BIAŁOWIEŻA, Poland — Michal Żmihorski, deputy director of the Institute of Environmental Protection, will never forget the morning of Aug. 1, 2023. Two Belarusian helicopters entered Polish airspace, hovering above the village of Białowieża in eastern Poland, three kilometers (1.9 miles) from the Polish-Belarusian border. The panic was palpable. “We didn’t know if the invasion had begun, if they were going to start dropping bombs,” he says during a conversation at the Białowieża-based Mammal Research Institute. The incident galvanized Żmihorski’s conviction that the borderlands should be impenetrable to enemy forces. “So that bandits on motorbikes can’t get through and start murdering people, because this is a real threat in this area,” says the longtime researcher of the UNESCO-protected Białowieża Forest straddling the Polish-Belarusian frontier. Poland shares a 420-km (261-mi) border with Belarus, 55 km (34 mi) of which runs through the Białowieża Forest, Europe’s last ancient woodland. This sprawling forest, covering an area equivalent to 200,000 football pitches, is among the continent’s top biodiversity hotspots. Consisting of impressive evergreens and broad-leaved trees, the Polish side alone is home to 900 European bison (Bison bonasus) — a species reintroduced to the forest — as well as lynx, wolves and up to 4,000 fungi species. While the specter of a military escalation by Belarus, a country that supports Russia, feels very real to some in this part of Eastern Europe, Poles throughout the country have been impacted by the war ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. To strengthen national security and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

KHON KAEN, Thailand – A wildlife officer holds a leopard cat cub in one hand, its entire body small enough for her fingers to wrap around its torso. With the other hand, she feeds it formula milk from a syringe. This is the latest rescue at the Department of National Parks and Wildlife’s rescue center in Khon Kaen, northeastern Thailand, which rehabilitates and ultimately releases dozens of lost and injured leopard cat cubs every year. Behind the officer, 15 larger leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis), rescued as young cubs months earlier, pace around inside their cages. They look a lot like domestic cats, only slightly more slender and with sharply defined markings on their fur; unlike domestic cats, they bare their teeth and growl whenever a human walks past. Nine of the cats, between 8 and 9 months old, will be released in the forest that afternoon. The other six, a younger cohort, will take their place in the center’s specialized behavioral rehabilitation pens, where they will spend two months practicing their climbing and hunting skills in preparation for life in the wild. Leopard cats are small wild felines common across much of Asia. The IUCN classes them as least concern, though experts believe populations are increasingly vulnerable to hunting and habitat loss. Highly adaptable to changing landscapes, leopard cats often live close to farms and villages. In northeastern Thailand, females are frequently found raising their litters in sugarcane fields. The tall leaves offer shelter from the sun, but proximity to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Funders of the $1.7 billion pledge to support Indigenous peoples and local communities’ land rights, announced at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, say they have exceeded the target by 35%, delivering $2.35 billion between 2021 and 2025. According to the final report of the Forest Tenure Funders Group (FTFG), in 2025 alone, donors provided about $486 million. Sources say the five-year pledge was a major accomplishment, but problems around direct access, regional inequality, funding for women and youth and aid sustainability persist. In 2025, only 7.2% went directly to Indigenous and local community organizations, the latest report found, while the vast majority still flowed through intermediaries, such as NGOs, consultancies and development banks. According to recently updated data in the report, the share of direct funding has increased over the five-year period, from 2.9% of the $351 million provided by donors in 2021, decreasing to 2.1% of the $514 million in 2022. By 2023, this number had risen to 10.6% of the $533 million provided that year, and in 2024, 7.6% of the $467 million provided went directly to these groups. “The pledge was good news, but the figure of the result doesn’t tell us how much actually reached the territories,” Myrna Cunningham Kain, of the Indigenous Miskito community of Waspam and chair of the Guiding Committee at the Pawanka Fund, told Mongabay over email. The Pawanka Fund is a global organization led by Indigenous people that channels financial and technical resources directly to Indigenous peoples and other…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Like a dark cloud of pestilence spreading across the globe in a science fiction movie, a highly contagious, fatal strain of avian influenza is continuing its death march across the globe, infecting wild birds, poultry, dairy cattle and mammals from pole-to-pole, sometimes with massive mortalities. In mid-June, it invaded the last bird flu-free continent, Australia, when the first cases of this lethal virus were detected in migratory seabirds, who likely brought it from the Antarctic to Australian islands, and then, inland. “These outbreaks mark the loss of the last continent previously free from the virus,” said Amandine Gamble, an expert on pathogens in endangered seabirds at Cornell University in the U.S., in a statement. “There are serious concerns for wildlife in Australia, New Zealand and surrounding islands, which are home to many already vulnerable endemic species.” The virus has spread rapidly since then, killing thousands of birds in some 690 “events” as of Oct. 6. An event may involve a confirmed infection or death of one — or many — animals. H5N1 has now spilled over into mammals, including endangered Australian sea lions (Neophoca cinerea) at key breeding sites. Across the globe, species that live or breed in colonies have died in shocking numbers, and this virus continues to mutate and adapt, infecting new hosts. As of publication, it had infected some 613 types of bird and about 112 mammal species, both wild and domestic, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. “We have seen this virus…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Twelve years ago, EU summit leaders announced they had a strategy to tackle unprecedented migrant arrivals.

