Rokiatu Traoré, president of a social enterprise in Mali that uses agroforestry to restore degraded land and create jobs for women and youths, has been named a Changemaker at the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals Action Awards.

“I work in Mali, where lands are becoming drier every year. Many farmers struggle with degraded soil, smaller harvests, and fewer economic opportunities,” Traoré said at the Oct. 29 awards ceremony in Rome. “I founded Herou Alliance to restore degraded lands and create real economic opportunities for communities in rural areas.”

The Herou Alliance uses an agroforestry model that creates value by producing seedlings, training farmers, and planting trees. Since 2021, the organization has built commercial value chains around the moringa tree (Moringa oleifera). Traoré has said in a past interview that she’s sometimes even referred to as the “Moringa Queen.”

The alliance develops “products derived from the leaves, flowers and seeds of this plant, which we process into different products: herbal tea, powder, honey, soap, spices, dietary supplements for the national, regional and international market,” Traoré told Mongabay by phone.

The moringa tree is native to South Asia, but is now widely grown in other parts of the world, including in Africa. This fast-growing deciduous tree is sometimes called the miracle tree because of its range of uses. Almost all parts of the plant are edible, with the leaves considered especially nutritious as a source of vitamins, minerals, and proteins. The seeds can be pressed to extract the oil, and the residue can be used for water purification.

The tree is also known to be resilient to drought, which makes it suitable for drier conditions, where it’s been planted as part of reforestation or afforestation programs to stop land degradation. However, there’s insufficient research on how well it does in such programs in the arid Sahel region of Africa.

Traoré said that beyond its role in restoring degraded land and helping halt the advance of the desert, moringa provides a versatile and valuable raw material for manufacturing cosmetics, food, and even medicinal products.

She added this transformative value, anchored by the tree’s well-established ecological and socioeconomic roles, earned her project a nomination for the 2026 edition of the U.N. SDG Action Awards.

The Herou Alliance has set a target of restoring 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of degraded land in Mali by 2040. Land degradation affected 11.5 million hectares (28.4 acres) in the country in 2019, impacting more than 6.5 million people, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

“We’ve planted so far 150,000 moringa and baobab [trees] and trained over 2,000 smallholder farmers in rural areas,” Traoré said at the awards ceremony.  “Restoring land is restoring opportunities.”

Banner image: A view of the Bandiagara escarpment in Mali. Image courtesy of Johannes Zielcke via Flickr. (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Chemical manufacturer 3M will pay up to $7.35 billion to settle lawsuits by people who say they were sickened by groundwater contamination from compounds used in firefighting foam and other consumer products.

The St. Paul, Minnesota-based company announced the settlement Tuesday. It will pay the money over nine years to as many as 120,000 people who say they were harmed by exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known collectively as PFAS. The chemicals contaminated groundwater near military bases, airports and other locations where the foam was used to extinguish fires.

3M did not admit liability for the contamination under the agreement.

Called “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade naturally in the environment, PFAS have been linked to health problems including liver and immune system damage and some cancers. The chemicals are also used in nonstick, water- and grease-resistant products, including clothing and cookware.

3M chairman William Brown called the settlement a “significant milestone” that substantially reduces uncertainty from the litigation. The company previously reached settlements in other PFAS-related lawsuits, including a $450 million agreement with the state of New Jersey to settle claims of natural resource contamination and a deal to pay more than $10 billion to many U.S. public drinking water systems.

Other manufacturers, including DuPont de Nemours Inc. and spinoffs Chemours Co. and Corteva Inc., have agreed to settlements totaling more than $1 billion to resolve PFAS claims.

Fred Thompson, an attorney with the Motley Rice law firm that helped negotiate the 3M settlement for the plaintiffs, called it welcome news for “the thousands of victims who have sought answers and accountability for nearly a decade.”

He said in a news release that the plaintiffs urgently need help covering mounting medical bills and other costs.

Under the terms of the settlement, the payouts will begin with $50 million this year, followed by yearly payments of more than $1 billion each year from 2028 to 2033.

3M could make additional payments if enough plaintiffs participate. If too few sign on, 3M has the option to cancel the settlement and continue fighting the lawsuit.

Environmental activists say PFAS manufacturers knew about the chemicals’ health risks long before they became public. They noted that the same attributes that make the chemicals so valuable in many uses — resistance to breakdown — also make them hazardous to people.

The Environmental Protection Agency has set strict limits on PFAS in drinking water from public utilities and requires testing, but those rules do not apply to private wells.

A study that would help federal regulators understand which industries dump the forever chemicals with their wastewater has been stalled for two years, awaiting review by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

By Rebecca Boone, Associated Press

Banner image: The 3M chemical manufacturer’s building in a suburb of Sydney on May 28, 2026. Image courtesy of Mark Baker via Associated Press

With no local polling station or means of getting to one from their remote community, residents of the Tumucumaque Indigenous Park in northern Brazil weren’t able to vote in October’s general elections. That’s according to Mitore Tiriyo Kaxuyana, a leader of the Tiriyó and Kaxuyana Indigenous peoples who spoke to Mongabay.

