The last known photo of the slender-billed curlew, a grayish-brown migratory waterbird, was taken in February 1995 at Merja Zerga, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

There will likely never be another one.

The species, Numenius tenuirostris, has officially been declared extinct by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

“The extinction of the Slender-billed Curlew is a tragic and sobering moment for migratory bird conservation,” Amy Fraenkel, executive secretary of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), said in a statement. “It underscores the urgency of implementing effective conservation measures to ensure the survival of migratory species.”

Details of the exact breeding and wintering sites of the slender-billed curlew have been hazy at best, although it’s known to have bred in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe, and migrated to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

In June 1995, the slender-billed curlew was included among 255 priority species of waterbirds listed in the then-new Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA), according to the CMS press release.

The latest IUCN assessment of the species notes that historically the slender-billed curlew was likely locally common, but there were signs of decline as early 1912. By the 1940s, researchers were warning the bird might already be close to extinct.

In a study published November 2024, researchers concluded the bird most likely went extinct sometime in the mid-1990s, after that last verified sighting in Morocco. At the time, Graeme Buchanan, the study’s lead author and conservation scientist with U.K-based NGO Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), told Mongabay the study was born out of the need for a formal, quantitative assessment of the species’ status, so conservation support wasn’t withdrawn too soon or too late.

The latest IUCN assessment now confirms the species’ extinction. “This is the first-ever recorded global bird extinction from mainland Europe, North Africa, and West Asia,” Esther Kettel, an ecologist at Nottingham Trent University, U.K., writes in The Conversation.

Geoff Hilton, conservation scientist at U.K.-based charity Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, previously told Mongabay that news of the bird’s extinction was “a source of deep sadness.”

“We arguably spent too much time watching the bird’s decline and not enough actually trying to fix things,” he said. “Although that’s easy to say: it’s not clear what really we could have done that would have made a difference.”

Migratory shorebirds like the slender-billed curlew have been declining worldwide, Birdlife International warned last year. “The Eurasian curlew (Numenius arquata), a relative of the slender-bill, is of particular conservation concern and is thought to be the UK’s most rapidly declining species,” Kettel writes.

“[T]he Slender-billed Curlew’s extinction serves as a poignant reminder that conservation frameworks must be implemented swiftly, backed by adequate science, resources and sustained political will,” Jacques Trouvilliez, the AEWA executive secretary, said in the press release.

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

“I knew I was disposable.”

That realization, from earlier in his career, helps guide Willie Shubert today in building a kind and capable global newsroom.

Shubert oversees Mongabay’s English-language newsroom — its largest — and shapes the organization’s global editorial strategy. His work ranges from deciding which forest to investigate next to building the conceptual framework for Mongabay’s model of impact. “This work enables Mongabay to scale up the volume and size of grants that fund our journalism,” he explains in an interview.

His days are spent shifting constantly between tasks: assessing security risks for reporters in remote regions, drafting proposals, and refining the workflows that keep a globally distributed newsroom aligned. “My day-to-day life is quite diverse,” he says.

Shubert’s path began at National Geographic, where he helped produce more than 30 international editions of the magazine. It was, he recalls, “a crash course in how to do high-quality journalism with a lot of resources.” Acting as a “living English dictionary” for translators taught him precision, while launching the magazine’s early social media channels showed him how legacy institutions could reach new audiences. But he soon realized he wanted to be closer to the work itself. “I wasn’t in a position to practice journalism,” he says. “Competition was fierce, and I knew I was disposable.”

He found that opportunity at Internews’s Earth Journalism Network, where he helped build a global community of environmental reporters — many in the Global South — capable of explaining complex science in accessible ways. He also helped create data-driven outlets such as InfoAmazonia and launched a grants program that helped local journalists tell stories once overlooked by international media. “The best opportunity for a journalist isn’t a workshop or a fellowship,” he says. “It’s a job.”

That conviction ultimately led him to Mongabay, whose model — paying journalists to produce independent environmental reporting — matched his vision for durable impact. For Shubert, that impact is seen not in clicks but in “forests still standing.” He cites investigations that halted plantation expansion in Suriname and blocked a carbon deal in Malaysian Borneo that would have displaced Indigenous communities.