Next week, they will meet again in Brussels and to tell us something similar.

We journalists will report on the latest twists and turns, hoping to get some sort of angle that hasn’t been covered. But the reality is that our leaders have broadly failed.

Dozens of EU summit conclusions have been published since 2015, when one around million Syrians arrived in Europe to seek protection.

We need stronger external borders to preserve the Schengen passport-free zone, they said. We need partnerships with foreign states to save lives. We need to step up deportations. We need a European solution.

All of these ideas and strategies have found a home in council conclusions, in various iterations, since 2015. All of them.

Some have actually panned out, including an EU migrant swap deal with Turkey and other deals with autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Others like internal reforms on asylum have also been delivered.

Yet the sense of urgency to tackle these issues continues because there is an obvious disconnect between what has been delivered, the promises made and the lived experience on the ground.

People still come. Some 80,000 arrived in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta end of July alone.

Many are still fleeing violence, war and economic hardships. Others are lured by the promise of labour in Europe by Europeans willing to exploit them.

I remember meeting a group of boys from Bangladesh on the Ocean Viking, freshly rescued in the middle of the night, asking when they would be able to start working in Italy.

One of them was still shaking with fear and sobbing, following a near death experience.

The European Commission is now claiming that the drop of irregular arrivals is due to their migration policy reforms, as if the fall of the murderous Assad regime in Syria had no discernible impact.

Perhaps some of that is true. But there is no disputing that Syrians accounted for over 100,000 irregular crossings in 2023, a year before Assad fell. It then dropped to around 6,000. Today, it is around 1,000, according to Frontex.

At some point, one has to wonder if these conclusions, repeated ad nauseam, is nothing but political theatre by a leadership that has run out of ideas.

A push to reopen the door to commercial whaling failed at the recent meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) after a controversial resolution was taken off the table on the last day. The draft resolution, put forward by the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda and co-sponsored by Palau, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and Togo, called for the IWC to discuss the “sustainable use of whale resources” and introduced a path toward the reintroduction of commercial whaling. The bill, however, was ultimately withdrawn by another Caribbean nation, Grenada, which did not co-sponsor the bill, leaving the IWC’s 40-year-old global moratorium on commercial whaling intact. The IWC, an intergovernmental organization that oversees the management and conservation of cetaceans, including whales, dolphins and porpoises, convened its 70th meeting between Sept. 27 and Oct. 2 in Hobart, Tasmania. Approximately 400 delegates from all 89 member governments and several observer organizations attended this year’s commission meeting, which has been held biennially since 2012. The meeting marked 80 years since the IWC was established and 40 years since the moratorium it placed on commercial whaling took effect. The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, the international agreement that established the IWC in 1946, only refers to baleen and toothed whales, leading some to believe the moratorium only applies to these species, and not smaller cetacean species. Experts say the moratorium has aided the recovery of many whale species once on the brink of extinction due to whaling. But other threats to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Some of the photographs that defined the past year will go on display in Oeiras this month as the World Press Photo exhibition returns with 42 award-winning images from around

