New Future

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.

A biotech company in the United States made headlines last month by revealing photos of genetically modified gray wolves, calling them “dire wolves, ” a species that hasn’t existed for more than 10,000 years.

A coalition of organizations has assessed how locally produced maps stack up against global open-access data sets to evaluate deforestation in the context of cocoa production.

A new paper paints a grim picture for the future of fishing communities in the Gulf of Guinea along coastal West Africa. Faced with increasing ocean warming and declining fish stocks, fishing communities in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria struggle to survive.

BOGOTÁ — Logs float downstream in long lines on the murky waters of the Atrato River in the depths of the Pacific rainforests of Colombia’s Chocó department. With few roads, this region in northwest Colombia relies on waterways for transportation, though some are blocked by remnants of the logging industry.

Last month, 48 animals — including endangered species like Asian black bears (Ursus thibetanus), greater adjutant storks (Leptoptilos dubius) and Bengal slow lorises (Nycticebus bengalensis) — were found to be kept captive, all in a debilitated condition, at an illegally established mini zoo in Mymensingh in north-central Bangladesh.

When Ridzki Sigit first encountered the idea of joining Mongabay, we had yet to establish a presence in the language of his native Indonesia. The prospect was novel, even daunting: a remote, international team with no physical office, focused solely on environmental coverage — a relatively niche field in Indonesia’s media landscape at the time.

Researchers may have finally cracked the centuries-old mystery of why African honeyguide birds sometimes lead human honey-hunters to dangerous animals instead of bees: they could just be recall errors. Honeyguides (Indicator indicator) are famed for guiding honey-hunters to wild bees’ nests in exchange for rewards of beeswax.

JAKARTA — Researchers have called out the Indonesian government’s claim of having reduced deforestation by 90% over the past decade, pointing to cherry-picked data and a skewed baseline that paint an incomplete picture of the reality on the ground.

Scarlet macaw chicks that may have otherwise died in the wild are getting a second chance at life through a hand-rearing program managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Guatemala.