Satellite data and imagery confirm ongoing deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon around colonies of Mennonites, a group of highly conservative Christian communities.

Mennonites, whose early history can be traced to Europe in the 16^th century, are known for their large-scale industrialized agriculture. By the late 19^th century, they migrated to Canada, from where they have been fanning out to various parts of Latin America in search of land for new agricultural settlements, or “colonies.”

Mennonite colonies first began appearing in Peru’s rainforests around 2017, and deforestation due to their activities has spiked from zero in 2017 to more than 8,660 hectares (21,400 acres) in 2024, according to the latest update by the U.S.-based nonprofit Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP).

“It is clear the Mennonites will continue growing population and expanding deforestation if the government does not implement more effective strategies,” Matt Finer, senior research specialist and director of MAAP, told Mongabay by email.

MAAP’s analysis, published in October, examined all five Mennonite colonies in Peru — Chipiar, Vanderland, Osterreich, Providencia and Masisea — and found that deforestation around all of them were continuing as of September 2024.

Deforestation around the newest Chipiar colony, for instance, has reached 2,708 hectares (6,692 acres) since 2020, MAAP’s analysis found. Visualizing Chipiar colony on the Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform shows considerable deforestation and fire alerts as recently as October.

Data and imagery from GFW also show a dramatic burst of continued forest loss around the Masisea colony in October.

Finer said that while MAAP’s analysis focuses on actual deforestation, a lot of what’s seen in the October GFW images appear to indicate burning as a result of fires meant for clearing forested areas escaping into surrounding areas.

“I don’t have more information other than in the imagery it appears to be escaped fire damage, I don’t know who started the fire,” Finer said. “And yes that is different than actual deforestation.” Mongabay couldn’t immediately confirm the reasons behind the latest clearings.

Previous Mongabay investigations have found that much of the land grab by the Mennonites in Peru’s forests is likely illegal. Some of their settlements also overlap with the territories of Indigenous communities, and the colonies are being investigated by the country’s authorities.

“We delivered a pair of confidential reports to the Peruvian government in early October alerting them to the continuing deforestation in Chipiar and also Vanderland,” Finer said.

Banner image of clearing around the Chipiar Mennonite colony in Peru, courtesy of Global Forest Watch.

The Biden administration recently clarified its position on a global treaty calling for a reduction in the amount of new plastic produced: It no longer supports production caps.

Previously, the U.S. said it recognized the need to regulate plastic over its entire life cycle, including limiting its production.

“So, the U.S. has been very vague,” Bjorn Beeler, international coordinator with the International Pollutants Elimination Network, told Mongabay in a phone call. “Some people heard the vagueness and they determined that they [the U.S.] were suggesting that there should be caps. And the U.S. let everybody run with that.”

“The only thing the U.S. has done now is clarified what they’ve meant,” Beeler added. In other words, the U.S. has acknowledged that capping plastic production could help address the plastic waste problem, but it doesn’t think mandatory caps are a “viable landing zone,” according to reporting from Grist. 

Calling for a global cap on new plastic production would have put the U.S. in line with nearly 70 other countries, including Canada, France and Japan, that make up the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution.

Top fossil fuel producing countries, including Saudi Arabia and China, have opposed stringent measures to limit plastic production and advocate for a less ambitious approach instead. Nearly all plastic is derived from oil and gas byproducts.

As the world shifts away from oil and gas for energy, “Plastics is the Plan B for the fossil fuel industry,” said Judith Enck, founder and president of the nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Plastics.

“Many of these fossil fuel states are really just trying to obstruct the whole process,” Beeler said.

It’s unclear which approach the U.S. will support. The U.S. is the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and one of the largest producers of plastic. While the Biden administration has been vague on its position on plastic, the incoming Trump administration has always been clear in its support for the fossil fuel industry.

“A Trump election would really spell doom, I think, for a strong treaty, at least one that includes the United States,” U.S. Representative Jared Huffman told Politico before the election.

The U.S. clarification comes as delegates prepare to meet in Busan, South Korea, for the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-5) with the goal of developing an instrument to tackle the growing problem of plastic pollution.

In next couple decades, plastic production is expected to grow by roughly 300%, Beeler said. “So, limiting new plastic production could mean not 300% growth, but 200% growth,” he said.

A 200% growth rate would still be a disaster for wildlife, Earth’s planetary systems and human health, scientists say.

“Plastics are climate change and cancer,” Beeler said, stressing the need for action at INC-5 in South Korea.

Banner image: A woman pulls a large bag filled with plastic waste in a landfill in Bangladesh. Image by Mumtahina Tanni via Pexels (Public domain).