The post World Press Photo brings the world to Oeiras appeared first on Portugal Resident.

PUERTO WILCHES, Santander – On the banks of Colombia’s largest river, the town and the wider municipality of Puerto Wilches sit amid a maze of wetlands and floodplain lakes in the Middle Magdalena Valley. Residents spend weekends at riverside swimming spots known as balnearios and nearby waterfalls, while local fishermen still cast their nets each morning. Since about 2018, however, the municipality has been a focal point in Colombia’s debate over how to balance energy security, environmental concerns, and the transition away from fossil fuels. In 2021, Puerto Wilches was chosen for two pilot projects to test whether fracking, a method of extracting oil and gas trapped in shale rock, could be done commercially in Colombia, targeting shale formations beneath the region. Then-President Gustavo Petro later halted the projects, arguing that Colombia should move away from fossil fuels rather than expand oil and gas production. But that policy could soon be reversed under the new government of right-wing populist Abelardo de la Espriella, who during his campaign pledged to “fully open the door to fracking.” De la Espriella and other fracking supporters say the practice could help shore up Colombia’s gas supplies. According to the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH), the country’s proven gas reserves will only last another 5.9 years at the current production rate and with no new discoveries. Critics, however, warn that fracking could expose communities and ecosystems to environmental risks while also deepening Colombia’s reliance on fossil fuels, just as the country has been accelerating its clean…This article was originally published on Mongabay

This article is paid for by Council of the Notariats of the European Union (CNUE).

An address rented in a European capital, an electronic signature obtained online, a 48-hour waiting period.

Under the proposed regulation establishing a 28th company law regime, known as ‘EU Inc.’, this could be enough to establish a company with legal personality throughout the European Union.

No share capital would be required. The founder could complete the entire process without appearing, even digitally, before a public authority or another person entrusted with preventive legal control.

There would be no personal verification of their legal capacity, of whether they understand what they are signing, or of whether they are acting on behalf of someone who wishes to remain invisible.

The company could then open bank accounts, enter into contracts, own assets and employ people across the European Union. If the company later fails to meet its obligations, creditors and employees may find that there are no assets to recover and that the person formally responsible for it was acting merely as a front man. 

This scenario illustrates the serious concerns raised by the proposal for a Regulation on ‘EU Inc.’ put forward by the European Commission and currently being examined by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union.

The preventive checks set out in Article 14 of the commission’s proposal are largely limited to formal requirements.

There is no independent and impartial scrutiny of the founders’ legal capacity, of the lawfulness of the articles of association, or of whether the transaction complies with substantive legal requirements. Transfers of shares and capital transactions are also not subject to substantive control. Liquidation is treated primarily as an administrative formality, even though it can directly affect creditors and employees.

The consequences may extend far beyond company law.

Companies own real estate and are entered in land registers. If it is no longer possible to establish reliably who owns a company, it also becomes more difficult to establish who ultimately owns the real estate held by that company. Reliable company information therefore matters for the transparency of property ownership.

‘Not reliably verified’?

If the information in a register has not been reliably verified, others have to verify it themselves. Banks, business partners and investors may need additional legal opinions, audits and insurance. Costs that a preventive check avoids at the outset may therefore arise repeatedly at a later stage.

This would represent a shift from the European tradition of public preventive legal control towards a model that relies more heavily on resolving disputes after they arise.

