$1.7 billion pledge to support Indigenous and local forest tenure has been met a year early

When governments and private donors pledged $1.7 billion at the 2021 U.N. climate conference to strengthen Indigenous and local communities’ land rights, few expected the target to be met—let alone ahead of schedule. Yet four years later, the funders have announced that they have fulfilled their commitment a year early, reports Aimee Gabay. In a field marked by broken promises, this is rare.

The pledge was born of frustration. Between 2011 and 2020, less than 1% of global climate finance supported projects tied to community land tenure. The “Forest Tenure Pledge,” as it became known, sought to correct that imbalance. Rebeca Sandoval of the Ford Foundation said the aim was to make the rights of Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and local communities a lasting priority in donors’ agendas. “And that is what happened,” she said.

The figures tell a mixed story. Direct funding to Indigenous and community-based organizations grew from 22 recipients in 2021 to 112 in 2024, according to the Forest Tenure Funders Group. But the proportion of total funds going straight to local organizations still hovers in the single digits.

“The important thing is that a path was opened,” said Levi Sucre Romero of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests. “That path needs to be broadened for future pledges.”

Observers credit the pledge’s success to unusual coordination among funders, facilitated by joint platforms and shared monitoring. Yet they note its limits. Early consultations with communities were scant, and the “plumbing” of aid—the compliance rules and bureaucratic hurdles that block smaller organizations—remains clogged. 

“A lot of these organizations aren’t traditional Western NGOs,” said Bryson Ogden of the Rights and Resources Initiative. “The funding architecture doesn’t make it easy for them to access resources.”

There were lessons too. Continuous dialogue and transparency matter more than lofty targets. So does inclusion: despite modest gains, projects centered on women’s leadership and youth remain scarce. And protection for forest defenders, still subject to violence and intimidation, lags behind the rhetoric of rights.

Now funders are debating whether to launch a second pledge. But global aid budgets are tightening, with traditional donors shifting resources toward defense. Without renewed political and financial commitment, the gains could erode as quickly as they came.

Ultimately, a pledge is only as good as the trust it builds—and that trust, once earned, will require careful tending.

Protecting Earth’s oldest data system: The case for biodiversity

Long before humans built computers, nature built a better one. Razan Al Mubarak sees biodiversity as the planet’s original information network.

In a commentary published on Mongabay, Al Mubarak, president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the founding managing director of the The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, argues that biodiversity is not just a collection of species but a vast, self-sustaining archive of information written in DNA. Each organism, she writes, encodes evolutionary knowledge—solutions to survival challenges refined over millions of years. The loss of a species, therefore, is not merely the disappearance of beauty or ecological function; it is the deletion of irreplaceable data from Earth’s biological archive.

Drawing examples from the Arabian oryx, whose genetic code reveals how to endure the desert’s extremes, and the ghaf tree, whose roots have mastered water detection, Al Mubarak contends that nature’s research and development far surpass humanity’s. Extinctions, she warns, are akin to losing entire languages before they have been translated.

The United Arab Emirates, she asserts, understands the value of information, having built a modern economy around data and knowledge. This perspective underpins its approach to conservation, from national Red List assessments and protected areas to global initiatives such as the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund. Projects like the reintroduction of the scimitar-horned oryx in Chad exemplify how restoring species helps repair the global ecological network.

But institutions alone cannot safeguard biodiversity. Al Mubarak calls for individuals to engage directly by observing local wildlife, contributing to citizen science, and supporting initiatives that treat ecosystems as essential infrastructure. She frames biodiversity as the ultimate backup system—a decentralized store of adaptive intelligence on which humanity depends for its own resilience.

As the world convenes in Abu Dhabi for the IUCN World Conservation Congress, Al Mubarak urges collective investment in preserving this living network. Protecting biodiversity, she concludes, is not only an ethical duty but a strategic imperative for the planet’s survival.

Rare photos capture fishing cat preying on monitor lizard

In the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans, a small predator has revealed unexpected prowess.

In July, naturalist Soumyadip Santra photographed a fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) leaping onto an adult monitor lizard and dragging it away. The sequence, corroborated by another photographer on the scene, is thought to be the first evidence of such a kill, reports Nabarun Guha for Mongabay India.

Fishing cats, the state animal of West Bengal and listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, usually dine on fish, rodents, snakes, and small birds. A monitor lizard, nearly the same size as the cat itself, is far from routine prey.

“This is a great find,” said biologist Tiasa Adhya, who has studied the species extensively. She likened the event to jaguars in South America catching caimans, a demonstration of wetland predators turning their skill against formidable rivals.

Other ecologists called the encounter “a very uncommon incident.” Food scarcity in the Sundarbans and competition with otters may have pushed the cat into riskier hunting.

Opportunism is no anomaly in nature, but this rare documentation underscores how much remains to be discovered about animal behavior.

Peru has created a new sanctuary in the Amazon

The Medio Putumayo Algodón Regional Conservation Area, covering more than 283,000 hectares of pristine rainforest in Loreto, was established in June and will be managed by the regional government. For the 16 Indigenous communities who live along the Putumayo River, the designation represents both protection and recognition, reports Geraldine Santos.

“This area is being driven by the Indigenous communities of the Medio Putumayo themselves, through three federations,” says Freddy Ferreyra of the Instituto del Bien Común.

Local peoples, including the Murui, Yagua, Ocaina, Kukama Kukamiria, Kichwa, Maijuna and Bora, have been pressing for safeguards for over a decade. Now they gain legal standing to defend their forests against incursions by land traffickers, miners and loggers.

The new area sits within a larger ecological corridor that links Peru with Colombia and Ecuador. It forms part of a mosaic of reserves and parks intended to secure continuous habitat for species ranging from jaguars and river dolphins to the yellow-tailed woolly monkey.

