The past two years have been a dramatic period for conservation funding. The greatest attention has focused on the sudden dissolution of USAID in early 2025, as well as the wider crisis in aid funding as European development budgets also undergo major shifts; total international development aid fell by roughly a quarter last year. These changes are driven by political forces and financial pressures that are only likely to intensify in the coming years. USAID’s dissolution alone removed $1 billion annually from the international environmental funding ecosystem, creating sudden deficits and fiscal crises for organizations large and small, all around the world. While most conservation organizations impacted by these changes in the near term are understandably focused on plugging gaps, keeping programs running, and addressing shortfalls, the bigger picture is reckoning with the ‘end of big aid’ and what the future of global conservation funding looks like. Beyond the aid crisis and its implications, though, the present moment is also one of dynamic change and new opportunities in global conservation funding. While it cannot replace the sheer volume of lost public development aid, private philanthropic funding for conservation is on the increase. Climate mitigation funding from foundations- of which nature conservation and restoration is now a significant focus- more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, to roughly $6 billion. A great deal of much-needed focus in recent years has been on the lack of conservation and climate funding reaching Indigenous Peoples and local communities, but here there is also significant…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Fifty automated recording units scattered across the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. gather roughly 500,000 hours of ambient sound each year. Computer models then sift through those recordings for wolf vocalizations, reports Justin Catanoso for Mongabay. Jeffrey Reed, a linguist and former software engineer, helped launch the Cry Wolf Project in 2023 within the long-running Yellowstone Wolf Project. It uses machine learning to pick out and analyze wolf calls. It turns the audio into spectrograms that reveal the structure of individual calls. So far, the project has isolated more than 8,000 continuous hours of wolf recordings, creating what researchers say is the largest database of wild wolf communication. Tracking wolves has generally meant catching them and fitting them with radio collars. Dan Stahler, Yellowstone’s chief wildlife biologist, told Catanoso that doing so is expensive and carries risks for both wolves and people. Recorders can simply be left in the field. Researchers are testing whether differences in wolves’ voices can identify individuals and help track their movements. The idea is also being tested in Europe. In northern Italy’s Po Valley, Osservatorio Lupi — “Wolf Observatory” — has deployed a dozen recording units near farms and towns. It hopes eventually to use the recordings to warn communities when wolves approach livestock. Researchers are exploring similar uses for brown bears and along wildlife migration corridors. Reed has annotated roughly a fifth of the archive by hand to check the models’ results. For now, listening to wolves still involves a fair…This article was originally published on Mongabay

  Last year the Christmas Island shrew, slender-billed curlew, and three Australian bandicoots were among the species formally declared extinct. None has been seen in at least 30 years, but bureaucracy takes a while. They may be joined in the next decade or so by the vaquita and the Sumatran rhino. A child born today may grow up knowing them through archival footage of the last few animals or AI-generated simulations. But biodiversity loss isn’t only about species extinction. The death of a single elder elephant can have consequences for the entire herd. Her knowledge of water sources, for example, can be critical in a drought. And the disappearance of that herd can have knock-on effects on a forest. Seeds lose their dispersal mechanisms, and clearings maintained by elephants may fill in. The result is a less resilient ecosystem even if the change isn’t immediately apparent. Forest elephants in Dzanga Bai, Central African Republic. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay. Delegates gathering in Yerevan, Armenia, for the U.N.’s COP17 biodiversity talks will assess countries’ progress toward goals to slow these kinds of losses. Under the Kunming-Montreal biodiversity framework, adopted in 2022, governments pledged to conserve 30% of land and seas by 2030 and restore degraded ecosystems. Only four years remain before that deadline. The previous agreement doesn’t inspire much hope: not a single one of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets had been fully achieved globally by 2020. Implementation of these agreements is also entirely at the mercy of whoever holds office.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Thousands of delegates are now gathering in Yerevan to discuss the future of life on Earth as we know it at the U.N.’s COP17 biodiversity summit. Countries have made considerable progress in developing national conservation plans under the biodiversity framework agreed to at COP15 in Montreal in 2022, but most remain well off pace to meet the overall goals set for 2030, according to an assessment published by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity on Thursday. The report finds that nearly 90% of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 196 parties have established national biodiversity targets, close to 60% have completed national biodiversity strategies and action plans, and more than 70% have submitted national reports. However, fewer than half of the national targets assessed by governments are on track. The U.S. is not a party to the treaty. Graphical representation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. From State of Biodiversity Action: Global Report on Collective Progress in the Implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework The framework set 23 targets aimed at halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030. They include conserving 30% of the world’s land and seas, restoring 30% of degraded ecosystems, reducing pollution and invasive species, slowing species extinctions, reforming subsidies that damage nature, and mobilizing $200 billion a year for biodiversity. Most countries have incorporated much of that agenda into national policy. At the time the report was prepared, 162 parties (83%) had established targets aligned with the global framework, covering an average of 22…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen to the lowest level on record. Data released today by Brazil’s national space research institute, INPE, shows that forest clearing in Earth’s largest rainforest over the 12 months ended July 31, 2026, amounted to 3,335 square kilometers (1,288 square miles), an area smaller than the Spanish island of Mallorca. That is 42% below the previous year’s figure. INPE PRODES data for 1988-2026. Deforestation in the Cerrado, the wooded savanna next to the Amazon rainforest, fell 24% to 5,516 sq km, also the lowest tally on record. The Cerrado has been the fastest-deforested biome in Brazil in recent decades, as vast areas have been converted to ranchland and industrial agriculture.  The reduction has accelerated since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2023. Lula restored environmental law enforcement, expanded conservation programs, and resumed efforts to establish protected areas and recognize Indigenous territories. He faces a tough re-election bid later this month, raising concerns about whether recent progress in reducing Amazon forest loss will continue. Seven of the nine governors of Amazon states are allied with Flávio Bolsonaro, the frontrunner, who has campaigned on reducing protections for the Amazon. Beyond the political dynamics, the near-term outlook for the Amazon is challenged by the super El Niño brewing in the Pacific. El Niño events are associated with drought in the southern Amazon, and fires typically increase in the year after a strong event. INPE PRODES data for 1988-2026. Deforestation in the Amazon now amounts…This article was originally published on Mongabay