On Oct. 22, just three days before the presidential runoff vote, a federal court ruled that Indigenous voters nationwide must be provided with transportation and language interpreters to facilitate their right to vote.

Elections officials in Amapá state, where the park is located, told Kaxuyana in a meeting on Oct. 19 that they weren’t even aware of the existence of the Tumucumaque Indigenous Park.

“I felt a bit sad. I told them we have difficulty voting in our territory,” Kaxuyana, the coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Women of the Tiriyó, Kaxuyana and Txikiyana Peoples (AMITIKATXI), told Mongabay by phone. “They were unaware of the existence of the Tiriyó and Kaxuyana people here in Amapá. We said that we existed.”

Mongabay reached out to the Amapá electoral court, the state judicial body that administers elections, for comment, but didn’t receive a response.

Without polling stations in the territory, Tumucumaque Indigenous Park residents must travel by plane to vote in Macapá, the state capital.

“The majority of people who live in the villages normally don’t vote,” Kaxuyana said.

There are 74 villages within the 3-million-hectare (7.6-million-acre) territory, home to roughly 2,800 Brazilian citizens. The territory straddles five municipalities across two states, but most public services for its inhabitants are concentrated in Macapá.

Kaxuyana said there have never been polling stations in the territory. The only residents who vote are those who happen to be in the city during elections, often for medical reasons, or public servants such as teachers or health workers who are there for other reasons, Kaxuyana added.

Of Brazil’s 839 Indigenous territories, only 232 — less than 30% — have polling stations, according to Sumaúma, an Amazon-based news website.

About 26% of Indigenous voters in Brazil didn’t vote in October, higher than the 20% average for all eligible Brazilian voters, according to a technical note by advisers at the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples seen by Mongabay.

On Oct. 14, Brazil’s deputy electoral prosecutor-general told the Superior Electoral Court that Indigenous leaders in five states, including Amapá, had reported that voters missed the first round of the elections due to lack of transportation from their villages and Indigenous territories to polling stations.

Kaxuyana said she was barred from translating in the first round of voting for two of her relatives, who were in Macapá for medical treatment and voting for the first time.

“We cannot be prevented from voting, from exercising this right,” Kaxuyana said.

Banner image: A village in the Tumucumaque Indigenous Park. Image courtesy of Kamikia Kisedje, Nia Tero/Iepé Archive.

In the land of tigers, prey animals like deer and monkeys are often the first to sound the alarm when they sense the predator’s presence. Forest communities in Nepal, where the success of tiger conservation has come at the cost of rising human-tiger conflict, have long known to listen for these natural alerts.

This local wisdom inspired a recent pilot project using sensors dotted around a forest to detect these alarm calls and send out automated alerts telling people where tigers or leopards might be prowling, reports contributor Praveen Kumar Yadav for Mongabay. The developers said they’d hoped it could be deployed to prevent tiger attacks in the region, but they didn’t have the chance to find out: the project ended for lack of support.

Nepal’s wild tiger population recently reached a record 429 individuals, with 112 residing around Bardiya National Park in the southwest. That increase has come at a cost: Between 2010 and 2024, there were 245 tiger attacks on humans, resulting in 141 fatalities, according to a recent study.

To reduce encounters, researchers deployed solar-powered acoustic monitoring devices in the Dalla Community Forest, near Bardiya, between December 2024 and March 2025. These devices, costing roughly $50 each, ran an artificial intelligence model trained to listen to sounds coming from the forest and identify alarm calls from chital deer (Axis axis), rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), and gray langurs (Semnopithecus hector).

Communities in Bardiya, who share the same landscape as tigers to graze their livestock and collect firewood and other forest products, have long relied on these signals to watch out for tigers.

“Footprints, scat, and alarm calls from deer, langurs, red monkeys all tell us that a tiger may be nearby,” said Bhadai Tharu, chair of the Gauri Community Forest and a tiger-attack survivor.

Casey Anderson, a U.S.-based wildlife filmmaker and study co-author who led the project’s deployment, said the system built on existing human understanding. “We weren’t teaching the forest or the people who live there something new. In many ways, we were teaching a computer to recognize something those people already understood,” she said.

The system seemed promising: according to Thenghchu Tharu, a 60-year-old forest guard at Dalla Community Forest who monitored the pilot, the automated alerts matched the physical tracking signs he observed on the ground.

“If people are informed beforehand, they do not need to enter that area,” he said.

But the pilot stalled, due to running out of resources, staffing constraints, and a lack of local institutional backing, Anderson said.

His team have since moved their equipment to India to continue testing there. Sabnam Pathak from Nepal’s Department of Forests and Soil Conservation said new conservation tools require thorough long-term evaluation before they can be adopted at scale.

Read the full story by Praveen Kumar Yadav here.

Banner image: The team used a faux tiger skin to elicit alarm calls from prey species. Image by Kershenbaum et al., 2026 (CC BY-NC-ND).