Such outcomes, he says, depend on persistence and trust.

“You have to trust people,” he says. “No one can do it alone.” For Shubert, journalism is slow, patient work — connecting evidence with empathy so that people can make better decisions for the environment and humanity, one story at a time.

Read the full interview with Willie Shubert here.

Banner image: Willie Shubert with lemurs at a rehabilitation center in Madagascar. Visitors aren’t permitted to touch the lemurs, but the lemurs do as they please. Image by Rhett Ayers Butler/Mongabay.

A South African court has nullified the environmental authorization for state-owned electricity utility Eskom’s proposed 3,000-megawatt gas-fired power plant. The court cited multiple reasons for its decision, including the failure to adequately consult local residents and consider the full impacts of the power plant’s entire life cycle on climate change.

“This ruling shows that environmental authorities must protect people and future generations, not fossil fuel interests,” Yegeshni Moodley of local NGO Groundwork, one of the applicant civil society organizations, told Mongabay. 

Eskom aimed to build the natural gas power plant in the state-owned Richards Bay Industrial Development Zone (RBIDZ) in the country’s KwaZulu-Natal province. Groundwork and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance challenged the project at the Pretoria High Court in 2022, arguing, among other points, that the project’s greenhouse gas emissions were inconsistent with South Africa’s commitment to decarbonization. However, the judge ruled in Eskom’s favor. Both nonprofits then challenged the High Court ruling at the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA).

The SCA agreed with them, finding that the environmental impact assessment had failed to consider renewable energy alternatives and cumulative impacts associated with gas extraction and transportation, besides inadequate community consultation.

The ruling passed in September also found that the environment minister, Dion George, had acted unlawfully in granting approval for the project, as his decision failed to comply with key principles of the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA). The court further noted that the country’s obligations under the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change are legally relevant commitments that should inform environmental decision-making.

Moodley said the case reflects growing judicial recognition of the urgency of climate change and the tangible harms experienced by communities.

Many African countries are pursuing natural gas as an energy source. Gas is also a cornerstone of the South African government’s plan to transition away from coal, as it’s seen as a “cleaner” fuel. However, research suggests while natural gas production emits less CO2 than coal, its emissions of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas, can be considerable, negating the CO2 benefits. 

Moodley said that Groundwork and other NGOs have challenged all 12 gas power plant projects currently proposed in South Africa, including five within the RBIDZ. Mongabay contacted the industrial zone’s operator for comment about what the court ruling means for those projects, but hadn’t received a response by the time this article was published.

Eskom told Mongabay in a written response that the ruling was a setback, but said that gas remains central to its energy strategy. “The judgment does not affect the planning and implementation of Eskom and government planning for new energy infrastructure,” a spokesperson said, adding that Eskom is still studying the judgment.

Mongabay also contacted South Africa’s energy department and environment department, but neither responded to our requests for comment.

Banner image: An Eskom power station in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province. Image courtesy of Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp (CCBY-ND4.0).

Scientists have described a new species of mouse opossum discovered in 2018 in the cloud forests of the Peruvian Andes, 2,664 meters (8,740 feet) above sea level. The find was reported by Mongabay Latam staff writer Yvette Sierra Praeli.

The new marsupial is named Marmosa chachapoya after the ancient Chachapoya people who once lived in the region. Its body is just 10 centimeters (4 inches) long with a tail longer than its body at 15 cm (6 in). It also has a Zorro mask-like dark mark around its eyes.

“I realized immediately that this was something unusual,” biologist Silvia Pavan, the lead author of the new species description, said in a statement.

The the first and only known specimen of the species was found in the Abiseo River National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for its rare biodiversity and pre-Columbian archaeological sites.

Compared with other animals in the same genus, M. Chachapoya looks physically different and it was found at a much higher altitude than is common for other mouse opossum species in its genus.

“That was our first sign that what we had captured was probably another species,” co-author Pamela Sanchez-Vendizú, a mammologist at Peru’s National University of San Marcos, told Praeli.

Genetic sequencing later showed the animal was nearly 8% genetically different from its closest relative in the Marmosa genus.

