become “trapped” in the housing estate by the wave of development sweeping through Tanjung Bungah. High rises, other buildings and a quarry had come up in the kilometer-wide (0.6-mile) area between Taman Concord and the hills to the south, seemingly cutting the langurs off from their natural habitat.

“‘All of you should bring the langurs back to the forest’ — that was the usual script that people used to say to us,” Yap says.

But moving the langurs, a practice known in conservation parlance as translocation, wasn’t necessarily feasible. Langurs are harder to capture than macaques. Even if you can trap them, a suitable release site must first be identified, one with enough food and no monkeys already living there, since fighting between groups could drive more monkeys into human settlements. Indeed, the langurs in Taman Concord, a group of eight, were led by a male who had broken his tail in a clash with another group, Yap says.

As they observed the langurs, the researchers noticed they would often try to cross a treacherous stretch of Jalan Lembah Permai, a road that widens to several lanes as it straightens out just south of Taman Concord. The langurs would begin to dart across, only to freeze in the middle and turn back. Sometimes they would cross via a culvert underneath the road, where they might encounter dogs that could rip them to shreds. When they did make it across, they didn’t venture far, sticking to a patch of trees by the roadside.

After six months of fieldwork, LPP proposed the canopy bridge. LPP had previously built one elsewhere on Penang Island, on a road where at least eight dusky langurs died in traffic accidents between 2016 and 2018. Since LPP put up a bridge there in 2019, no langur deaths have been recorded in that area.

The bridge in Tanjung Bungah has helped the eight langurs in Taman Concord access more territory, and they now spend less time in the housing estate, LPP has observed.

“They have more opportunity to venture closer to the hills … and find their way to a safe haven,” Yap says.

As a result, complaints from Taman Concord “have decreased tremendously, because the bridge has helped that group of monkeys move toward the other side,” says Wong Hui Yi, LPP’s project executive.

The neighborhood into which the langurs have expanded is home to younger people who tend to commute to work, and so don’t encounter the monkeys as often — something LPP learned from interviewing around 130 people in Taman Concord and two adjacent communities before pitching the bridge idea.

Numi’s Crossing is the first canopy bridge in a high-density urban area in Peninsular Malaysia, which already has “ecological viaducts” to help larger mammals cross some rural highways.

This past April, after LPP installed a third canopy bridge in Batu Ferringhi, another part of Penang Island, Syed Ibrahim Syed Noh, Malaysia’s deputy minister of natural resources and environmental sustainability, visited the site and said the ministry would study wider use of canopy bridges.

“The initiative by LPP has the potential to be an effective and animal-friendly solution,” Syed toldjournalists. “However, it requires thorough evaluation before being expanded to other areas.”

Mr. Tan’s neighborhood

While Numi’s Crossing has alleviated the pressure on Taman Concord, it hasn’t been a cure-all. The langurs still frequent the neighborhood, and some residents still gripe about them.

“I think they will multiply more and more if you don’t kill them,” one local man told LPP recently, according to field notes the group shared with Mongabay.

Langur incursions are a relatively new phenomenon in this part of Penang, so people assume the monkeys must be spreading out of control, says Teo Hoon Cheng, head of LPP’s environmental education program.

“Actually it’s the other way around — you see them more often because of the habitat loss, that’s why they come to your place,” says Teo, a former IT manager who first joined LPP as a volunteer citizen scientist.

Teo tries to teach residents how to deal with the langurs in a more humane way. Don’t feed the langurs, he instructs them. Be sure to properly dispose of your garbage. No need to scare them off with firecrackers, as some have tried; just spray them with water, make a loud noise, or bang a stick on the ground to make them scatter as you walk past. Don’t look them in the eye or show your teeth, even if you’re smiling at how cute they are, as they’ll interpret that as a challenge or a sign of fear.

“Some [people], they don’t really know what to do. So now we are educating them and they get some ideas of how to protect themselves and also to be kind to those animals,” says Lim Hock Cheng, head of the Village Community Management Council (MPKK) in Batu Ferringhi.

For others in Taman Concord, understanding why the langurs are here and how to safely engage with them when they must has made them more sympathetic, Wong says. Some say they miss the langurs now that they don’t come around as much.

“I would say they develop some sense of compassion and kindness towards animals,” Wong says. “And they are slowly accepting that this is the situation of coexistence that we need to practice.”

Tan helps out, calming things down with his neighbors when tensions flare. A retired graphic designer, he’s joined some of LPP’s meetings with local government officials and keeps an eye on the bridge itself, which is important for its maintenance. The citizen scientists, who range in age from 17 to 65, have named the alpha male after Tan, and now refer to the pack of eight langurs as “Ah Tan’s group.”

Support from locals has been key to the success of the project, says Nadine Ruppert, vice president of the Malaysian Primatological Society, who advised Yap on her Ph.D.

“She has this little army of citizen scientists who are very invested in the project,” Ruppert says. “I think that’s really beautiful and really the essence of successful conservation projects: to have a long-term impact, you have to have the people feel happy and involved in it.”

Tan says he doesn’t get to eat very many of his mangoes these days. But for him, the langurs are the real treat.

“When we go to another country, you have to pay to see the wildlife,” he says on his terrace, with a view of steel cranes rising over concrete and green hills in the distance. “I’m so lucky they’re here.”

Banner image: A female dusky langur with her baby crosses an artificial canopy bridge called Numi’s Crossing along Lembah Permai road in the Tanjung Bungah area of George Town, Penang Island. Image by Mohd Rasfan / AFP.

This article is part of a reporting project between Mongabay and Agence France-Presse (AFP).