“We hope this regional conservation area brings benefits to our communities,” says Gervinson Perdomo Chavez, a former leader of Puerto Franco. “That way, we can also take care of our forest.”

DJs inspired by nature

The music began long before humans arrived. Rivers carried their basslines downstream, insects beat time in the dusk, and birds poured their arias into the dawn. For Dominik Eulberg, who grew up without radio or television, this was the only soundtrack. “Nature for me is the greatest artist of all,” he once said. When he later discovered synthesizers, they felt less like inventions of silicon and circuitry than another register of the same ancient score.

Eulberg, an ecologist by training and DJ by trade, has made it his vocation to let those hidden symphonies be heard. At festivals along the Main in Frankfurt, he layered the call of the corncrake over deep electronic pulses, thrilling dancers who mistook the bird’s cry for a machine. His albums, with names drawn from butterflies and plants, offer an invitation to hear biodiversity not as an abstraction but as melody and rhythm.

He is not alone. In the Peruvian Amazon, Tayta Bird and his collaborators record the chatter of macaws and the bass rumble of howler monkeys, weaving them into tracks that pulse with the rainforest’s vitality. Their “Nature Punk” is less rebellion than reminder: that music once came from sitting quietly in the forest, listening.

There is poignancy in this movement. As habitats shrink and species vanish, silence spreads. What these artists do is less about novelty than remembrance. They bottle fragments of the living world and return them, amplified, to crowded dance floors where the diversity of humanity mirrors the diversity of nature. “On the dance floor, everybody is the same,” Eulberg said. The same, too, in the world that sustains us.

Electronic music once seemed the anthem of machines. In the hands of such musicians it has become elegy and exhortation, carrying into the night the oldest rhythm of all.

Read Manuel Fonseca’s story

A dancing lemur could help save one of Madagascar’s most endangered ecosystems

Madagascar’s rainforests often steal the spotlight, with their flamboyant biodiversity and familiar lemur mascots. Less noticed are the country’s dry forests in the west and southwest, which shelter equally remarkable life yet have been steadily eroded by agriculture, fire and logging. Now conservationists are betting that one of their most charismatic residents, the Verreaux’s sifaka, a white “dancing” lemur famed for its sideways bounds across the ground, could rally support to save what remains, reports Mino Rakotovao.

The sifaka has just been added to the World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates, a move driven by the new Madagascar dry forest alliance, a coalition of NGOs, scientists and government officials. Its advocates hope the listing will draw attention not only to the sifaka’s plight but also to the fragile forests it depends on.

“In the west and southwest [of Madagascar], the situation is just as serious, with widespread food insecurity, increased bushmeat hunting, and similar threats like deforestation,” said Rebecca Lewis, a primatologist and founder of AID Forests.

Dry forests provide food, medicine, timber and grazing land for some of Madagascar’s poorest communities. They also face some of the world’s fastest rates of loss. Yet unlike the better-known humid forests, they lack coordinated international backing. The alliance aims to change that by pooling knowledge, strengthening patrols and amplifying the voices of local people.

The sifaka’s presence offers a powerful symbol. As seed dispersers, these lemurs help regenerate forests, knitting human livelihoods and ecological health together.

“I’ve never been more optimistic about the future of Madagascar’s dry forest,” said Anne Axel of Marshall University.

If the sifaka succeeds as an ambassador, the “dancing lemur” may yet give Madagascar’s overlooked forests a chance to endure.

Largest known turtle nest documented in drone study

In the western Brazilian Amazon, scientists have documented the world’s largest known nesting aggregation of the endangered giant South American river turtle (Podocnemis expansa), reports Shanna Hanbury. Using drones and ground counts on a sandbank of the Guaporé River, which marks the border with Bolivia, researchers estimated around 41,000 adult females gathering to lay their eggs.

“We knew it was an important area, but we didn’t have the full picture of the size,” said Camila Ferrara of WCS.

The population has grown in part thanks to Brazil’s four-decade conservation program, carried out with local communities. Yet threats persist. Illegal traders continue to seize turtles by the hundreds, while habitat loss looms. Turtle meat, once sustainably harvested, has long been a staple in Amazonian diets—ranking second only to fish in archaeological records from 7,000 years ago—but today’s demand far outpaces historical levels.

To count the nesting turtles, the scientists combined ground surveys, drone imagery and mathematical models to correct for errors such as double counting or missed individuals. The method produced a more credible estimate than either approach alone and offers a stronger tool for monitoring mass nesting events. By improving accuracy, it allows conservationists to distinguish genuine declines from statistical noise—vital knowledge in the struggle to protect one of the Amazon’s most threatened species.

The case for optimism in conservation

The mountain gorilla should have vanished. In the late 80s, gorillas clung to survival in the misted borderlands of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Poaching, snares, and conflict made extinction feel scheduled. What changed was not a miracle but a grind: Rangers pulling traps at risk to their lives, communities earning a stake through carefully managed tourism, and governments that held a fragile line. Numbers have climbed. The recovery is measured in steady hands rather than headlines, and it offers a simple proposition.

Optimism is not a mood. It is a method. And this tradition is not new: The Smithsonian’s Earth Optimism summit, the Conservation Optimism movement, and IUCN’s Green List of Species have carried that conviction into institutions and practice.

Conservation suffers from grim arithmetic. Loss can be swift; recovery takes years of money and attention. Dismissing optimism as naïveté is a mistake. The useful kind is disciplined. It begins with the premise that action changes outcomes, then organizes institutions and incentives to make that premise true.

First, the case is cognitive. People do not decide in spreadsheets. They respond to stories that link values to visible results. Accurate warnings alone rarely move behavior because facts need carriers. Stories grounded in real places and people travel further and lodge deeper. The gorilla’s climb persuades not because it flatters sentiment, but because it shows cause and effect readers can imagine joining.