Madagascar’s largest fruit bat is getting smaller, and hunting may be partly to blame, a recent study suggests.

The Malagasy flying fox (Pteropus rufus) feeds mainly on fruit and nectar, making it an important pollinator and seed disperser. But the species is also hunted for meat, both for subsistence and commercial sale. Hunting is legal in Madagascar from May to September each year; some hunters use nets to catch bats for food, while others shoot them with shotguns to sell in markets and restaurants.

Researchers from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, U.S., first noticed the apparent change while observing the bats in the wild. The animals seemed smaller than specimens held in the museum.

“I was thinking about a million different angles to explain why the bats were getting smaller,” Emily Cornelius Ruhs, the study’s lead author a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center, said in a statement. “I wondered if it was related to changes in temperature or habitat.”

Co-author Steve Goodman, also from the Field Museum, suspected commercial hunting, which had intensified from the 1980s onward, might be a factor.

To investigate, Ruhs and Goodman measured the skulls and teeth of 121 Malagasy flying fox specimens collected over the past 150 years. They found the bats’ skulls had become significantly smaller since 1980, while their teeth had not. The researchers suggest this could indicate that hunters are selectively shooting larger bats because they yield more meat.

“If you’re the biggest bat in the sky, you might be the easiest target. You’re also going to provide a hunter with the most meat,” Ruhs said. She cautioned, however, that the study doesn’t prove hunting caused the bats to shrink, only that the two trends are correlated.

Targeting larger bats could also have implications for the species’ reproduction. Mid- to large-sized adults are likely to be sexually mature, the authors write. The species reaches sexual maturity at more than 2 years, and then births just one pup after a gestation period of more than six months.

Vincent Florens, an ecologist at the University of Mauritius, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Smithsonian Magazine that the fruit bat “has a big ecological role, because the dissemination of seeds is extremely important for the reproduction of plants and also for the regeneration of forests.”

Ruhs and Goodman write in their paper that the reduction in the bats’ size could also affect the species’ ecological role by limiting the size of the fruits they can eat and the seeds they can disperse.

Acknowledging that the Malagasy flying fox is an important food source in some parts of Madagascar, Ruhs said it was “critical to figure out ways to protect the bat populations.”

Banner image: Two Malagasy flying fox specimens from the Field Museum’s collections. The smaller specimen on the left is from 1995; the larger specimen is from 1948. Image © Field Museum.

Coastal communities near Bangkok in Thailand are testing artificial mangrove roots to combat severe shoreline erosion, reports Mongabay’s Carolyn Cowan.

The shorelines of Phra Samut Chedi district, located in the Chao Phraya River Delta where Bangkok’s main waterway empties into the Gulf of Thailand, is especially vulnerable to erosion. Each year, strong surges claim 20 to 60 meters (66 to 200 feet) of land, and wave energy regularly collapses dikes and inundates aquaculture farms. Several methods of protecting the coast — from mangrove restoration to bamboo fences — have proved ineffective.

Researchers recently evaluated a new method: they installed artificial mangrove root systems that mimic the shape of natural mangrove roots, to see whether these would also mimic their function and prevent loss of land to the sea.

A 15-month trial at 11 sites in Phra Samut Chedi and other parts of Samut Prakan province showed some success, according to a recent study. It found the engineered mangrove roots captured 16 to 88 centimeters (6 to 35 inches) of sediment behind them across 10 locations.

Unlike hard-engineered structures or short-lived bamboo fences that quickly break down into marine debris, the composite wood-plastic and rubber structures of the artificial mangrove roots allow water to flow through, the researchers said. This creates localized turbulence that encourages suspended mud to settle onto the seabed, they added.

“Aquaculture farmers sent us a video of the waves hitting their dikes,” Butsawan Bidorn, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of coastal engineering at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, told Mongabay. “By the next day, the dike had collapsed and they’d lost everything. They need urgent action — the erosion can cause damage overnight.”

Butsawan said that while the structures imitate root function rather than exact anatomy, their fast modular installation provides a crucial intermediate pathway for vulnerable communities.

Field evaluations several months after installation showed that raised sediment levels behind the structures had allowed shrimp farmers at one site to rebuild mud dikes. At another site, it had enabled landowners to resume replanting mangrove seedlings.

Sompratana Ritphring, an associate professor of water engineering at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, who wasn’t involved in the study, said that while the engineered mangrove roots are an interesting intervention, such a system can’t serve as a universal or permanent fix.

“At best, it should be a temporary or enabling engineering component that helps create conditions in which a real mangrove ecosystem can establish itself,” Sompratana said. “The ultimate objective should be a functioning natural system, not a coastline permanently dependent on artificial structures.”

Sompratana added the structures should also be monitored long term so the materials used in them don’t end up as marine litter.

Read the full story by Carolyn Cowan here.

Banner image: Aerial view of artificial mangrove root units installed at a study site seaward of an intensively farmed aquaculture zone, with Bangkok’s skyline in the distance. Image courtesy of Warit Charoenlerkthawin.