New Future

In recent years, we’re learning more about how fungi work, what they can do, and how they can help mitigate the climate crisis. They play a crucial role in balancing ecosystems, and keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.

Year after year, a colony of elephant seals arrives in Jackson Bay, on the islands of Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Chile, to molt and breed. However, in 2023, an outbreak of avian flu devastated the region, and the colony’s population dropped by half.

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. A new report, “Primates in Peril: The World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates, ” catalogs the species closest to the brink.

“They’re big, like an overweight Peruvian dog, ” is how photographer Santiago Romaní describes giant otters . In 2022, on his trip to the Imiría Regional Conservation Area, a protected area in the Ucayali region of Peru’s east-central Amazon, he observed the aquatic river giants.

Samoa, an archipelagic country composed of nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean, is on the frontline of climate change. Rising sea levels, ocean warming and acidification all pose significant threats to the country’s coastal communities.

MAE HONG SON, Thailand — The flashlight bouncing off the cave walls stopped abruptly as Sakda Khayankitphuanphon came to a halt in the dark. Scarcely 2 kilometers (1.

Male bonobos are larger and stronger than females, so researchers have found it puzzling that the female apes enjoy high status in bonobo society. After analyzing three decades of behavioral data, researchers recently shared a study that pinpoints their source of power: female alliances and coalitions.

Roughly five years since Kim Stanley Robinson’s groundbreaking climate fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, hit shelves and The New York Times bestseller list, there’s little he says he’d change about the book, were it to be published again, he tells Mongabay’s podcast.

On the evening of May 9, 2019, conservationist and teacher Itakwu Innocent narrowly survived an assassination attempt outside his home in Kubong-Bette, a small farming village in the southeastern Nigerian state of Cross River. “Daddy! Gun! ” Innocent recalls his son screaming seconds before a shot was fired.

Researchers have released new maps documenting the “Great Nile Migration, ” the Earth’s largest-known land mammal migration across South Sudan and Ethiopia. The maps chart the seasonal movements of two antelope species, the white-eared kob and the tiang .

The World Bank promotes expansion of private land ownership and title to improve efficient land use and recently announced billions of dollars to support these policies, claiming it will also facilitate carbon projects including offsets and afforestation.

In 2024, the world lost almost 6.7 million hectares of primary tropical forest, the fastest rate ever recorded. The world’s forests are still falling prey to mining, logging and agriculture, but as the climate crisis intensifies, for the first time on record, the leading cause of tropical primary forest loss is fire.

Construction has begun for a luxury resort on Seychelles’ Assomption Island, near a UNESCO World Heritage coral atoll that’s one of the most remote and pristine places on the planet.

EAST HALMAHERA, Indonesia — Police in Indonesia’s North Maluku province arrested 27 people and charged 11 of them with weapons offenses and commercial obstruction in late May following conflict with a nickel mining company controlled by Indonesia’s billionaire Barki family.