Five months after the World Bank’s private investment arm submitted its action plan to address community grievances against a rubber plantation it funds in Liberia, affected residents are still waiting for its implementation.

The case goes back to a 2019 complaint filed by four Liberian NGOs with the internal watchdog of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO). The complaint was filed on behalf of 22 communities in Margibi and Bong counties who live around a Salala Rubber Corporation plantation, alleging sexual harassment of workers, inadequate compensation for crops, pollution of groundwater sources, desecration of sacred sites, and land grabbing. The CAO validated these allegations in its investigation report in December 2023. It took the IFC until March 2025 to issue a management action plan (MAP). Since then, community representatives told Mongabay, no progress has been made toward addressing the violations.

“We are concerned about how the implementation of the MAP is going,” said Windor Smith from the Alliance for Rural Democracy (ARD), one of the NGOs representing the communities. “Until now we have not seen any tangible differences in the communities, at all.”

Smith added the IFC hasn’t communicated with them since March.

At the time of the complaint in 2019, Salala was owned by Luxembourg-based multinational Socfin, but it sold the plantation to India’s Jeety Rubber just after the CAO investigation concluded in 2024.

It’s unclear whether and how Socfin, or Jeety, will engage in the remedial action. The MAP includes commitments to implement community development programs that improve livelihoods, women’s economic empowerment, and measures to end gender-based violence and harassment.

Paul Larry George from ARD said that while Jeety has taken over the plantation with its existing grievances and liabilities, the new owner hasn’t engaged with ARD or the communities yet, nor shown any signs of getting involved in bringing redress to them.

According to the IFC’s first progress report, released in June 2025, the institution says it has conducted three missions to Liberia and several virtual meetings from March-June 2025. During these meetings, the IFC reportedly engaged with new plantation owner Jeety, former owner Socfin, and Socfin’s consultancy Earthworm Foundation, which found the same grievances in its own investigations.

An IFC spokesperson told Mongabay by email that it “continues to explore opportunities to implement MAP actions as envisioned.”

Jeety didn’t respond to Mongabay’s request for comment. Socfin, too, hadn’t sent its responses by the time this article was published.

The IFC has been under scrutiny for years for failing to ensure that the companies it invests in uphold its own social and environmental standards. Despite adopting two major policies intended to tackle environmental and social issues throughout its investment cycles, concrete actions to redress communities for harm and loss remain to be seen.

The institution’s next progress update is due in December 2025.

Banner image of Jorkporlorsue town, surrounded by rubber trees owned by Salala Rubber Corporation. Image by Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay.

THE SANTA ROSA PLATEAU ECOLOGICAL RESERVE, Calif. (AP) — Efforts to restore the red-legged frog to Southern California, where it had all but disappeared, seemed doomed when the COVID-19 pandemic struck and restrictions were put in place at the U.S.-Mexico border. But scientists were able to airlift coolers of frogs’ eggs from a tiny population on a remote ranch in Mexico and race them across the border to plant them in American ponds. Biologists have been using artificial intelligence to confirm that the batch not only hatched but went on to breed in a remarkable experiment to restore an ecosystem. The red-legged frog is the latest species to see success from binational cooperation along the near-2,000-mile border.

By Julie Watson, Associated Press

The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) recently announced the creation of a formal role for Indigenous peoples, giving them a voice for the first time in one of the Amazon Basin’s most important intergovernmental bodies.

The announcement was made during ACTO’s fifth summit of presidents of Amazonian countries in Bogotá, Colombia, marking a historic shift that grants Indigenous peoples more influence over important issues including deforestation, biodiversity and protected-area management.

“Our ways of life already offer concrete solutions to confront climate change and biodiversity loss with justice and effectiveness,” a coalition of Indigenous peoples from the nine countries of the Amazon Basin said in an opening statement at the summit last week. “That’s why we emphasize that we’re not only guardians: We are climate and environmental authorities.”

ACTO’s members — Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela — coordinate a regional agenda for protecting the Amazon’s natural resources. (The ninth Amazonian territory, French Guiana, isn’t part of ACTO.) Traditionally, ACTO has been composed of each member country’s minister of foreign affairs along with various commissions, drawing criticism that the organization’s structure excludes Indigenous voices.