Delaware is a prominent example of such an approach, supported by specialised courts and a correspondingly prominent role for litigation. Transplanting it to Europe would place additional demands on national judicial systems that lack the necessary resources.

The proposal also raises questions with regard to the recent European efforts to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

The creation of the Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) is the latest milestone in this process. To create, at the very same time, a legal form with significantly reduced checks risks severely undermining these efforts.

The same applies to sanctions: their enforcement depends on knowing who is really behind a company – especially when shares are transferred. Without reliable legality control of share transfers, corporate ownership can change unnoticed and become a vehicle for sanctions circumvention.

The amendments required are straightforward. The acquis of European company law, as established by Directive (EU) 2017/1132 and recently reinforced by Directive (EU) 2025/25, should also apply to EU Inc. companies.

This means reliable identification of founders and directors, public oversight of legal compliance at the time of formation and at subsequent stages, and reliable business registers. 

Public protection

These safeguards exist for a reason.

They protect not only the parties to a transaction, but the public at large. Because they serve a public purpose, they must remain a public responsibility. Private service providers cannot replace independent preventive control carried out under public responsibility. 

How these checks are organised differs between member states. In some member states, public authorities carry them out directly. In others, the state entrusts notaries with this public function.

Notarial involvement therefore does not add another layer of control: the same public function is simply carried out by different public authorities. In many member states, a company can already be formed digitally within 48 hours, with full legal verification carried out by a public official.

The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union will decide their positions in the coming weeks.

There is still time to improve the legislative framework of EU Inc. significantly and to make it a success.

This requires digital and efficient procedures without compromising legal certainty. The rule of law is one of the European Union’s strengths. EU Inc. should build on that strength, not weaken it.

As the midterm election draws near, a number of Republicans in tough races are distancing themselves from President Trump’s war. The war is unpopular because it has inflicted economic pain on the already-suffering American people. No, I am not talking about the Iran War. I am talking about President Trump’s tariff war. The Tax Foundation […]

Treasury Secy Scott Bessent clearly endeavors to be the second Pete Hegseth of Trump World, albeit via packing heat in the form of economic missiles rather than the kinetic kind. In fact, however, his ballyhooed Operation Economic Outcast actually amounts to the greatest windmill tilting operations since Don Quixote himself. So let’s cut to the […]

