New Future

PURSAT, Cambodia — The Cambodian government has approved at least three new irrigation dams across the Cardamom Mountains, carving even deeper into forests currently being used for the Southern Cardamom REDD+ and Samkos REDD+ carbon credit projects.

Recent and major shifts in international environmental policies and programs have precedent in history, but the scale and urgency of their potential impacts present a planetary risk that’s new, podcast guest Sunil Amrith says.

The night parrot, once presumed extinct and later rediscovered, has had its largest known population discovered on Indigenous land in the Ngurrurpa Indigenous Protected Area of Western Australia, by Ngurrurpa rangers. Endemic to Australia, the bird is threatened by feral invasive species and habitat loss.

Rhythmic clicks, grunts and roars fill the Año Nuevo Island Reserve in California, home to a large breeding colony of northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris). For nearly 60 years, scientists at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) have studied the seals here.

Residents and officials worry illegal miners in the Munduruku Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s Amazon will simply return or migrate to other conservation units once the government’s operation to evict the miners ends.

The Australian government has warned of impacts to the country’s economy in the wake of Cyclone Alfred that caused massive losses to infrastructure, agriculture and the dairy industries when it struck in late February.

The costs that companies will have to bear in complying with the EU regulation on deforestation-free products, or EUDR, are “negligible, ” according to a recent report published Feb. 12 by Profundo, a nonprofit research organization based in the Netherlands. The analysis found they will amount to 0.

What better way to track whales than listening in on them? Passive acoustic monitoring, in which microphones are placed underwater to pick up any sounds, has long helped scientists detect the presence, or absence, of whales in oceans. More often than not, however, the method isn’t that great at estimating the population of whales.

COLOMBO — As the waves creep closer to his home in Kankesanthurai, in Sri Lanka’s northernmost Jaffna Peninsula, 41- year-old Seelan Kandeepan recalls how the sea continuously consumes what was once a thriving shoreline. His family has lived in this coastal village for generations, but now they struggle daily with an ever-changing coastline.

JAKARTA — The Norwegian government is monitoring growing concerns over Indonesia’s decision to appoint political figures with little climate expertise to oversee a climate forestry program largely financed by Norway.

To address deforestation in Cameroon, an environmental engineer has devised a cheaper, ecological alternative to charcoal, a Mongabay video narrates. Thirty-year-old Steve Djeutchou has tapped local food markets to supply organic waste to his company, STEMA Group, which then turns the biomass into biochar or black carbon.

Half a million barrels of toxic waste lurking beneath the waves just miles from California’s coastline sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller. Yet this environmental catastrophe is real, as documented in the award-winning film Out of Plain Sight, co-directed by journalist Rosanna Xia and filmmaker Daniel Straub.

Mongabay went to Pará state’s southwest and found examples of people struggling to keep sustainable initiatives in a region dominated by soy, cattle, gold and logging.

For a plant, life in Argentina’s Monte Desert is hard enough. Daily temperatures can fluctuate dramatically; it rarely rains, and there are few nutrients in the parched soil for a hungry plant.