Its new Amazon Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (MAPI) will include two Indigenous delegates from each member country. They will meet annually to discuss threats to their ancestral territories, including from illegal mining, wildlife trafficking, food insecurity and poverty, among others. MAPI will also issue reports and recommendations to other bodies within ACTO, with the goal of promoting Indigenous knowledge systems and languages.

“This is the result of a high-level political commitment and a historical debt to Amazonian Indigenous peoples, whose contribution to biodiversity protection, climate change mitigation and cultural preservation is invaluable,” ACTO coordinator for Indigenous affairs Freddy Mamani said in a statement.

The announcement comes at a crucial moment as member countries work toward implementing policies that build on the Belém Declaration from 2023, including reducing deforestation and carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation. Officials are also preparing climate and conservation financing plans ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP30), scheduled for November in Belém, Brazil. At the summit, they reinforced their support for the Tropical Forests Forever Fund that will be discussed at COP30, a mechanism to pay countries for protecting their forests.

“The responsibility is enormous, and the challenges are many. But this alliance between governments and Indigenous organizations has all the foundations to succeed in achieving our common goal: protecting our forest, our home,” said Sônia Guajajara, Brazil’s minister of Indigenous peoples, during the meeting.

Banner image: Ecuadorian Vice President María José Pinto, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombian President Gustavo Petro speak at the closing of a meeting of leaders of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization in Bogotá, Colombia, on Aug. 22, 2025. Image by AP Photo/Fernando Vergara.

A federal court in Brazil has reinstated the Amazon soy moratorium, a private-sector antideforestation measure that helps protect the Amazon Rainforest against the expansion of soy farms in the biome.

The Aug. 25 ruling overturns a suspension issued last week by Brazil’s antitrust regulator, CADE, which had opened an investigation into claims that the two-decade-old soy moratorium violates competition laws.

The ongoing antitrust probe is unaffected by the court’s decision, but federal judge Adverci Mendes de Abreu ruled that suspending the moratorium until the investigation is complete — which could take years — went too far.

“The Soy Moratorium, in effect since 2006, is voluntary, involves multiple public and private actors, and has been recognized as an instrument to promote sustainable development,” Abreu wrote in her decision.

“At this preliminary stage, it appears disproportionate and premature to immediately dismantle it through a monocratic decision, without collegial debate and without proper consideration of the technical arguments offered in the original proceeding,” the decision continues.

The ruling came in response to an appeal filed by the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE), which represents multinational grain traders including Cargill, Cofco, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus, all signatories to the soy moratorium.

The deal was signed in 2006 and is credited with keeping at least 18,000 square kilometers (about 7,000 square miles) of rainforest standing. At the same time, it gave Brazilian soy greater access to international markets.

ABIOVE said in a statement that it “welcomed the federal court’s decision to suspend CADE’s order to interrupt the Soy Moratorium.”

“The ruling acknowledged the need for a deeper debate on the soy moratorium and was consistent with ABIOVE’s view of the pact’s legality,” it added.

The legal dispute underscores heightened tensions between international soy traders and the domestic farmers who grow the crop.  

Brazil’s largest soy farmers’ lobby, Aprosoja, initiated the antitrust probe in December 2024. The group argues that the zero-deforestation rule set by the moratorium penalizes thousands of soy farmers in the Amazon operating on land cleared after 2008. Under Brazilian law, farmers in the Amazon can clear up to 20% of their land.

“This is an old fight, but we’ll keep fighting to try and topple this moratorium,” Maurício Bufon, the president of Aprosoja, told Mongabay in an audio message. “It’s a cartel of companies that dominate the soy market and use the environmental issue to give credibility to their agreement.”

Banner image: Soy farms in Belterra in the Brazilian Amazon’s Pará state. Image © Leo Correa/AP Photo.

Hundreds of wildfires across Europe have burned at least 1 million hectares, or around 2.5 million acres, since the start of the year. That’s made 2025 the worst year for the continent since official wildfire records began in 2006. In Türkiye, Greece and Cyprus, which saw deadly fires peaking since June, weather conditions that drove the spread of wildfires were made 22% more intense due to climate change, a rapid analysis has found.

World Weather Attribution, a global network of scientists who study extreme weather events, said in its latest analysis that the combination of hot, dry and windy conditions in the eastern Mediterranean was also made 10 times more likely in today’s climate, which has warmed by 1.3° Celsius (2.3° Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times because of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. In the absence of climate change, such extreme wildfire-triggering weather conditions would have happened once every 100 years compared to once every 10 years now.

