Elizabeth Erasito, custodian of Fiji’s parks and places (December 30, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/elizabeth-erasito-custodian-of-fijis-parks-and-places/
- Conservation in small island states is portrayed as a political and administrative challenge shaped by limited land, scarce resources, and external pressures, where development choices often carry irreversible consequences.
- In Fiji, protected areas were expected to deliver conservation, public access, cultural continuity, and economic value at once, while facing storms, fires, invasive species, and illegal extraction with limited capacity.
- Elizabeth Erasito’s career at the National Trust of Fiji centered on making protection work in practice, managing a modest but significant network of parks and heritage sites with an emphasis on monitoring and enforcement rather than expansion.
- She argued that parks should remain accessible and grounded in everyday life, and that short-term development gains rarely justified long-term damage, valuing steady institutional endurance over visible triumphs.
Fishing ‘modernization’ leaves Tanzania’s small-scale crews struggling to stay afloat (December 30, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/fishing-modernization-leaves-tanzanias-small-scale-crews-struggling-to-stay-afloat/
- Tanzania’s boat modernization program aims to empower small-scale fishers with affordable, government-distributed vessels, but has instead left many struggling with unreliable vessels and unsustainable loans.
- In Kilwa district, fishers say the boats they received were poorly equipped, costly to operate and prone to mechanical failure, forcing them to rent missing gear and spend more on fuel.
- Mounting repayment pressure is driving some fishers toward illegal or risky fishing practices, undermining the project’s goal of promoting sustainability.
- Experts warn that poor consultation, mismatched designs and a lack of community input threaten to turn Tanzania’s fisheries modernization plan into a long-term burden rather than a solution.
Southeast Asia’s 2025 marked by fatal floods, fossil fuel expansion and renewed mining boom (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/southeast-asias-2025-marked-by-fatal-floods-fossil-fuel-expansion-and-renewed-mining-boom/
- 2025 has been a year of global upheaval, and Southeast Asia was no exception, with massive disruption caused by changes in U.S. policy and the intensifying effects of climate change.
- The region is poised at a crossroads, with plans to transition away from fossil fuels progressing unevenly, while at the same time a mining boom feeding the global energy transition threatens ecosystems and human health.
- On the positive side, deforestation appears to be slowing in much of the region, new species continue to be described by science, and grassroots efforts yield conservation wins.
A nuclear power plan exposes Kenya’s deeper land rights issues (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/a-nuclear-power-plan-exposes-kenyas-deeper-land-rights-issues/
- Across Kenya, millions of people living on community land remain legally vulnerable, as complex, costly and often obstructive processes prevent them from securing collective land titles under the Community Land Act.
- Because untitled community land is treated as state property, county governments can lease or allocate it for large infrastructure and commercial projects, creating power imbalances and exposing communities to displacement with little say or legal protection.
- In Uyombo, on Kenya’s southern coast, this systemic problem has resurfaced amid plans for the country’s first nuclear power plant, which residents say threaten their land, livelihoods and access to coastal ecosystems, and has proceeded without meaningful consultation.
- The lack of formal land ownership also leaves communities uncertain about compensation, reinforcing fears that development projects can override local land rights — a pattern researchers say is rooted in colonial land policies and persists nationwide.
Top 10 Indigenous news stories that marked 2025 (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/top-10-indigenous-news-stories-that-marked-2025/
- Lack of progress on direct funding for Indigenous land rights, poor representation at climate talks, and intensifying mining pressure were central issues that affected Indigenous peoples in 2025 covered by Mongabay.
- Our investigations revealed how communities were persuaded to sign over land rights for shady carbon deals, and how a high-profile operation to clear out illegal miners from Amazonian territories has barely made a dent.
- We also covered more hopeful stories, highlighting the communities putting forward their own solutions, including women forest guardians in the Amazon, and micro-hydro development in mountainous Philippine villages unreached by the grid.
- To end the year, here are Mongabay’s top 10 stories on Indigenous communities that marked 2025.
Photos: Top new species from 2025 (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/photos-top-new-species-from-2025/
- Scientists described several new species this past year, including a tiny marsupial, a Himalayan bat, an ancient tree, a giant manta ray, a bright blue butterfly and a fairy lantern, to name a few.
- Experts estimate that fewer than 20% of Earth’s species have been documented by Western science, with potentially millions more unknown and unnamed.
- Although such species may be new to science, many are already known to — and used by — local and Indigenous peoples, who often have given them traditional names.
- Many new species are assessed as threatened with extinction as soon as they are found, highlighting the urgent need for conservation efforts.
In California’s redwoods, scientists rebuild lost ecosystems high up in the canopy (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/in-californias-redwoods-scientists-rebuild-lost-ecosystems-high-up-in-the-canopy/
- Roughly 95% of California’s old-growth redwood forests have been logged at least once, leaving mostly young trees and making the overall ecosystem less diverse.
- Fern mats — spongy masses of leather-leaf ferns and decomposed plant matter that build up high in the canopy — are an important part of that system, providing critical habitat for plants and animal in California’s redwood forests.