In recent years, there has been a steady stream of ocean conservation pledges, from French Polynesia extending marine protection across its nearly 5 million-square-kilometer exclusive economic zone, including more than 1 million square kilometers of highly or fully protected waters, to the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (CMAR), where Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Panama agreed to establish a contiguous, transboundary safe passage of more than 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) for migratory species. There is also much greater recognition of the contributions made by traditional stewards, including Indigenous communities, artisanal fishers, and other coastal communities. On paper, at least, this would seem to bode well for progress toward protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030. Yet at the same time that these announcements are being made, we also hear about “paper parks” — those protected in name only — industrial fishing vessels entering protected areas, boats turning off their transponders, and abandoned fishing gear drifting through supposedly protected waters. Coral reef in the Pacific. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler / Mongabay Over the summer, looking across academic literature and Mongabay’s multilingual coverage, I tried to pin down what the evidence actually shows about marine conservation outcomes in the Americas. Merging peer-reviewed datasets with field reporting has its limitations, but it helps bridge a common divide: studies document broader ecological trends, while journalists track the political compromises and enforcement lapses that shape what happens on the water. Unsurprisingly, the central takeaway is that marine conservation is most likely to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Twenty months after the dismantling of USAID, a new analysis documents what the international development agency’s disappearance has meant for conservation projects around the world. Projects have stalled or collapsed in countries from Kenya to Bangladesh, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo. Wildlife patrols, forest monitoring, community conservation programs and environmental policy work have all been hit. The report draws on interviews and surveys involving 150 people familiar with the agency’s work in Bangladesh, Peru, Kenya, Colombia and Vietnam. It was produced by One Earth Partners, a consultancy founded by former senior USAID officials Monica Bansal and Hadas Kushnir. U.S. President Donald Trump’s dismantlement of USAID removed nearly $1 billion from global conservation and environment funding. USAID spent $366 million on biodiversity conservation and $257 million on climate adaptation in fiscal year 2024, plus hundreds of millions more on clean energy, natural climate solutions, ocean plastics and pollution. The report traces what happened to some of that work after the agency was dismantled. USAID had trained officials in Colombia and Peru to use satellite data to monitor Amazon deforestation. It was a major supporter of anti-poaching and wildlife law enforcement at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. In Bangladesh, nearly two decades of work had gone into helping communities develop nature-based tourism and negotiate revenue-sharing arrangements around protected areas. Kenya was particularly hard hit. Daniel Sopia, who heads the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association, told Mongabay that…This article was originally published on Mongabay

On June 17, 2015, Philippine officials confiscated thousands of turtles in cement tanks from a warehouse in Palawan, an island province in the Philippines. More than 3,800 of them were endangered Palawan forest turtles (Siebenrockiella leytensis), piled as many as a dozen deep, awaiting export. Some had ulcers on the undersides of their shells or open wounds on their feet; others had been bitten by turtles crowded in alongside them. Sabine Schoppe organized the response. No facility was equipped to deal with thousands of turtles so students built shade and shelters. A former crocodile enclosure was turned into an emergency pond. Schoppe and her colleagues worked around the clock, joined by veterinarians and turtle specialists who came from abroad. “Yesterday by sadness and work, now by hope,” she wrote after help began arriving. Schoppe had arrived in the Philippines from Germany in 1995 after completing a doctorate in biology. She began with bird surveys and coastal resource management in the Visayas before moving to the State Polytechnic College of Palawan, now Western Philippines University, where she was a guest professor of aquatic and marine biology. She also became an associate editor of The Palawan Scientist. The bakoko, as the Palawan forest turtle is known locally, was first described scientifically from specimens said to have come from the Philippine island of Leyte. Those specimens were later destroyed during the bombing of Manila in World War II. For decades scientists didn’t know where the turtles lived until they were eventually found in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

  This is an abridged version of a piece I wrote shortly after her death a year today. I find it hard to believe Jane Goodall is gone. She was more than an icon to me. She was a friend, a mentor, and someone whose presence felt like both a gift and a lesson. Our friendship began in the most Jane way possible: an email that opened, “Yes, this is the real Jane Goodall,” followed by a request that I not share her “secret email address.” She said she admired Mongabay and wanted to meet. That message was the start of thirteen years of laughs, tears, and conversations that often stretched late into the night over vegan Indian food and a glass of whisky in her hotel room—even though I rarely drink or stay out late. Jane had a way of making every encounter feel personal. When she first met my children, she lit up as if she had been waiting her whole life for them to enter the room. She crouched to their level, told stories, and pulled up YouTube videos of rats performing clever tricks. “Aren’t they marvelous?” she said, with the same awe she once expressed for the chimpanzees of Gombe. She told my son he was an inspiration for starting a trash cleanup at his school.  She believed hope was not simply a feeling but a tool. Hope, she would tell me, creates agency. The larger the crisis, the more powerless people feel. But small, local…This article was originally published on Mongabay