Second, it is political. Doom is demobilizing. Faced with planetary-scale charts, many decide their choices are too small to matter. Optimism counters this by shrinking part of the problem to a human scale. A no-take zone that yields fuller nets nearby helps a community believe rules can work and cooperation can pay. Hope, in that form, becomes habit.

Third, it is strategic. Optimism focuses effort where it can tilt systems. The Mesopotamian Marshes, once drained and written off, were revived by engineers and local communities who refused resignation. Through hydrology and coalition, water returned, reed beds spread, and lives were reestablished. In Raja Ampat, partners are restoring Indo-Pacific leopard sharks with coolers of eggs, sea pens, and protected reefs. Unglamorous logistics married to design become a model others can adapt.

Useful optimism has guardrails. It insists on evidence, speaks plainly about trade-offs, and resists declaring victory too soon. Journalism helps by pairing rigorous reporting on harm with credible examples of repair, narrowing the distance between evidence and action. Ecoanxiety is real, especially among the young, but pairing grief with a path can turn concern into agency.

Coalitions endure when they experience progress. The gorilla in the mist, a reed bed where a desert stood, a small shark returning to a reef, each is a proof point that sustains a politics of the possible. The future will not arrive in a single leap. It will accumulate, one verified improvement at a time, until the long odds begin to shift.

The full piece: https://mongabay.cc/fscDRz

Forests on Indigenous lands help protect health in the Amazon

Healthy forests are more than climate shields; in the Amazon, they also serve as public-health infrastructure.

Communications Earth & Environment study spanning two decades across the biome links the extent and legal status of Indigenous Territories to 27 respiratory, cardiovascular, and zoonotic or vector-borne diseases. The findings are complex, but one pattern is clear: Where surrounding forest cover is high and fragmentation is low, Indigenous lands help blunt health risks.

Between 2001 and 2019, the Amazon logged 28 million cases of illness, four-fifths of them from fires and mostly respiratory. More than 532,000 square kilometers burned during that period, with most blazes starting outside Indigenous lands. Each surge in fire activity sent fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) higher, and with it hospital visits for asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory ailments.

Landscape context matters. Municipalities with high forest cover outside Indigenous lands see fewer fire-related illnesses, as those forests buffer PM2.5 exposure. The protective effect appears once overall cover exceeds about 45%. For zoonotic and vector-borne diseases, forests inside and outside Indigenous lands offset fragmentation when combined cover passes 40%. Fragmentation weakens these protections.

Law matters too. Recognized Indigenous Territories show a nonlinear pattern: at low to mid coverage they correlate with higher incidence, but at higher coverage with lower incidence. Unrecognized territories are consistently tied to worse outcomes, reflecting heavier fire and deforestation where rights are weak.

“Indigenous forests in the Amazon bring health benefits to millions,” said Paula Prist of the International Union for Conservation of Nature in a statement. “We have long known that the rainforest is home to medicinal plants and animals that have cured countless illnesses. This study offers new evidence that forests themselves are a balm for fire-related threats to people’s lungs and hearts, to illnesses like Chagas, malaria and spotted fevers. Ensuring Indigenous communities have strong rights over their lands is the best way to keep forests and their health benefits intact.”

As fire season returns and climate talks convene in Belém, the message is straightforward: securing Indigenous land rights and conserving contiguous forests is a health intervention as well as a climate one.

Where trees should grow

Reforestation is in vogue as a climate cure. Governments, businesses, and philanthropists are pledging billions to put seedlings in the ground. Yet planting trees in the wrong places can damage ecosystems, undermine livelihoods, and squander scarce resources. A study recently published in Nature Communications offers a sobering correction, reports Marina Martinez.

Led by scientists from The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and partner institutions, the team reviewed 89 maps of reforestation potential published since 2011, many of which had fueled grandiose claims. Earlier work, most notably by researchers at ETH Zürich in 2019, had suggested that 900m hectares could be covered in trees, an expanse larger than Brazil. Such estimates inspired initiatives like the Trillion Trees movement. But they also drew fire for including grassy biomes and fire-prone savannas where forest does not naturally occur.

The new analysis, by contrast, uses stricter definitions, high-resolution land-cover data, and a suite of safeguards to avoid perverse outcomes. After excluding croplands, wetlands, peatlands, and areas with frequent fires, the authors identified just 195m hectares worldwide suitable for reforestation. That is a reduction of 71-92% compared with previous maps.

Still, the potential remains significant. Restoring these lands could sequester 2.2bn tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, about 5% of annual global emissions from fossil fuels and land-use change.

“Reforestation is a readily-available, scalable, cost-effective carbon removal solution, but we have neither time nor resources to restore trees everywhere” says TNC’s Susan Cook-Patton, Ph.D.

Most promising are areas adjacent to existing forests, where natural regeneration is more likely and biodiversity gains are greater. Yet only 90m hectares also meet social safeguards such as secure land tenure and minimal conflict with rural livelihoods. The research highlights the difficulty of optimizing for carbon, biodiversity, water, and human rights at once. Few places satisfy all objectives.

For policymakers, the message is clear: reforestation is not a silver bullet. Protecting standing forests delivers greater climate benefit, and tree planting must be carefully targeted to succeed.

As Kurt Fesenmyer, the study’s lead author, notes, “The biggest climate benefits come from protecting the carbon within existing forests, including both young and old.”

Former trappers find new calling as bird protectors in Indonesia

Ari and Junianto once spread sticky sap to trap songbirds flitting through the mist drifting through the forests on Mount Slamet in Java. By their teens, they had graduated to trading slow lorises, sugar gliders, and even Javan hawk-eagles, Indonesia’s national bird. At the height of their careers, hundreds of white-eyes could be caught in a single outing.

But the flocks dwindled. “The number of birds went down because they were always being caught,” Junianto, now in his mid-30s, told L. Darmawan for Mongabay-Indonesia.