About 45 million years ago in northern Egypt, a long-snouted crocodile hunted in the warm, shallow sea. Its bones settled into the same limestone formation that ancient Egyptians would later carry and carve into the Great Sphinx. Now, a century after researchers first dug up the fossils, they say the animal is a species new to science. The extinct reptile, named Herugavialis cairensis, is described in a study published in Royal Society Open Science. Like the Sphinx, the fossil is missing the tip of its nose. “Given this coincidence with the famously missing nose of the Great Sphinx, we decided to name the new crocodile after the Egyptian god Heru, who was possibly the inspiration for this iconic monument,” Philip Mannion, a paleontologist at University College London who co-led the study, said in a press release. The fossils, including a nearly complete skull, were recovered in the 1920s from Egypt’s Mokattam Formation. At the time, scientists assigned them to Tomistoma, the genus of the living false gharial (Tomistoma schlegelii), because the two looked alike. An international team from the U.K., Sweden, Germany and Egypt decided to take another look at the fossils with modern tools. Led by Paul Burke of the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, the researchers used CT scans to see inside the skull. They found several features that set the fossil apart from the false gharial. Herugavialis belongs to a group of long-snouted crocodilians called gavials. Fossils show gavials once lived nearly worldwide, and many…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Relics of ancient wet forests stretch across the coast of Queensland state in Australia. In a landscape made patchwork by agriculture, volunteers, community groups and Indigenous rangers in Australia’s Wet Tropics now grow more than 300,000 native plants to turn cleared pasture back into rainforest. But once the young trees shade out the weeds, some groups aren’t keeping track of the trees, a new study finds. That gap means the goals these groups care about most, such as bringing back wildlife and reconnecting fragmented forest, are poorly captured by what most groups measure. Researchers from Australia’s James Cook University and the University of Queensland surveyed 25 organizations doing rainforest restoration in northeastern Australia. The respondents included community groups, conservation land trusts, Indigenous ranger groups, nature market investors, and commercial land managers. The results were published in the journal Restoration Ecology. Australia’s Wet Tropics, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stretches about 450 kilometers (280 miles) along Queensland’s northeast coast, and contain relics of the ancient forests that once covered the supercontinent of Gondwana, according to UNESCO. Mossman Gorge in Daintree National Park in Far North Queensland, Australia. Photo by Merryjack via Flickr (CC BY 4.0) Around 40% of Australia’s bird species live in the Wet Tropics. Of the roughly 2,800 plant species found here, about 700 grow nowhere else in the world, according to the Wet Tropics Management Authority. Rare animals living there include the southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius), the northern bettong (Bettongia tropica), and the spotted-tailed quoll (Dasyurus maculatus). During…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Emily Fulton spends a lot of time in a small boat cruising the waters of Clayoquot Sound off the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. As the marine program manager for the nonprofit Redd Fish Restoration Society, she regularly checks on a newly created kelp nursery growing within the traditional territory of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation. “We have grown a lot of kelp,” Fulton told Mongabay in a phone interview. Touted by its organizers as the largest kelp restoration project on the West Coast of North America, the nursery has planted more than 4,200 square meters (45,200 square feet) of new kelp habitat since launching in early 2026. That’s the footprint of three and a half Olympic-size swimming pools. The team grows baby bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) and giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) on four lines; each 330 meters (1,083 feet) long, submerged below the water’s surface and away from seafloor predators such as sea urchins. As the kelp grows and matures, they’ll take some of it off the lines and transplant it to sites throughout Clayoquot Sound, to restore degraded kelp forests and also seed new ones. Getting a project of this scale up and running has cost almost a quarter of a million Canadian dollars. The funding has come from various sources, including the provincial government, the World Wildlife Fund of Canada and the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust. Managing the project alongside Redd Fish is West Coast Kelp, a business devoted to kelp restoration and the Tla-o-qui-aht…This article was originally published on Mongabay

In October 2006, I was supposed to be starting my dissertation research on tropical reforestation in Indonesia. Instead, I found myself in the forests of Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan helping locals to fight fires with brooms, backpack pumps, and hoses connected to hand-dug water wells. It was an ‘all hands-on deck’ moment for the local NGO I was working with then — Friends of Nature, People and Forests (FNPF) — including Basuki Santoso, FNPF’s Kalimantan program manager, alongside Adut and Isam, who were teenagers at the time. On our first night of firefighting, we slept in the forest on a raised platform that would later become part of a field station. I was awoken in the middle of the night by a sun bear rifling through our makeshift kitchen about 20 feet away. I sat frozen, watching this wild animal who was fleeing the fires while everyone else slept soundly. It was a surreal and humbling moment. Twenty years ago, these severe forest and peatland fires were due to a dangerous combination of El Niño-induced drought, slash-and-burn agriculture and other land clearing, and the grass-fire cycle. Much of Southeast Asia was left choking on the haze, and that was a weak El Niño year. Firefighting in Indonesia often requires resourcefulness as well as resilience and fortitude. Image courtesy of Basuki Santoso. History keeps repeating itself, and it’s hard to watch. Experts say we are now facing a Super El Niño. For the past three months, millions of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

