New Future

KATHMANDU — Whenever Chandra Prakash Pathak visits neighboring farms in his hometown of Lumbini, in southwestern Nepal, he sees a thick blanket of black smog. The problem is more severe in winter, when the country doesn’t receive much rainfall.

WEST JAVA, Indonesia – A billion-dollar push to expand fish farming on the island of Java to support Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s free school meals program will absorb protected forests nearly the size of Washington, D. C. , according to the country’s largest environmental group.

In late August, high in South Africa’s Jonkershoek Mountains, a small group of botanists picked their way across steep ground in search of one of the world’s rarest plants. They were surveying Penaea formosa, a critically endangered shrub thought to number fewer than 50 individuals.

How are rhinos faring around the world? As per new findings, it’s a “mixed bag. ” According to a report published by the nonprofit International Rhino Foundation, the number of Javan rhinos, on the Indonesian island of the same name, have plummeted as a result of poaching.

Eight Socorro dove chicks hatched at Chester Zoo in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this year. These brown floofs represent a significant milestone for a species that is extinct in the wild. Socorro doves once lived fearlessly on Socorro Island, located 400 kilometers southwest of Mexico’s Baja California coast.

In 2017, when Vincent Deblauwe joined the Cameroon-based Congo Basin Institute to study African ebony — economically valuable pitch-black, dense wood — the Indigenous Baka people accompanied him on his field trips.

COLOMBO — In recent months, elephants have stolen the spotlight yet again in Sri Lanka’s mainstream and social media. The surge in attention to them began when a series of deadly train collisions killed several elephants, followed by the agonizing death of the iconic tusker Bhahiya, whose final days were made into emotional videos.

Five months after the World Bank’s private investment arm submitted its action plan to address community grievances against a rubber plantation it funds in Liberia, affected residents are still waiting for its implementation.

For local communities in Brunei, the longest bridge in Southeast Asia does more than connect remote eastern areas to the country’s urban capital; it also opens up access to rainforests teeming with unique biodiversity and protected species.

Kenya is in the process of building its very first nuclear power station. According to forecasts by the Kenya Nuclear Power and Energy Agency , construction is due to start by 2027 and will produce 1,000 MW of power.

By 1970, scientists had spent 65 years thinking the black lion tamarin, a small monkey with a spectacular mane, was extinct. That year, locals found a small population of the species clinging to survival in a patch of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s Balam Kú Biosphere Reserve has been invaded over the past year by people trying to establish a permanent settlement, and officials are racing to remove them before more of the forest is destroyed.

Some 30,000 years ago, Stone Age people decorated a cave, today known as Cueva de los Casares, in central Spain with pictures of mating humans , geometric shapes, and animals. The most popular carved animal is the wild horse. Cueva de los Casares sports at least two dozen images of wild horses.

The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization recently announced the creation of a formal role for Indigenous peoples, giving them a voice for the first time in one of the Amazon Basin’s most important intergovernmental bodies.