Ari, who had begun selling through social media, drew the attention of the conservation agency. “It felt like I was being hunted. So I quit entirely,” he recalled.

Their story reflects a wider crisis. The IUCN estimates that only 600–900 Javan hawk-eagles remain in the wild, half of them mature adults. Fewer than 2,500 rufous-fronted laughingthrushes survive. The Javan pied starling has likely vanished altogether. Trappers supplying the caged-bird trade are largely to blame.

That trade is among the largest in the world. Across Java and Sumatra, sprawling bird markets, or pasar burung, openly sell millions of wild-caught birds each year. Many are destined for the popular “kicau mania” songbird competitions, where prized species fetch high prices. The demand is so great that researchers warn entire populations of native birds are being emptied from forests to fill cages in urban homes. Academic studies to investigations published on Mongabay describe stalls stocked with species already listed as endangered, and enforcement has often been lax or inconsistent.

Yet these hunters have turned. Ari joined the Biodiversity Society, a local conservation group, in 2013. He began mapping bird nests and persuading others to abandon their snares.

“If they’re doing good, we’ll support them — a lot of hunters have now become forest guardians,” he said.

Junianto, once an expert in finding raptors, picked up a camera to photograph the species he once pursued.

For Ari, the rewards are not only moral. He has won provincial and national conservation prizes.

“I used to think hunting was cool, it was easy money,” he said. “Now I realize protecting [the birds] is worth a lot more.”

Key lessons:
☑️ Declining returns made hunting less viable: Overexploitation itself can push hunters to reconsider, especially when economic incentives weaken.
☑️ Pressure from authorities created personal risk: Even limited enforcement can act as a deterrent when it becomes personal and visible.
☑️ Alternative identities and roles were made available: Offering alternative livelihoods or identities that build on existing expertise rather than replacing it.
☑️ Recognition and rewards reinforced the shift. Awards provided social and moral validation, confirming that his new path carried prestige as well as purpose.

Thousands of catfish climb a waterfall in the Amazon

Thousands of tiny fish inching up waterfalls might sound like fantasy, but it happened in Brazil last November, reports Kristine Sabillo Guerrero.

Scientists and Brazil’s environmental police documented a “massive aggregation” of bumblebee catfish (Rhyacoglanis paranensis) in Mato Grosso do Sul’s Aquidauana River. The small blotched fish swarmed in pools at the base of waterfalls, then hauled themselves up rock faces, sometimes climbing over one another in great shoals. Some even clung upside down to the ceilings of crevices.

The spectacle, reported in the Journal of Fish Biology, marks the first recorded instance of a member of the Pseudopimelodidae family climbing waterfalls. Fully mature males and females were present, leading researchers to conclude that the catfish were likely migrating upstream to spawn. The timing coincided with the onset of the rainy season, following one of the region’s worst droughts. “It happened right after a long and severe drought in the region, and the sudden rise in water levels seems to have triggered the species to spawn,” said Manoela Marinho, the study’s lead author.

Such observations, though rare, matter. Fish migration in South America’s rivers is poorly understood, particularly for small species. The findings underscore how dams and altered water flows may disrupt not just the region’s big commercial fish, but the secret lives of its smallest ones.

Solar-powered boats are expanding in the Amazon rainforest, under an Indigenous-led initiative

Eight years after its launch, a solar-powered canoe initiative born in Ecuador’s Amazon is reshaping river transport far beyond its origins, reports Aimee Gabay.

The Kara Solar Foundation, led by Indigenous engineers and community leaders, has delivered 12 canoes to villages in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Suriname and even the Solomon Islands. Each vessel glides silently across rivers that once echoed with the noise and fumes of gasoline engines.

For many communities, rivers are the only roads. Solar boats spare them the cost of fuel while reducing pollution.

“[They] do not pollute the environment, especially for those who live near rivers,” said Ichinki Tentets Tanchim Federico, a leader of the Achuar community of Wayusentsa.

The boats also diminish pressure to build roads, which often accelerate deforestation and the spread of mining and livestock.

The first canoe, Tapiatpia, proved the concept in 2017 when it traveled 1,800 kilometers across Amazonian rivers. Since then, Kara Solar has paired its boats with solar recharge stations that double as community energy hubs. Local residents are trained to operate and repair the systems themselves.

“Kara Solar ensures that technical knowledge is cultivated within the communities,” says Nantu Canelos, the foundation’s executive director.

Ambitions run high: By 2030, the group aims to support 10,000 solar canoes across the Amazon Basin and create a network of Indigenous-run recharge stations. Yet financing remains elusive.

“Projects like this…are not attractive for traditional investment because they are not designed to obtain large gains quickly,” Canelos said.

Still, in regions where infrastructure is sparse, these solar vessels offer a rare chance to chart a different future—quietly, cleanly, and on local terms.

Deforestation is the leading cause of declining rainfall in the Amazon rainforest

For decades, the Amazon has been growing drier. A new study in Nature Communications disentangles how much of this shift is due to global warming and how much to tree loss within the forest. The results suggest deforestation is the dominant factor.

Researchers led by Marco Franco and Luiz Augusto Toledo Machado examined 35 years of land-use and atmospheric data across Brazil’s “Legal Amazon,” an area of 5 million square kilometers. Using statistical models, they separated the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions from local forest loss. They found deforestation accounts for nearly three-quarters of the rainfall decline and about one-sixth of the warming during the dry season since the mid-1980s.

Between 1985 and 2020, dry-season rainfall fell by about 21 millimeters per year, of which 15.8mm—74.5%—was linked to forest loss. Maximum daily temperatures rose by 2°C, with 0.39°C, or 16.5%, due to deforestation. The findings confirm what scientists have long suspected: forest clearance disrupts not only carbon balances but also local weather.