Researchers noted that Abiseo River National Park, along with other remote regions of the Andes, are still likely full of undiscovered species. The region’s canyons, dense vegetation and steep slopes make exploration physically challenging. But that same difficult terrain offers a wide variety of habitats, creating a biodiversity hotspot.

Pavan had initially set out with a team of researchers to find another species, an endemic squirrel last seen in the 1990s. They did not catch any individuals of the rare squirrel but stumbled upon the marsupial as well as several other new-to-science species during the 2018 expedition, including a semiaquatic rodent that is yet to be formally described by the team.

“It is a highly endemic area for small mammal diversity,” Pavan told Praeli. “It is an area that has been scarcely studied scientifically. So, there are likely other species there that still need to be described.”

The original story by Yvette Sierra Praeli, written in Spanish, can be read here.

Banner image: The new-to-science Marmosa chachapoya species. Photo courtesy of Silvia Pavan.

A coalition formed to align the international banking sector’s investments with global climate goals has disbanded nearly four years after it was launched.

Set up in 2021, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was a U.N.-sponsored initiative to shift bank financing away from fossil fuels — the biggest source of climate changing greenhouse gases — and toward net-zero emissions by 2050. Members were required to set five-year targets and provide detailed reports on how they planned to meet their goals.

“The NZBA had laid out a timeline for members to develop detailed transition plans meaning the rubber was starting to meet the road and banks globally, not just in the US, were getting cold feet,” Allison Fajans-Turner, who works in climate and energy finance with the Rainforest Action Network, told Mongabay by email.

However, the alliance began hemorrhaging participants following the U.S. election of Donald Trump and his anti-environment rhetoric. All the major U.S. and Canadian banks withdrew from the group, soon followed by many European and Japanese financial institutions.

According to a 2025 report, bank financing for fossil fuels fell in 2022 and 2023 but grew more than 20% in 2024. As of 2024, the world’s 65 largest banks, many which were once part of the NZBA, had invested roughly $7.9 trillion in fossil fuels since 2016, when the Paris Agreement to limit climate change went into effect.

“Trump’s election was absolutely a catalyst, but the wheels had been set in motion before his election,” Truzaar Dordi, a climate finance researcher at the University of York, U.K., told Mongabay by email.

“The alliance’s real purpose was creating the illusion of action to stall and delay regulation,” Truzaar said, adding that banks routinely pointed to participation in the NZBA when regulators or shareholders pressed them on climate. Now that the NZBA has disbanded, “paradoxically, this might accelerate momentum for regulation as voluntary alternatives are so definitively discredited,” he said.

The collapse of the NZBA could also push fossil fuel-rich countries, including many in Africa, to invest further in fossil fuel infrastructure, “which risks becoming a stranded asset as global demand declines. This would leave African nations with significant debt and environmental damage, while missing the critical opportunity to leapfrog to renewables,” Truzaar said.

The collapse of the NZBA, experts say, presents an opportunity to replace a failed voluntary system with a stronger, mandatory framework for regulating financial investments in industries most responsible for driving the climate crisis.

“NZBA’s legacy is that voluntary approaches don’t work. Banks have proven they won’t sacrifice profitable fossil fuel relationships no matter what they promise publicly,” Truzaar said.

Mongabay reached out to the International Banking Federation, which represents more than 18,000 banks internationally, and the U.S.-based Bank Policy Institute, but did not receive a response by deadline.

Banner image: The Trans-Alaska Pipeline system required bank investments. Image by Luca Galuzzi via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 2.5)

The U.S. has blocked a global fee on shipping emissions as an international maritime meeting ended Friday without adopting new regulations. The world’s largest maritime nations had been discussing ways to move the shipping industry away from fossil fuels. On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump urged countries to vote against the regulations. The International Maritime Organization adjourned its meeting Friday. The proposed regulations would have set a marine fuel standard and imposed fees for emissions above allowable limits. Shipping emissions have grown to about 3% of the global total, prompting calls for action.

By: Sibi Arasu and Jennifer McDermott, Associated Press

Banner image:  Tokyo Tower is visible amid tall buildings as a container ship leaves a cargo terminal in Tokyo, April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Hiro Komae, File)