HONG KONG — “Spiderman … Tom Holland,” two secondary school boys repeated to each other as they watched conservationist Harry Wong nimbly climb a tall tree at their school, St. Louis School, in downtown Hong Kong. On a humid September afternoon, Wong installed a nest box for yellow-crested cockatoos (Cacatua sulphurea) on a candlenut tree (Aleurites moluccanus). Equipped with a harness and ropes, he climbed up the tree, installed the box, and quickly rappelled down. Wong and Astrid Andersson, a biologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), are the dynamic duo behind HK Cockatoo Watch, a conservation project that seeks to protect the city’s feral yellow-crested cockatoos. Arborist and conservationist Harry Wong installs a nest box for yellow-crested cockatoos on a tree at St. Louis School in Hong Kong on Sept. 7, 2026. Image by Yenni Kwok/Mongabay. Yellow-crested cockatoos are considered to be critically endangered, with fewer than 2,000 individuals remaining in their native range in eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste. However, few people know that Hong Kong is home to the largest wild population of the species outside the two Southeast Asian countries. There are roughly 200 cockatoos in the city, or about 10% of the global wild population, believed to be descendants of released or escaped pets. The number is stable, thanks to the lack of natural predators and strict legal protection. A recent DNA analysis study by Andersson and her research team found that Hong Kong’s feral cockatoos have unexpectedly high genetic diversity and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Steve Rose investigates a catastrophic pollution incident at Furnace Brook, a fishing lake in East Sussex, where thousands of fish suddenly died and the local ecosystem collapsed. Neighbours suspect pollution from nearby Morgans Farm, and Rose examines whether their concerns are justified. In doing so, he uncovers broader national problems with water pollution, illegal waste dumping, and the limited power and resources councils and regulators have to tackle them.

He headed about half a mile up the valley to a tributary joining the stream from a neighbouring property named Morgans Farm. “You could clearly see the water upstream [of the tributary] was totally normal, a sandy colour with clay silt in it, and what was below it had gone a blue-black colour. You could see dead brook trout, wild eels, and there was a dead crow or raven, which may well have eaten something poisonous from the river.” In some places, he says, there was a thick layer of blue-grey scum on the water, which he later learned is sometimes called “bacterial cheese”. “There’s so much nutrient [sic] in the water that it allows for a bacterial colonisation explosion.” The bacteria take up all the oxygen, which causes most of the fish, especially the older, larger ones, to die.

Indonesia’s government is imposing new restrictions on access to geospatial data, raising concerns among researchers and activists that it will suppress environmental science and advocacy work in one of the world’s most biodiverse countries. For around a month, visitors to an interactive mapping platform maintained by the Ministry of Forestry have been greeted with a pop-up legal notice warning that the information is “view-only” and that anyone who “downloads” or “extracts” it without the ministry’s written permission “will be prosecuted” under the 2008 Electronic Information and Transactions, or ITE, Law. Anyone who wants to use the once freely accessible platform, known as SIGAP, must first agree to “terms and conditions” stating that the relevant articles in the ITE Law “carry penalties of up to 9 years in prison and/or a fine of up to Rp 3 billion [$170,000],” the notice says. On Sept. 21, the ministry’s Directorate General of Forestry Planning posted a video to Instagram outlining a new application process that requires prospective users to disclose their research aims and submit supporting documents. Doni Prabowo, the department’s head of forest monitoring and geospatial information, told Mongabay that restrictions were needed because geospatial data had been uncontrolled for a long time, creating opportunities for manipulation and illegal trading of the country’s precious information. “What if somebody manipulates the data and says certain areas are not protected forest [when they really are]? It could be dangerous,” Doni said by phone. He said he’d heard of the ministry’s geospatial data being listed…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Reprinted with permission from Trita Parsi‘s Substack:  Michelle Brohard, head of policy and geopolitical risk at Kpler, speculated in a recent interview with energy analyst Rory Johnston (@commoditycontext) that the reason why more crude is getting through the Strait of Hormuz may be because some countries are paying Iran a toll, possibly up to 20% […]

Reprinted from John’s Substack:  The Trump administration and its supporters – including the Wall Street Journal editorial page – are working overtime these days to spin the news around the Iran war to make it appear that the US is winning and Tehran had better submit to Washington’s demands before it is wrecked, maybe even […]