Amazonian trees are central to this system. Through transpiration they draw water from the soil and release it into the air, providing more than 40% of the region’s rainfall. This moisture rises and condenses into clouds, while creating low-pressure zones that pull in additional humid air, a process some call the “biotic pump.” Strip away forest and the cycle falters.

The consequences extend beyond the basin. The “flying rivers” of vapor influence rainfall across Brazil’s agricultural heartlands and into the Andes. Deforestation is also altering the South American monsoon, raising the risk of drought in central and southeastern Brazil.

If recent trends continue, by 2035 the region could see dry-season rainfall fall by another 7mm and temperatures climb by 0.6°C. The Amazon’s climate could begin to resemble that of the Cerrado savanna or even the semi-arid Caatinga.

Such a shift would test the resilience of the forest’s 11,000 known tree species, the communities that depend on them, and distant agricultural zones and megacities that rely on the Amazon’s moisture.

🔬 Franco, M.A., Rizzo, L.V., Teixeira, M.J. et al. How climate change and deforestation interact in the transformation of the Amazon rainforest. Nature Communications 16, 7944 (2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63156-0

Extinct-in-the-wild plant rediscovered in Sri Lanka thanks to social media

In 2012 Sri Lanka’s National Red List pronounced the towering dipterocarp Doona ovalifolia “extinct in the wild.” Known locally as Pini-Beraliya, the species lingered only as a single cultivated specimen in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya. For years that lone tree stood as a melancholy reminder of what had been lost.

Its unlikely revival began in 2018, when a Facebook post in a medicinal plant group prompted a villager from Ratnapura district to declare, “We have this tree in our village.” At first, botanists doubted the claim; related species are easily confused. But photographs of the leaves raised eyebrows, and when flowers were eventually obtained by a daring tree climb, experts confirmed the identification.

Since then, two more wild populations have been found, all near rivers or streams, reports Malaka Rodrigo. Conservationists have moved swiftly. Dilmah Conservation established a nursery that has already raised more than 250 saplings. Schoolchildren in Ayagama were given seedlings to plant, turning conservation into a lesson in pride and stewardship.

Ecologists argue that saving Pini-Beraliya is about more than preserving a single species. As a keystone of Sri Lanka’s lowland rainforests, its return bolsters entire ecosystems. From near oblivion, a chance rediscovery has restored both trees and hope.

Scientists recognize a fourth species of giraffe

For centuries giraffes have been treated as a single species, a uniform silhouette rising above Africa’s plains. That view has now been officially retired. A new assessment by the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Giraffe and Okapi Specialist Group recognizes four distinct giraffe species, informed by the most comprehensive review of genetic, morphological, and biogeographic evidence to date.

The reclassification may sound like a taxonomic quibble. In fact, it carries weighty consequences. Genetic studies, including whole-genome analyses, consistently reveal deep divergences among giraffe lineages dating back hundreds of thousands of years. Morphological work, notably a survey of more than 500 skulls, reinforces these divisions, while rivers, rift valleys, and arid zones appear to have acted as natural barriers. Together, these lines of evidence persuaded experts that northern, reticulated, Masai, and southern giraffes warrant recognition as separate species:

🦒 Northern giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis)

  • West African giraffe (G. c. peralta) – subspecies
  • Kordofan giraffe (G. c. antiquorum) – subspecies
  • Nubian giraffe (G. c. camelopardalis) – subspecies

🦒 Reticulated giraffe (Giraffa reticulata)

🦒 Masai giraffe (Giraffa tippelskirchi)

  • Masai giraffe (G. t. tippelskirchi) – subspecies
  • Luangwa/Thornicroft’s giraffe (G. t. thornicrofti) – subspecies

🦒 Southern giraffe (Giraffa giraffa)

  • South African giraffe (G. g. giraffa) – subspecies
  • Angolan giraffe (G. g. angolensis) – subspecies

“This landmark taxonomic revision … reflects the best available science and provides a globally standardized framework to inform conservation,” said Michael Brown, co-chair of the Specialist Group.

For conservationists, the change means more precise Red List assessments and clearer priorities. What was once one vulnerable giant is now four species, some faring far worse than others—a sobering reminder that even the tallest animals can disappear when overlooked.

The IUCN assessment

Trained sniffer dogs may have rediscovered a lost population of Sumatran rhinos in Indonesia.

In the dense rainforest of southern Sumatra, a handful of dog tracks may have unsettled a long-held assumption. For years, conservationists believed the Sumatran rhinoceros had vanished from Way Kambas National Park. Then Yagi and Quinn, dogs trained by Working Dogs for Conservation to detect wildlife, uncovered scat that early tests suggest belongs to the world’s most endangered rhino. For a species whose total wild population is thought to number fewer than 50, even the possibility of survival here feels momentous, reports Jeremy Hance.

“With fewer than 50 [Sumatran rhinos] in the entire global population, even a single individual is a big deal,” said Peter Coppolillo, who led the dog teams.

But a rediscovery, if confirmed, would not alter the species’ peril. The Sumatran rhino — hairy, small, and evolutionarily ancient — clings on in tiny fragments of forest. Its elusiveness has long confounded rangers; its biology, with long gestation periods and fragile calves, resists quick recovery. Eleven animals are safeguarded in captivity, a precarious lifeline against the losses in the wild.

The plight of Indonesia’s other surviving rhino is scarcely brighter. In Ujung Kulon National Park, the world’s last Javan rhinos have fallen from 76 to about 50 after poachers killed 26 animals, mostly males. Arrests have been made and new patrols deployed, but the damage is lasting: an already fragile population skewed further by sex.

“Poachers are creative and bold,” said Nina Fascione of the International Rhino Foundation.

Yet even against this backdrop of attrition, there are signs of resilience. Six Javan calves have been born in two years, reminders of the species’ persistence. In 1967, surveys found only 26 Javan rhinos. Against the odds, they rebounded once before.

