New Future

BARDIYA, Nepal — Ram Raj Dhakal, 22, jolts awake to an alert on his phone. A wild elephant has strayed into a village near Thakurdwara, on the fringes of Bardiya National Park. At 11 p. m.

Across continents, “sacrifice zones” resemble wounds carved deep into the fabric of our planet. These are regions where ecosystems and livelihoods have been ravaged by fossil fuel and other industries that promise progress but leave devastation in their wake.

VALPARAI, India — Frequent interactions between humans and wildlife define life in Valparai, a town in India’s Tamil Nadu state, where the surrounding dense forests of the Western Ghats are fragmented by sprawling tea estates. These forests are home to elephants, Indian bison, bears and leopards, which frequently traverse the area.

In the late 1970s, Nepal launched a reforestation project to restore its massively deforested lands in the southeastern Terai landscape. However, the main tree of choice, eucalyptus, after showing initial signs of success has now proven detrimental to the region’s soil moisture and fertility, Mongabay contributor Mukesh Pokhrel reported in February.

TOCOA, Honduras – On a rainy November day in 2024, Storm Sara, a slow-moving tropical cyclone, struck Honduras, claiming at least six lives and displacing more than 6,000 people. Along the country’s northern coast, trees were bent or broken, roads turned into brown rivers, and houses were torn apart and swept away.

At least two dozen people were recently killed across seven states in the U. S. South and Midwest. Several days of heavy rain starting April 2 from simultaneous storms and tornadoes led to severe flooding across the region.

Populations of the critically endangered Indochinese tigers in eastern Thailand’s forest reserves remained stable between 2018 and 2021, but a shortage of prey and the presence of highways prevented their expansion to promising habitat, a recent study has found.

Javier Monzon has been deploying camera traps for close to two decades. He likens retrieving the equipment and the data to opening a present. “You just don’t know what’s inside until you look, ” Monzon, associate professor of biology at Pepperdine University in California, told Mongabay in a video interview.

Socotra Island, known as the Galápagos of the Indian Ocean, hosts an unusual diversity of plants found nowhere else on Earth. Nine of these endemic plant species, belonging to the genus Boswellia, are now closer to extinction, according to the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

JAKARTA — Rights activists have lambasted Indonesia’s parliament for delaying yet again a long-awaited Indigenous rights bill — stuck in limbo for more than a decade — even as communities continue to lose millions of hectares of land and face criminalization for defending their ancestral territories.

As REDD projects around the world face setbacks, restoration projects in the Amazon are flourishing as a means of reviving market confidence in forest-based carbon credits.

At a time when media outlets are downsizing newsrooms and the audience for traditional news is in decline, Mongabay continues to grow thanks to its impact-driven, nonprofit model.

Jaguar tourism in Porto Jofre, a remote outpost in the Pantanal wetlands of western Brazil, has become so successful that researchers now say it needs new rules to survive. Brazil’s Pantanal is home to the second-largest population of jaguars (Panthera onca) in the world (after the Brazilian Amazon).

In the Mexican port city of Acapulco, in southwestern Guerrero state, human activities have put so much pressure on the most important lagoons that the mangrove areas in this city have been severely damaged by urbanization and made more vulnerable to damage from hurricanes.