Between June and July, the eastern Mediterranean faced record-breaking heat waves, and several days of temperatures above 40°C (104°F). Total rainfall during winter months also saw a 14% decline, and the dry heat made it easier for plants to burn while extremely strong northerly winds, called Etesian winds, fanned more fires.

In Türkiye, more than 50,000 people were evacuated as wildfires spread in both rural and urban communities this year. At least 17 people were killed, including 10 firefighters and rescue workers.

More than 32,000 people were also evacuated from Greece as wildfires razed tens of thousands of acres of farmlands, houses and resorts. Fires killed at least three people in August.

In Cyprus, fires burned 12,500 hectares (about 31,000 acres) or 1% of the island, killing at least two people in what was the country’s worst wildfire in more than 50 years.

Although all three countries are in the eastern Mediterranean region, their different geographies mean they face different wildfire challenges, according to WWA. Cyprus is especially vulnerable due to its reliance on aerial support to tackle large fires.

“Today, with 1.3°C of warming, we are seeing new extremes in wildfire behaviour that has pushed firefighters to their limit,” Theodore Keeping, report co-author and researcher at Imperial College London, told Mongabay in a statement. “But we are heading for up to 3°C [5.4°F] this century unless countries more rapidly transition away from fossil fuels.”

But “even destructive events can unlock opportunities to strengthen resilience,” Maja Vahlberg, report co-author and technical adviser to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said at a press briefing. In Türkiye, for example, the dominant Calabrian pine (Pinus brutia), which is highly flammable and helps wildfires spread, also releases its seeds during high-intensity fires, contributing to future forest regeneration.

Banner image of a firefighter trying to extinguish a wildfire as a helicopter flies over Athens on July 26, 2025, by AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis.

The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, now officially recognizes four distinct giraffe species, it announced on Aug. 21.

Until recently, giraffes across Africa were classified as a single species with eight to 11 subspecies. However, since 2016, when the giraffe’s threat status was last assessed for the IUCN Red List as vulnerable, several studies have argued for splitting the giraffe into multiple species given their vast differences.

In response, the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Giraffe and Okapi Specialist Group (GOSG) initiated a taxonomic review and concluded there are four distinct species of giraffe: the northern (Giraffa camelopardalis), reticulated (G. reticulata), Masai (G. tippelskirchi) and southern giraffe (G. giraffa). The northern giraffe now includes three subspecies, while the Masai and southern giraffe have two each.

“For a long time, we’ve known that giraffe diversity was being underestimated, but there wasn’t a unified IUCN position,” Michael Brown, review co-author and co-chair of the IUCN GOSG, told Mongabay by email. “Without that clarity, conservation risks treating giraffe as one big, healthy population instead of several species — some of which are actually very small and at real risk. Doing the review now ensures that conservation plans and resources can be better targeted, and that no species gets overlooked.”

The GOSG review initially considered eight giraffe lineages and evaluated the evidence supporting each as distinct species. They considered three lines of scientific evidence: genetic analysis of giraffe populations across Africa, examination of hundreds of giraffe skulls and bone shape, and biogeographical features like rivers and rift valleys that have kept populations apart over time.

While four lineages couldn’t hold up as standalone species, the final four were consistently supported as distinct species by different data sources, Brown said.

Genetics gave the reviewers the strongest signal. “[G]iraffe are actually one of the most genetically well-studied large mammals in Africa, and the data consistently point to four separate lineages,” Brown said.

The four giraffe species live in different parts of Africa. The northern giraffe can be found in isolated pockets stretching from Niger to East Africa, while the reticulated giraffe is found primarily in northern Kenya and parts of Ethiopia and Somalia, Brown said. The Masai giraffe inhabits large parts of Tanzania and central and southern Kenya, while the southern giraffe is found across Southern Africa, including Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, he added.

The threat status of each species will now have to be assessed for the IUCN Red List. “That means pulling together the latest data on population sizes, trends, and threats for each one,” Brown said. “The Taxonomy Review provides the framework, but the Red List process itself is a separate, formal evaluation with its own expert review.”

These steps can help focus conservation efforts where they’re most needed. “This review isn’t the end of the story — it’s the start of a clearer, more effective era for giraffe conservation,” Brown said.

Banner image: Giraffes in Uganda’s Kidepo Valley National Park. Image courtesy of Michael Brown.