Glaciers are often treated as scenic features or scientific curiosities. In fact, they are critical infrastructure. Though they cover roughly a tenth of the Earth’s land surface, meltwater from glaciers…
Over the past year, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K., officially named 125 plants and 65 fungi. The new-to-science species include a parasitic fungus that turns…
Conservation often presents itself as a technical enterprise: how much land to protect, which species to prioritize, what policies deliver results. A recent paper in Nature argues that this framing…
It was 27 December 2004. I was sitting at my computer in my office in Jakarta, Indonesia, my mind busy with plans for the New Year party I had organized…
CAPE TOWN — Western leopard toads have been listed as endangered since 2016. Andrew Turner, scientific manager for CapeNature, the government body that manages protected areas and conservation in South…
In India, arguments about nature are often treated as friction in the path of progress. Madhav Gadgil insisted they were arguments about power: who gets to decide what happens to…
Why Mongabay is reporting on California’s biodiversity Mongabay’s coverage of biodiversity has long been associated with tropical forests and far-flung frontiers. Yet California—wealthy, populous, and intensively studied—presents a different…
The death of a well-known wild animal is an odd kind of news. It is intimate, because so many people feel they have met the creature through photographs and video.…
Extinction is rarely a moment. It is a process that unfolds offstage, marked by missed sightings, thinning records, and the slow reassignment of hope to footnotes. Discovery, too, is rarely…
Universities like to present themselves as durable institutions. They outlast governments, ride out recessions, and take pride in the slow accumulation of knowledge. In Australia, that confidence has been tested…
Encompassing some 7,400 square kilometers, or 2,860 square miles, along the Honduran border, Nicaragua’s Bosawás Biosphere Reserve is the largest biosphere reserve in Central America. It’s home to the Miskito…
A transparent goby fish drifted through the darkness, its skeleton visible through paper-thin skin. Nearby, a sea slug wore yellow polka dots like a party dress, while an orange fish…
In the early 2000s, José Juan Flores Martínez was studying for a bachelor’s degree in biology and working as a volunteer in a program designed to control invasive rodents on…
Updated on Jan 2, 2026 with final 2025 figures In 2025, Mongabay published more than 7,300 stories across eight languages. The volume reflects a newsroom that has expanded geographically and…
Conservation philanthropy often favors urgency: campaigns, deadlines, the language of crisis. A smaller group of donors has worked differently, treating environmental protection as a problem of capacity and continuity. They…
Deep within the cloud forests of the San Martín region of Peru lie two places so high, cold and remote that they remained virtually unexplored for decades. In 2022, and…
She wrote about damage that accumulated slowly, in places most people did not look, and about the systems that allowed it to be ignored. When her own life was overtaken…
Brazil’s Triunfo do Xingu Environmental Protection Area encompasses an area of Amazon Rainforest more than half the size of Belgium. Or at least it used to. The embattled reserve has…
In the late 20th century, forest conservation in the eastern United States was rarely a matter of sweeping victories or clean resolutions. It was a practice shaped by hearings that…
The work of conservation in small island states is rarely abstract. It is shaped by land that is limited, institutions that are thinly resourced, and pressures that arrive from far…
In small island states, conservation has often depended less on formal institutions than on vigilance: watching harbors, checking traps, noticing what does not belong. The work is repetitive, practical, and…
Smallholders produce significant quantities of Vietnam’s coffee, Indonesia’s palm oil, and Thailand’s rubber exported into the EU. Yet under the bloc’s upcoming deforestation-free regulation (EUDR), industry experts say small-scale producers…
Conservation debates are usually framed by damage already visible. Forests are cleared, fisheries decline, protected areas invaded, and budgets cut. Developments that have not yet hardened into crises tend to…
In the second half of the 20th century, animal protection was often treated in public debate as a minor cause, sentimental at best and unserious at worst. It sat uncomfortably…
In the late 1980s, something began to go wrong in places that were supposed to be safe. Protected cloud forests, buffered from chainsaws and bulldozers, started losing animals that had…
Half the planet lies outside any country’s border. In those waters, rules have long been thinner than the myths: freedom to fish meant freedom to take; “out of sight” became…
The story of the world’s tropical forests in 2025 was not one of dramatic reversal, but one shaped by accumulated pressure. In several regions, deforestation slowed. In others, loss continued…
For much of the late 20th century, environmental writing oscillated between alarm and reassurance. One strand emphasized catastrophe; another urged optimism. A smaller, more demanding tradition insisted on neither denial…
When it comes to capturing carbon, trees have always been our go-to. But a sinister switch is underway. A study published in the journal Nature reveals that moist tropical forests…
As the world grapples with climate change, biodiversity loss and resource scarcity, Indigenous and local communities (IPLCs) remain at the forefront of conservation, yet are often sidelined in global environmental…
I write short obituaries for people who spent their lives protecting parts of the natural world. I work on them in the margins of other responsibilities, yet they have become…
For much of the second half of the 20th century, the American outdoors attracted a particular kind of devotee. They moved easily between disciplines, took seasonal work without much…