A frog smaller than a pencil eraser has hopped into the record books as the one of the smallest vertebrates known to science. Researchers formally described the species in late October 2024 after encountering it in the Atlantic Forest in southeastern Brazil’s São Paulo state.

At a length of 6.95 millimeters (0.27 inches), Brachycephalus dacnis has given scientists a new appreciation of just how small vertebrates can get. The only known frog smaller than this, found in February 2024 in northeastern Brazil, beats it by just 0.5 mm (0.02 in) but struggles with balance.

Frogs in the tiny Brachycephalus genus are notorious for their clumsy landings, often tumbling over or falling on their heads after jumping, as their vestibular systems were compromised in their evolution to be small.

But the B. dacnis retained its inner ear structure, allowing it to hear and leap quite proficiently. Researchers found that it can jump an impressive 32 times its own size, with surprising grace.

“The size makes this frog very special,” Edelcio Muscat, one of the researchers who described B. dacnis and a coordinator at Projeto Dacnis, a conservation NGO working in the Atlantic Forest, told Mongabay by phone. “The miniaturization process hasn’t affected any of its organs or its skeleton.”

In 2016, Muscat was on a typical nighttime expedition carefully turning over leaves on the forest floor when one of the frogs jumped out. Recordings of its croak, more akin to a cricket’s chirp than a typical toad’s ribbit, would confirm it was a unique species years later.

Brazil is home to the world’s largest number of amphibian species, most of them in the Atlantic Forest, a biodiversity hotspot encompassing Brazil’s largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with dozens of species described every year. Just 13% of the original Atlantic Forest remains.

“The discovery of this species reveals how much we’ve lost without even realizing it,” Adrian Garda, a herpetologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, not involved in the study, told Mongabay by phone. “Right before our eyes, such a peculiar and extremely miniaturized vertebrate existed. What might we have lost over the past 40 to 80 years of industrialization?”

Worldwide, nearly 41% of amphibian species are threatened with extinction, compared with 26.5% of mammals, 21.4% of reptiles and 12.9% of birds.

B. dacnis is speckled brown and white and has survived by blending in and laying low. Its tiny size helps it avoid predators, and the leaves of the forest floor provide thermal comfort, which might help protect it against the brunt of climate change, Muscat said.

“The discovery shows us how much we need to preserve the Atlantic Forest,” Muscat said. “There are still species it supports that we have not yet found.”

Banner image: A B. dacnis rests on a fingertip, courtesy of Lucas Machado Botelho.

A recent report says that a new Philippine law meant to hold companies responsible for their plastic waste is showing “promising results,” with most of the country’s largest plastic packaging producers going beyond the minimum recovery target. But critics say the law has several shortcomings.

The Philippines’ Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) law of 2022 requires large companies with more than 100 million pesos ($1.7 million) in assets to take responsibility for reducing their plastic waste. They’re expected to recover 20% of their plastic waste by the end of 2023 and 80% by 2028, preventing it from entering the environment. 

Companies can comply with the recovery targets on their own or authorize a “producer responsibility organization” like the nonprofit PCX Solutions, which published the report.

The report estimates based on available data that 626,725 metric tons of plastic packaging in the Philippines need to be recovered annually.

By the end of 2023, the first milestone, 947 companies had registered for the country’s EPR program and helped recover and divert 163,000 metric tons of post-consumer plastic packaging waste, the report says. While government is yet to validate the numbers, the report added that this suggests plastic packaging recovery has already surpassed the 20% target for the year. 

However, not all firms obliged to comply with the EPR law have done so, the report says, suggesting education and awareness to improve compliance are still needed. The report also noted several challenges, including addressing decades of legacy plastic pollution, creating the supply and demand for recycled materials, and reducing unnecessary plastic packaging. 

Dominic Hogg, founder of U.K.-based environment consultancy Equanimator and author of a report about EPR in the Philippines and other countries, said the PCX Solutions report “makes some sensible comments” about the law, but cautioned it doesn’t address its “key shortcomings.”

Hogg said the data in the report also fail to clarify “what the scheme has achieved that was not already happening in the Philippines: there is no clear indication of who received how much money for doing what under the scheme.”

The report emphasized the role of incentives to boost compliance, like plastic credits, where companies can pay other groups to clean up plastic waste and earn credits in return, without having to rely on their own efforts. However, Emma Priestland from the NGO Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), told Mongabay that “plastic credits can be deeply problematic and can actually incentivize harmful waste treatment methods,” such as burning plastic in cement kilns that causes air pollution. 

Miko Aliño of BFFP added that the Philippine EPR “is limited to plastic collection targets, having little impact on reduction.”

“The law doesn’t mandate companies to reduce their plastic footprint through production reduction, product redesign, or reuse systems — higher-priority strategies in the Zero Waste hierarchy,” he said. 

