SAO PAULO (AP) — Renowned Indigenous Chief Raoni Metuktire is receiving palliative care at home in the Brazilian heartland after being diagnosed with cancer at age 94, his institute said Monday.

The Raoni Institute said the cancer diagnosis in the chief’s digestive system was confirmed after he was hospitalized in Sao Paulo in June due to a severe intestinal obstruction. He underwent surgery then and returned to the region of the city of Peixoto de Azevedo, in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state.

“At this moment, our priority is ensuring that Chief Raoni is well cared for, comfortable, and close to his family and his people. We wish to share this information transparently, but we also ask for respect regarding his privacy, his need for rest, and his family’s decisions,” the institute said in a statement.

Raoni, one of the most renowned advocates for the protection of the Amazon rainforest and for Indigenous rights, traveled the world for decades to raise awareness about environmental preservation.

Doctors opted for palliative care given Raoni’s advanced age, overall clinical condition, and the high risks associated with aggressive oncological treatments, the institute said.

“Palliative care does not mean an absence of treatment. The goal is to control pain and other symptoms, prevent complications, and ensure nutrition, hydration, medical supervision, nursing care, physical therapy, and the best possible quality of life,” it added.

Raoni is currently resting at home, surrounded by his family, community, and specialized health teams. The care plan also incorporates intercultural and spiritual support, the institute added, which honors his Indigenous heritage and allows traditional healers alongside medical professionals.

By Mauricio Savarese,  Associated Press

Banner image: Kayapo leader Raoni Metuktire looks on in Brasilia, Brazil, April 9, 2026. Image courtesy of Eraldo Peres, Associated Press.

A forested tiger reserve in southern India is home to a thriving population of spotted and sambar deer, nilgai antelopes, and wild pigs — all ideal prey for tigers. Yet the reserve has no resident tigers, reports contributor Nivedhika Krishnan for Mongabay India.

Kawal Tiger Reserve in the state of Telangana connects key tiger populations in the reserves of Tadoba-Andhari, in Maharashtra state to the west, and Indravati, in Chhattisgarh state to the east. Since 2015, researchers have confirmed that only 15 tigers entered Kawal from Maharashtra. Of these, only two were females.

Lead researcher Imran Siddiqui told Mongabay India that tigers traveling from Maharashtra to Kawal face heavy infrastructure throughout their journey.

“The corridor is fragmented by open-cast coal mines, the Ada irrigation project, electrified farm fences, and the main Hyderabad-Nagpur railway line,” Siddiqui said. “National Highway 44 acts as the most formidable barrier of all with its heavy traffic and high fencing. It isn’t just one obstacle — it is a cumulative mosaic of risks that forces dispersing tigers to turn back.”

He added that while male tigers dispersing from their birthplace are “bolder risk-takers” and can move long distances through human-dominated landscapes, female tigers are more risk-averse and “require quiet, undisturbed habitat to raise cubs.”

“Crossing busy highways, railways, and mines poses a massive perceived threat to females,” Siddiqui said. “That is why males occasionally dodge traffic to reach Kawal, but females turn back. Without females, you simply cannot build a breeding population.”

Anish Andheria, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Trust, told Mongabay India that the reserve itself needs a core area free from human settlements, like in India’s other tiger reserves. As of 2023, there were 37 villages and 67 small settlements inside Kawal Tiger Reserve’s core, he said.

But keeping people out of the ecosystem is a fraught issue. When Kawal was declared a tiger reserve in 2012, authorities had promised the resident Indigenous communities, the Adivasis, that the change wouldn’t harm their legal rights or survival, said Siddam Bhujang Rao, a local Adivasi leader. “But once the reserve was established, their stance completely shifted.”

Families who were relocated from the core reserve, for instance, received little of what was promised to them in the official relocation package for the villages, Rao said.

“They promised us land, water, and model villages,” he said. “Instead, families were moved to houses with crumbling plaster, and the agricultural lands were never handed over.”

Wildlife managers have also floated the idea of “assisted dispersal,” where wild female tigers from dense populations in states like Maharashtra are airlifted directly into Kawal. But Siddiqui warned that such manual translocations aren’t “a shortcut for fixing broken corridors.”

“Bringing tigers from outside will not work,” Rao agreed. “It is a flawed idea, and it should be abandoned.”

Read the full story by Nivedhika Krishnan here.

Banner image: A tiger in Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, from where tigers move to Kawal Tiger Reserve but do not live there. Representative image by A.J.T Johnsingh, WWF-India & NCF via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is repealing rules that limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas, an action the agency said would remove more than $300 billion in costs for the industry and help “unleash” American energy. The rule change, first proposed last year, represents a fundamental shift from efforts by Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama to address climate change and clean up industrial pollution. EPA officials said the change would allow utilities to make the best decisions for their ratepayers rather than be forced to close aging or inefficient plants.

By Mathey Daly, Associated Press

Banner image:  A barge on the Ohio River moves past the Mountaineer Power Plant, a coal-fired power plant near New Haven, W.Va., March 13, 2026. Image courtesy of Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press

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

When researchers began cataloging dragonflies in Guainía, a remote region in eastern Colombia, the scientific record contained only about 10 species. By working with Indigenous communities, they’ve found nearly 120.

“When we started, very little was known,” Yiselle Cano, biodiversity leader of the Dragones Guainía project, told contributor Manuel Fonseca for Mongabay.

“I think we must be close to 120 species by now,” Cano said. “It’s a hugely diverse group, because it includes dragonflies native to the Orinoco, Amazonas, and dragonflies that are endemic to the Guiana Shield.”