- Now, a pilot project is trying to restore fern mats to the canopies of particularly robust redwood trees.
- Scientists are finding that manually planting fern mats is also an effective buffer in a warming climate: they mitigate forest temperatures for salmon, birds and a host of other animals.
Amazon fishers help scientists map dam harms to Madeira River stocks (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/amazon-fishers-help-scientists-map-dam-harms-to-madeira-river-stocks/
- Having fishers as protagonists, a recent study disclosed unanswered details about the Amazon communities and fish species most affected by two Madeira River dams.
- The dams limited the natural flow of the Madeira, disrupting the currents that fish need and causing up to a 90% reduction in stocks in some locations; species like pirarucu and tambaqui have largely disappeared from traditional fishing communities.
- The research serves as evidence to support the decade-long legal battle by fishers in Humaitá who are seeking compensation for losses caused by power plants.
George Teariki-Mataki Mateariki, the Birdman of Atiu, has died, aged 67 (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/george-teariki-mataki-mateariki-the-birdman-of-atiu-has-died-aged-67/
- In small island states, conservation often hinges on daily vigilance rather than formal institutions, where routine tasks like watching harbors and checking traps determine whether endemic species survive invasive threats. Such work is repetitive, underfunded, and easily overlooked, yet decisive.
- In the Cook Islands, late-20th-century bird recoveries paired outside science with local enforcement, showing that plans mattered only insofar as they were sustained on the ground at airstrips, wharves, and forest edges.
- George Teariki-Mataki Mateariki, known as Birdman George, embodied this approach by monitoring birds, trapping predators, and responding quickly to changes, helping establish Atiu as a refuge for the critically endangered kakerori and later the Rimatara lorikeet.
- Through guiding visitors, sharing practical knowledge, and maintaining constant vigilance, he treated conservation as prevention rather than rescue, asking not for admiration but for attention, and making extinction less likely through persistence rather than spectacle.
SE Asia’s smallholders struggling to meet EUDR: Interview with RECOFTC’s Martin Greijmans (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/se-asias-smallholders-struggling-to-meet-eudr-interview-with-recoftcs-martin-greijmans/
- The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is set to take effect at the end of 2026, after EU lawmakers voted to postpone its implementation for a second year.
- The legislation aims to reduce commodity-driven deforestation and illegal trade in forest products by enabling companies importing into the EU to trace entire supply chains.
- Experts say the increased oversight is a vital step to reduce the footprint of EU consumption on forests, but caution that many smallholders across Southeast Asia need more support to prepare for compliance, especially on land documentation and geolocation data.
- Without appropriate technical, financial and governance support, observers warn, the new rules could sideline smallholders or push them into less regulated markets, deepening already existing inequities.
Fights against development projects marks 2025 for Nepal’s Indigenous people (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/fights-against-development-projects-marks-2025-for-nepals-indigenous-people/
- From protests to court rulings, for Nepal’s Indigenous peoples and local communities, 2025 was marked by activism and struggles to secure their forests, land and territories from infrastructure projects.
- As threats from hydropower, cable cars and mining projects increased, communities lost touch with their forest, lands and sacred connection with nature, which impacted biodiversity conservation.
- However, communities pushed legal action against these projects that operated without FPIC, community consultation, environmental regulation and safeguards.
From ‘extinct’ to growing, a rare snail returns to the wild in Australia (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/from-extinct-to-growing-a-rare-snail-returns-to-the-wild-in-australia/
Rarely do species presumed extinct reappear with renewed hope for a better future. But researchers in Australia not only discovered a wild population of Campbell’s keeled glass-snail on Australia’s Norfolk Island in 2020 — they’ve now bred the snail in captivity and recently released more than 300 individuals back into the wild, where they’re multiplying. […]
Striking ‘red gold’ with saffron farming in Algeria: Interview with Keltouma Adouane (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/striking-red-gold-with-saffron-farming-in-algeria-interview-with-keltouma-adouane/
- Farmers in Béjaïa, on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast, have been affected by drought in recent years, depressing their harvests and discouraging them from investing in expansion.
- In 2018, Keltouma Adouane bought a kilo of crocus saffron corms; experts doubted they would thrive in Béjaïa’s coastal climate, but she succeeded in growing them and now sells a range of saffron products to local buyers.
- She is working with other women in this province, where agricultural income has stagnated, to develop cultivation and marketing of this valuable crop.
How Mongabay’s journalism made an impact in 2025 (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/how-mongabays-journalism-made-an-impact-in-2025/
The guiding star at Mongabay isn’t pageviews or clicks; it’s meaningful impact. As 2025 draws to a close, we look back at some of the ways Mongabay’s journalism made a difference this year. Empowering Indigenous and local communities A Mongabay Latam investigation found 67 illegal airstrips were cut into the Peruvian Amazon to transport drugs, […]
On Indonesia’s longest river, a Borneo community passes crucial public health milestone (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/on-indonesias-longest-river-a-borneo-community-passes-crucial-public-health-milestone/
- Sekadau is the largest settlement in a district of the same name on Indonesia’s longest river, the Kapuas River in Borneo.