Banner image of waste pickers in the Philippines, courtesy of PCX Solutions. 

Ship strikes are a leading threat to large whales, with global shipping routes overlapping 92% of their habitats, a new study finds. But protecting whales in the most dangerous collision hotspots would require action over just 2.6% of the ocean’s surface, researchers conclude, potentially saving thousands of whales with minimal disruption to global trade.

The study looked at four of the largest and most impacted whales: blue (Balaenoptera musculus), fin (B. physalus), humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus). Researchers overlapped locations of 430,000 recorded sightings of these whales with the courses of 176,000 cargo ships to pinpoint high-risk areas for whale collisions.

The endangered blue whale, the largest animal ever to live, was found to be disproportionately impacted around the Azores Islands, the West Coast of the U.S. and around the southern tip of India. Meanwhile, humpbacks, famous for their haunting songs, are at highest risk along South Africa’s coast and between China and Taiwan.

“We were surprised by the lack of protective measures that are in place for guarding whales against these collisions with vessels,” Briana Abrahms, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor at the University of Washington, U.S., told Mongabay by phone. “Our study is really a big first step in identifying where across the world we need to be focusing our eyes.”

Researchers found that mandatory measures to reduce collisions, including introducing the scientifically backed safe speed limit of under 10 knots (19 kilometers per hour or 12 miles per hour), or closing high-risk areas, were rare. Restrictions overlapped with just 0.54% of blue whale hotspots and 0.27% of humpback hotspots.

Today, most ships don’t even realize when they’ve hit whales, and an estimated 80% of ship collisions go undocumented, Abrahms said. “There’s so much opportunity to improve the situation, as there haven’t been any measures to protect these whales in the past,” she added.

Shipping traffic also creates noise and chemical pollution, making it harder for whales to find food and mates in the ocean. Rerouting vessels away from whale habitats and setting up alert systems to warn authorities and crews when whales are nearby could also be implemented, the researchers write.

More than 95% of the hotspots were along countries’ coastlines, where whales also often go to breed or feed on krill. This can make it easier for countries to set up protections independently, researchers say.

“Trade-offs between industrial and conservation outcomes are not usually this optimal,” co-author Heather Welch, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a statement. “There is a potentially large conservation benefit to whales for not much cost to the shipping industry.”

Banner image: Global shipping routes overlap 92% of the range of the blue, sperm, fin and humpback whales. Image courtesy of Asha de Vos.

Large-scale monoculture plantations have devastated tropical forests worldwide, but a recent study finds that creating islands of native trees can be a way to restore biodiversity on degraded lands.

The Indonesian island of Sumatra is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. However, the demand for palm oil has led to rapid deforestation for monoculture plantations, leading to a tremendous loss of biodiversity.  In the recent study, an international team of researchers wanted to see if creating tree islands, or strategically planting patches of just a few native species within degraded or agricultural lands, can help restore native woody plant diversity.

Researchers cleared 40% of the existing oil palm trees for each of their 52 experimental plots. They then planted between zero and six native tree species on each of their tree islands. They also kept four control plots with oil palms standing. The tree islands vary in area from 25-1,600 square meters (269-17,222 square feet).

Six years after their establishment, the researchers found that the tree islands were home to an additional 2,788 woody plants of 58 different species from 28 families. While most of the plants typically thrive in open habitats, including secondary forests that regrow after a disturbance like agriculture, one-third of the species were associated with tropical forests. Roughly 20% of the plants were endemic and 10% were non-native. The diversity of trees in the islands was also higher than in the rest of the oil palm plantation but still far lower than in undisturbed forest, highlighting the critical conservation value of standing forests.

Furthermore, large tree islands, greater than 400 m2 (4,300 ft2), hosted 94% of the native tree species found in the study and all of the endemic species. In contrast, small tree islands hosted just 45% of native species and a quarter of the endemic species.

Previously, the researchers had found that the tree islands had greater diversity of several groups of animals, including birds and bats. Large tree islands likely provide better habitat for such animal seed dispersers, the authors write. Geographically large tree islands can also create a more stable microclimate, while more leaf litter improves soil conditions; both make it easier for new trees to get established.

In the previous study, the researchers found that tree islands didn’t reduce yields of oil palm. Palms near tree islands actually had improved yields, which made up for trees that were removed.

“This is a landmark study,” Robin Chazdon, a tropical ecologist with the University of Connecticut, U.S., who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by email.

“The outcome is a hopeful message that it is possible to provide islands of hope for native vegetation within landscapes dominated by large-scale oil palm plantations,” she added.

Banner image: Habitat loss for oil palm is driving orangutans toward extinction. Image by Marc Veraart via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).