Whether in Way Kambas or Ujung Kulon, survival now rests on whether such flickers of hope can outpace the forces that have driven Indonesia’s last rhinos to the brink.

How rain can reveal what lives in rainforest treetops

Perched high above the forest floor, the tropical canopy is a reservoir of biodiversity that has long resisted scrutiny. Its inaccessibility has left many of its inhabitants—orchids, epiphytes, ants, monkeys, frogs—poorly studied and poorly protected. But a new study offers a workaround: let the rain do the climbing. 

Scientists led by Lucie Zinger at the French National Centre for Scientific Research have shown that water dripping from the canopy carries traces of DNA from the organisms above. By capturing and analyzing this “rainwash” in low-tech collectors, they identified hundreds of species across plants, insects, birds, amphibians, and mammals.

The study, conducted in French Guiana, compared samples from a mature Amazonian forest and a nearby tree plantation. The results were striking. Diversity was markedly higher in the undisturbed forest, where passive collectors accumulated eDNA over a ten-day period. Crucially, the rainwash signal was both local and persistent. Even after heavy rain, biodiversity signatures remained spatially distinct at the scale of tens of meters and stable for up to 40 days.

Lucie Zinger et al. (2025) Elusive tropical forest canopy diversity revealed through environmental DNA contained in rainwater.

Unlike airborne or stream-based eDNA, which can drift and muddle geographic origin, rainwash captures a sharp snapshot of the immediate canopy. It can also be deployed at scale with minimal cost. The researchers propose that this method could become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring in tropical forests—habitats that are increasingly threatened and chronically under-surveyed.

That is not to say it is a panacea. Detection remains limited to species that shed detectable DNA and to wet seasons where rainfall is sufficient. But in a field stymied by logistical and financial constraints, the ability to “listen” to the canopy through its own runoff is a conceptual advance. In the future, the hum of the rainforest may be traced not through what can be seen and heard, but through what the rain leaves behind.

Lucie Zinger et al. (2025) Elusive tropical forest canopy diversity revealed through environmental DNA contained in rainwater. Science Advances 11, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adx4909

Indonesia’s idle land problem

Indonesia is defying the global trend in tropical deforestation. While forest loss in much of the tropics reached record highs in 2024, Indonesia’s rate fell by 14% compared with the previous year. Yet beneath this apparent success lies an inconvenient truth: Almost half of the deforestation recorded cannot be traced to a clear cause, reports Hans Nicholas Jong.

According to TheTreeMap, a technology consultancy that monitors forest change, logging accounted for 18% of primary forest loss in 2024, industrial oil palm for 13%, pulpwood plantations for 6%, mining for 5%, food-estate projects for 3%, and fires for just over 2%. Together these explain less than half of the total. The remainder falls into a shadow zone — forest that is cleared but remains unused, often for years.

Why is this the case?

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that nearly half of deforested land in Indonesia lies idle for at least five years before being converted, usually to agriculture. In Riau and Bengkulu, natural forests within selective logging concessions have been stripped and then abandoned, only for oil-palm investors to arrive years later.

Environmentalists see this as a symptom of weak governance. Permits are issued liberally; concession holders face few penalties for clearing and walking away. Boy Jerry Even Sembiring of Walhi calls it the result of “reckless issuance of permits.” The pattern is not new: since the 1990s, firms have cleared land, extracted timber, and left the rest as part of speculative land-banking strategies.

The government has begun to respond. This year the Ministry of Forestry revoked 18 inactive concessions covering 526,000 hectares. Minister Raja Juli Antoni described the move as a step toward reclaiming unproductive lands. But critics say the problem is far larger.

Solutions exist. Mapping idle lands and clarifying ownership could pave the way for rehabilitation or community management. Advocates propose expanding Indonesia’s social-forestry program, which grants local communities rights to manage state forest. Properly targeted, it could boost rural incomes, bolster food security, and reduce the risk of fires — a common hazard on abandoned land.

Yet the politics of land in Indonesia are fraught. Sixty-eight percent of the country’s land is controlled by just 1% of its population. Between 2015 and 2024, over 3,200 agrarian conflicts erupted, affecting 1.8 million households. Using idle land as a pretext to expand industrial agriculture, warns Auriga Nusantara’s Timer Manurung, risks deepening these disputes.

Indonesia’s declining deforestation rate may be encouraging. But unless the country tackles the murky drivers of idle land, today’s progress could mask tomorrow’s problems.

What prevents deforestation?

A new study has flipped the deforestation debate on its head. Rather than asking what drives tropical forest loss, researchers asked what prevents it—and found that political will, born of public pressure and civil society activism, is among the most important factors, reports John Cannon.

Published in Conservation Letters on July 22, the study drew on the insights of 36 experts involved in forest protection in Brazil and Indonesia. These two countries, home to some of the largest remaining tropical forests, have made notable progress in curbing deforestation despite the pressures of agricultural expansion.

Between 2004 and 2012, Brazil slashed deforestation rates through a combination of satellite monitoring and legal tools such as its Forest Code. Indonesia, too, saw steep declines in forest loss following a surge in palm oil-driven deforestation. While prior studies have focused on the impact of specific policies, the new research, led by scientists at the University of Cambridge and IDH, a Netherlands-based NGO, sought to capture the broader ecosystem of drivers through a Delphi process—a method of iterative expert consultation.

“There are many complex drivers. There are many different actors,” said co-lead author Joss Lyons-White. “We wanted to understand, what is the whole range of factors that have contributed to protecting forests?”

The results showed surprising consensus.

“I was shocked to see such strong agreement on the importance of political will,” said co-author Rachael Garrett.

That consensus stretched across participants with backgrounds in ecology, development, and remote sensing. For Brazil, the state’s role in demarcating Indigenous lands and enforcing environmental laws was seen as especially critical. In Indonesia, corporate responsibility and advocacy by civil society were also cited.