- Historically, Sekadau has recorded higher rates of acute illness that local authorities suggested may be attributable to the widespread practice of open defecation in the river, a public health menace that exacts a range of costs from economic productivity to child stunting.
- This year, the district of Sekadau announced it had eliminated open defecation from all 94 villages in the district of 211,559 people, thanks in part to a campaign to build affordable toilets.
- Data collected by local authorities showed instances of ill health have declined swiftly over the last decade.
Beyond human loss, floods from Cyclone Ditwah devastate Sri Lanka’s wildlife (December 29, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/beyond-human-loss-floods-from-cyclone-ditwah-devastate-sri-lankas-wildlife/
- Cyclone Ditwah caused extensive flooding across several protected areas in Sri Lanka in late November and early December, resulting in mass deaths of deer and other wildlife that perished largely unreported.
- Wildlife officers rescued several stranded elephant calves separated from their herds, including around five still dependent on milk, with fears that more may have perished.
- Floodwaters destroyed roughly 860 kilometers (534 miles) of electric fencing, about one-sixth of the national total, raising the risk of human-elephant conflict in affected regions.
- Floods also drove venomous snakes into residential areas, prompting wildlife officers and volunteers to carry out urgent rescue operations.
15 forces that could reshape conservation in the next 10 years (December 28, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/15-forces-that-could-reshape-conservation-in-the-next-10-years/
- A recent horizon scan led by William J. Sutherland shifts conservation thinking away from visible damage toward emerging developments that could shape biodiversity outcomes over the next decade, even if they have not yet hardened into crises.
- The fifteen issues identified span technology, climate, biology, and finance, with a particular emphasis on computational advances that could expand monitoring and modeling while also narrowing what can later be revisited or challenged.
- Alongside technological change, the scan highlights physical, institutional, and biophysical pressures, from drone-related plastic pollution and new forest finance mechanisms to drying soils, darkening oceans, and abrupt shifts in the Southern Ocean.
- The authors also situate these risks against two background constraints already underway—eroding environmental data systems and tightening conservation finance—and, looking back ten years, argue that the value of horizon scanning lies less in prediction than in improving preparedness before change becomes costly.
Brigitte Bardot, who turned fame into a lifelong fight for animals (December 28, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/brigitte-bardot-who-turned-fame-into-a-lifelong-fight-for-animals/
- In a period when animal protection was often dismissed in public debate as sentimental or marginal, Brigitte Bardot used the force of her celebrity to insist that cruelty toward animals, especially wildlife, was a serious moral and political issue.
- She redirected her fame toward sustained campaigns against practices such as the commercial seal hunt, whaling, fur trapping, and bullfighting, arguing bluntly that wild animals were among the most defenseless victims of modern economic systems.
- By formalizing her activism through the Fondation Brigitte Bardot and maintaining an uncompromising public stance long after leaving cinema, she treated wildlife protection not as a gesture or phase, but as a permanent measure of society’s restraint.
- Bardot died on December 28, 2025 in Saint-Tropez, France. She was 91.
A ‘national pride’ highway meets Indigenous resistance in ancient Nepali settlements (December 28, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/a-national-pride-highway-meets-indigenous-resistance-in-ancient-nepali-town/
- Nepal’s Indigenous Newa communities in Khokana and Bungamati are resisting the Kathmandu–Terai Fast Track expressway, which would cut through their ancestral lands, threatening livelihoods, settlements and cultural identity rooted in centuries-old traditions.
- The government promotes the highway as a “national pride” project to boost connectivity and economic growth, but locals say it was pushed forward without meaningful consultation and dismisses Indigenous rights and heritage.
- Resistance is fueled not only by the highway but by fears that it will trigger a cascade of additional infrastructure projects, including an outer ring road, Bagmati Corridor road expansion, transmission lines, a railway line, and a planned satellite city.
- Community members stress their fight is not about compensation but survival, arguing that money cannot replace their land, culture and civilization, and warning that the expressway would permanently erase their Indigenous way of life.
Clark Lungren and the case for compromise in conservation (December 28, 2025)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/clark-lungren-and-the-case-for-compromise-in-conservation/
- Clark Lungren spent most of his life in Burkina Faso, where he worked on conservation not as an external intervention but as a local, becoming a naturalized citizen and embedding himself in village life. His authority came less from formal credentials than from long familiarity with people and place.
- He was best known for his role in the recovery of the Nazinga area, where wildlife rebounded after communities were granted controlled hunting rights in exchange for protection. The arrangement, initially dismissed by many experts, proved durable.
- Lungren argued consistently that conservation would only last if it aligned with local governance and incentives, a view reflected in community-managed hunting zones and buffer areas around protected lands. He favored workable compromises over strict orthodoxy.
- Active well into his seventies, he continued training, research, and advocacy through a demonstration farm near Ouagadougou. The systems he helped build persisted in a region where many conservation efforts were short-lived.