New Future

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. In a farmhouse overlooking the Upper Delaware River in the U. S. , Barbara Yeaman found her life’s calling later than most.

Human-driven climate change made the extreme rainfall that caused dozens of deaths in early April in the U. S. South and Midwest more intense and likely, according to a new rapid analysis from World Weather Attribution (WWA). The storms that struck from April 2-6 caused flash floods, tornadoes and power outages, affecting at least 100,000 people.

As apex predators, lions (Panthera leo) roam the African savanna, and occasionally even the rainforests, as the only social big cats. A small, isolated population of Asiatic lions (Panthera leo persica), an endangered subspecies, is found in the scrublands of the Indian state of Gujarat.

JAKARTA — Experts have lambasted Indonesia’s heavy push toward natural gas, saying it risks locking the country into fossil fuel dependency under the guise of clean energy, dealing immense damage to the economy, public health and the environment.

Coffee agroforests in India’s Western Ghats mountains, where coffee shrubs are grown under the shade of trees, could be a good source of seeds for forest restoration efforts, according to a recent study, reports Mongabay India’s Simrin Sirur. Much of India’s coffee is grown in the rain-rich Western Ghats, a global biodiversity hotspot.

In April this year, Mozambican President Daniel Chapo announced the launch of a national petrochemical city project in Mavanza village in Vilankulo district of Inhambane province.

The rise in e-commerce has created a commensurate rise in demand for single-use paper packaging. Fast-growing, high-yield eucalyptus has become a popular choice for paper but farming communities in Mozambique are paying the price for cheap paper according to a Mongabay documentary produced by Boaventura Monjane, Davide Mancini and Juan Maza.

A sea lion named Ronan is better able to keep a beat than the average human, a new study finds. Such ability in animals is generally thought to be unique to humans and some birds, but Ronan’s performance challenges those assumptions, the study’s researchers say.

At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss the ecological significance of Mbalmayo Forest Reserve in southern Cameroon, one of several degraded forest patches scattered across the country.

Climate change, land use change and biodiversity loss are combining to drive an increase in agricultural pests and expansion of their ranges with concerning implications for future global food security.

KATHMANDU — Recently, one morning in Kathmandu, senior lawyer Padam Bahadur Shrestha reclined in his cluttered second-floor office in a neighborhood near Nepal government’s administrative headquarters Singha Durbar. On one side lay stacks of files pertaining to civil cases.

Scientists have raised the alarm about biodiversity loss if construction of an airport near South Korea’s west coast begins as proposed this year.

The Republic of Congo’s recently announced plans to double oil production over the next three years puts it “fatally at odds” with its own stated goals for a clean energy transition, activists warn.

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Long before “biodiversity hotspot” became a conservation cliché, Alwyn Howard Gentry was painstakingly mapping them — one vine, one tree, one tenth-hectare transect at a time.