“It really is hard to nail down what causes declines in deforestation,” noted Daniel Nepstad, founder of the Earth Innovation Institute. “Expert opinion is a real clever way to go about it.”

Political will, the study found, rarely emerges overnight.

“People were saying there wasn’t political will in the beginning,” Garrett said. Instead, it was built over years, spurred by domestic activism and international climate debates.

“When societies want to protect the environment, they can,” said Lyons-White. “They just have to want to do it.”

🔬 Joss Lyons-White et al (2025). Political Will Has Been Critical for Protecting Forests in the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesia. Conservation Letters. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.13120

Not too fast: The perils and promise of downlisting species

The IUCN Red List is the global barometer of extinction risk. When a species improves enough to be “downlisted”—moved from a higher to a lower threat category—it is often celebrated as a conservation success. But a recent study urges caution. Downlisting, the authors argue, can unintentionally lead to funding cuts, weakened legal protections, and diminished political will—risks that may imperil species before their recovery is secure.

The case of the woylie, a small Australian marsupial, underscores the danger. Downlisted in 1996, it suffered a catastrophic 90% population collapse soon after. By 2008, it was reclassified as Critically Endangered. Its status only improved again in 2024 following renewed interventions. The lesson: recovery can stall or reverse if conservation is withdrawn too soon.

Of 1,500 species with genuine status changes on the IUCN Red List between 2007 and 2024, 85% were uplisted—moved closer to extinction. Just 222 were downlisted. Among those, several high-profile cases sparked controversy. The red-crowned crane’s 2021 downlisting was driven by population growth in Japan, though its Chinese population has plummeted. The black-faced spoonbill, proposed for downlisting to least concern, remains highly vulnerable due to concentrated habitats and threats like climate change and avian flu.

Downlisting can weaken legal protections and shift conservation priorities. Flagship species often drive habitat protections and environmental scrutiny. A lower threat status may lessen urgency for further action, especially in countries where red-list status informs national policy.

To mitigate risks, the study calls for early, inclusive engagement with local experts and the use of complementary tools like the IUCN’s Green Status of Species, which assesses a species’ recovery and conservation dependence. A species may no longer face imminent extinction, but still rely on human intervention to survive.

Downlisting should be seen as a milestone, not a finish line, the authors conclude. 

Celebrating progress is warranted, but only if conservation commitment endures beyond the headlines.

Mongabay News: https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/07/study-highlights-dangers-of-declaring-conservation-success-too-soon/

Citation: Mu-Ming Lin et al (2025). Downlisting and recovery of species assessed by the IUCN. Conservation Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70103

The cost of restoring mangroves

Mangroves, the amphibious forests that fringe tropical and subtropical coastlines, are ecological powerhouses. They buffer communities against storm surges, support fisheries, and sequester carbon at rates that rival their terrestrial counterparts. Yet despite growing recognition of their value, mangroves remain imperiled. About 35% of global cover was lost in the late 20th century, largely to aquaculture and coastal development.

New research offers the most comprehensive look yet at the cost of reversing that damage. Drawing on nearly 250 projects and dozens of data sources, researchers have created the first global model of site-specific mangrove restoration costs. They find a median implementation cost of $8,143 per hectare, with wide variability: From just $9 to over $700,000. Site conditions matter. Rehabilitating abandoned shrimp ponds tends to be cheap; replanting eroded or hydrologically disrupted coastlines is far pricier.

Overlay of abatement cost and biophysical suitability for restoration

(A) Mapped across the global extent of potential mangrove restoration and (B) summed by area for the 20 countries with the greatest area of potential mangrove restoration. Abatement cost was calculated using the area-weighted mean within each 1° cell. Cells were categorized as having “high” or “low” value for each metric relative to the median value.

Indonesia, with its vast archipelago and degraded deltas, holds the greatest potential. At least 204,000 hectares could be restored at less than $10,000 per hectare—making it a focal point for meeting national and international targets. Globally, 1.1 million hectares of mangroves could be restored for $10.73 billion, or roughly what Americans spend on pet food every three months. That could remove up to 0.93 gigatons of CO₂ from the atmosphere, at an average cost of $11.49 per ton.

Such figures are competitive in the world of carbon markets, where blue carbon credits—those derived from coastal ecosystems—are gaining traction. But for now, the market is nascent.

Carbon finance alone is unlikely to underwrite the global mangrove revival. Opportunity costs—such as forgone aquaculture profits—could more than double restoration expenses. And the true success of such efforts will depend not just on trees planted or credits sold, but on long-term governance, local engagement, and ecological resilience.

Global maps of restoration cost, carbon abatement potential, and abatement across potential global mangrove restoration sites. (A) Restoration cost ($ ha−1), (B) carbon abatement potential (tCO2 ha−1), and (C) abatement cost ($ tCO2−1). Data were summarized to 1° cells using the area-weighted mean across areas of potential mangrove restoration in each cell.


Still, this cost model offers a tool for prioritizing investment. Where resources are scarce and climate ambitions high, identifying the most cost-effective hectares could help steer restoration efforts toward both fiscal prudence and environmental payoff.

CITATION: Garrett M. Goto et al. Implementation costs of restoring global mangrove forests. One Earth
Volume 8, Issue 7, 18 July 2025, 101342. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101342

Videos capture an unlikely alliance between ocelots and opossums in the Amazon

In the Peruvian Amazon, a series of curious encounters has left biologists scratching their heads. Camera traps have captured an unexpected partnership: solitary, nocturnal ocelots (Leopardus pardalis) strolling alongside common opossums (Didelphis marsupialis). Not once, but four times, in distinct locations over several years, the feline predator and its potential prey were seen moving together—sometimes even returning along the same path minutes later, still in tandem. The opossum, far from appearing alarmed, showed no signs of distress.

This behavior is not only puzzling; it is without precedent. Associations between solitary carnivores and omnivores—especially those that occasionally dine on one another—are vanishingly rare. Yet further evidence suggests this pairing is more than happenstance. In field experiments, opossums showed a distinct preference for the scent of ocelots over that of pumas or neutral controls. They lingered, sniffed, and rubbed themselves against the ocelot-scented fabrics, as though seeking some form of chemical communion.

Why cozy up to a cat that might eat you? The researchers suggest two possibilities: improved foraging efficiency or olfactory camouflage. Opossums may benefit from the ocelot’s hunting prowess, while the ocelot may gain from masking its scent with the opossum’s pungency. There is precedent in the animal kingdom: coyotes and badgers have been known to hunt cooperatively, trumpetfish hide behind larger fish to ambush prey, and some marsupials resist snake venom—knowledge the ocelot may intuitively exploit.

Whether this is mutualism, manipulation, or mere curiosity remains unknown. But the discovery is a reminder of how little is understood about rainforest dynamics. Even in well-trodden ecosystems, the wild has secrets yet to reveal—one cautious step at a time.

CITATION: Ettore Camerlenghi et al (2025). Beyond predator and prey: First evidence of an association between ocelot and opossum individuals. Ecosphere. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.70322

Global forest mapping missed 396 million hectares of trees

Despite mounting global pledges to stem deforestation, a new study published in Nature Communications finds that 17% of tropical tree cover—nearly 396 million hectares—has gone overlooked by mainstream forest monitoring systems.

Using high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning, an international team of researchers has mapped this previously undetected tree cover (PUTC), revealing that significant changes are taking place well beyond the traditional forest frontier.

Between 2015 and 2022, net tropical tree cover shrank by more than 61 million hectares. While most of that loss occurred in forests, over a third happened in areas not typically classified as forest: Croplands, grasslands, and urban spaces. These are precisely the areas where existing tools such as the World Cover dataset, with its 10-meter resolution, tend to fail.

“Neglecting scattered trees has led to a systematic underestimation of ecological degradation,” said Liu Shidong, the study’s lead author, via a Chinese Academy of Sciences press release.

The study found that 54% of tree cover loss was linked to land-use change and deforestation, while 44% of gains were driven by increased rainfall. Human activity—including logging and expansion of agriculture—emerged as the dominant driver of decline. The most substantial gross losses occurred in Brazil, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Beyond simply identifying losses, the research highlights a mismatch between deforestation data and restoration goals. In 2021, 141 nations pledged to halt forest loss by 2030 under the Glasgow Declaration. Yet the study recorded a gross gain in tree cover of just 6.2 million hectares across the tropics, barely a tenth of what was lost. Brazil, for instance, gained only 1.36 million hectares over the eight-year period, far short of its Bonn Challenge target of restoring 4.28 million.

Much of the newly detected cover sits in places long classified as treeless. In Africa, for example, more than a quarter of shrubland and grassland tree cover had been missed. In Asia, significant PUTC was found in croplands and cities. These trees matter: they sequester carbon, cool microclimates, and sustain livelihoods.

The methodology, which achieved 97.3% accuracy, could offer a more consistent and scalable way to track global tree dynamics, argue the authors.

“Fine-scale mapping is essential for credible climate mitigation,” said Wang Li, the project’s principal investigator, in the release.

The findings call into question long-standing assumptions about where trees grow—and where they are disappearing. In the battle against climate change, it seems, the world has been flying partially blind.

🔬 Shidong Liu et al, Mapping previously undetected trees reveals overlooked changes in pan-tropical tree cover, Nature Communications (2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-60662-z

The guardians of the Amazon who work without pay—and without fear

In a corner of the rainforest where Colombia meets Peru and Brazil, the hum of chainsaws and gunfire never quite dies. Yet in the shadows of this long emergency, a sublter resistance endures. Its front line is not marked by barricades or armed patrols, but by walking sticks carved from peach palm and a deep, unshakable intimacy with the land, reports Daniela Quintero Díaz.

Luis Alfredo Acosta has walked this path for 35 years. A member of the Nasa people and national coordinator of the Indigenous guard under the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), he speaks with clarity shaped by decades of witnessing promises deferred and communities displaced.

“Although these appear to be isolated things… it really is an integral resistance,” he said. “Because at its core, all of this only works if there is land.”

In Colombia’s Amazon region, “resistance” is neither metaphor nor battle cry. It is physical: Guarding against armed groups, illegal loggers, and narcotraffickers. It is intellectual: Preserving ancestral knowledge and mapping sacred sites. It is spiritual: Sustained through rituals and the use of yagé. And it is cultural: Enacted in daily life through small farms, seed banks, and forest patrols.

That these efforts persist amid violence is remarkable. Of the 1,411 human rights defenders killed in Colombia over the past decade, at least 70 were Indigenous guards. In many areas, the state has withdrawn: 11 protected zones in the Amazon are now inaccessible to park rangers due to armed conflict. Yet forests within Indigenous territories remain largely intact, with 98% cover — a fact both defiant and tragic.

The guards, often unpaid, rely on collective will more than resources. In Putumayo, the Siona community has removed mines and monitored vast forest tracts. In Guainía, fishers have transformed kitchens into labs, contributing to national fishery policies. In Amazonas, communities reforest thousands of hectares using knowledge handed down through generations.

The state’s support has been halting. President Petro’s National Development Plan pledged to strengthen Indigenous guardianship, but funding has been piecemeal. For guards like Olegario Sánchez of the Tikuna, even basics like radios or canoes are scarce.

“If we leave the territory,” a Siona guard warned, “we get closer to dying. If a root dies, its essence dies. And the principle of a community dies.”

In the Amazon, the forest still stands. But its fate — and that of its guardians — hangs in the balance.