The diversity makes Guainía a hotspot for dragonflies and damselflies. It may also provide insights on what is happening to the region’s water. These insects depend on healthy freshwater ecosystems, and their aquatic habitats are coming under growing pressure from mining, deforestation, poorly managed waste, and rapidly expanding tourism.

Cataloging the insects was only part of the work. Once the researchers had begun filling gaps in the scientific record, they held workshops to share their findings with local communities. There they encountered another gap: the language of biology meant little to people whose understanding of the landscape had been formed outside scientific taxonomies. Some participants didn’t speak Spanish at all.

Community leaders invited everyone, from young children to elders who retained ancestral knowledge. As researchers displayed the dragonflies found around puddles, streams, and rivers, participants tried to identify them in their own languages.

“This is something that sometimes leaves us speechless,” Delio Suárez, a Tucano Indigenous leader of the multiethnic community La Ceiba, told Mongabay. “This leaves us with the task of recovering their names, of looking back and asking the last remaining wisdom keepers that we have.”

Sometimes the words could be recovered. Sometimes they had to be invented. In the community of Remanso, members of the Puinave tribe created names in an ancestral language that is itself at risk of disappearing. Tucano and Curripaco communities have also begun naming the insects while working to recover their languages.

Communities are now developing their own means of monitoring dragonflies and, through them, the condition of the water on which they depend.

Read the full story by Manuel Fonseca here.

Banner image: Guainía, also known as the land of many waters, is a remote biodiversity hotspot at the meeting point of the Amazon Rainforest, the Orinoco River Basin, and the Guyana Shield. Image courtesy of Jenilee Montes.

Three male African wild dogs in Zambia have travelled more than 4,000 kilometers, about 2,500 miles, in search of new territory and mates, according to a new study. This nine-month odyssey, about half the distance between Cairo and Cape Town, reveals how these endangered animals connect populations and ecosystems that are far apart within Southern Africa and potentially beyond, researchers say.

“It’s the longest African mammal movement on record, and the longest [recorded] wild dog dispersal,” study co-author Matt Becker, chief executive of the Zambian Carnivore Programme, told Mongabay.

The trio of African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus), litter mates known as the Mayukuyuku males, left their birth pack in Kafue National Park in mid-2025. They travelled east out of the park, then north toward the industrial cities of Kitwe and Ndola, then doubled back before heading east toward the Luangwa River Valley and its 400-or-so-strong wild dog population.

By April 2026, the pack had traversed 4,126 km (2,564 mi) to reach a game management area (GMA), a partially protected buffer zone, between the national parks of South Luangwa and Lower Zambezi.

“We think they’ve actually established a [territorial] range, but we haven’t quantified who they’re with and how many dogs there are,” Becker said.

The Mayukuyuku males were among 19 wild dog groups the team tracked using GPS collars fitted to individuals. Some journeys ended in tragedy.

A female wild dog, nicknamed EWD-1355, set off with her two sisters from a pack in South Luangwa in 2021. After travelling more than 2,300 km (1,400 mi), including through Mozambique, EWD-1355 was killed in a hunter’s snare set in a GMA in southern Zambia to catch animals like antelope for meat.

It’s unclear what happened to her sisters, but snares are often laid in sets, Becker said. Dogs are reluctant to leave injured pack mates, and several can be trapped and killed in a single event, he added.

All 19 tracked groups moved within or around seven national parks in Zambia. Four groups separately reached within a few kilometers of neighboring Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.

Researchers previously recorded similar wild dog migrations in Botswana, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, suggesting most wild dog populations in Southern and Eastern Africa remain connected, the authors write.

“If we conserve and continue to improve these connections, a lot of species like wild dogs can make the rest happen,” Nyambe Nyambe, executive director of the secretariat governing the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area, who wasn’t involved in the study, said in a statement.

With much of the landscapes where wild dogs live and disperse changing, Becker called for improved conservation models, such as ones that provide economic benefits through nature-based tourism or that produce meat sustainably and legally through game ranching.

“We don’t need to separate people from nature,” he said. “We can have these large landscapes, large, connected areas, beneficial to both.”

Banner image: A pack of endangered African wild dogs moving along a small dirt track in Kafue National Park., Zambia. Image courtesy of Scott Creel.

More than 500 people have invaded Brazil’s Ituna/Itatá Indigenous Land in recent weeks, opening illegal roads, setting deliberate fires and threatening federal agents. The area is home to the Igarapé Ipiaçava Indigenous people who live in voluntary isolation with no contact with outsiders.

On Aug. 26, a federal court ordered the government to deploy the National Public Security Force within 48 hours to contain the invasion. As of Sept 11, the forces hadn’t yet arrived.

The recent invasion followed the creation of the Bacajaí Environmental Protection Area (APA Bacajaí) under a new state law, which allows private landowners to build homes and raise livestock. However, APA Bacajaí completely overlaps the federally protected Indigenous land in Pará state, creating legal confusion that authorities say has been weaponized by land-grabbers to justify occupation for cattle ranching and other agricultural activities.

The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) has asked a federal court to fine the government 50,000 Brazilian reais (about $9,000) daily for failing to deploy enough security forces to contain the invasion. The area is currently under a temporary land-use restriction order to protect the isolated people living there.

The government has argued it needs authorization from Pará’s government, which hasn’t cooperated. However, federal prosecutors say the federal government can be deployed on federal land without state authorization.

Both the federal government and the state of Pará did not reply to Mongabay’s requests for comment by the time of publication.

In its press statement, the MPF said the Indigenous Affairs Agency (Funai) and Federal Police overflights have detected the use of heavy machinery and chainsaws to clear more than 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) of forest trails and clandestine roads to mark illegal plots in the Indigenous land. It also said fires were started shortly after inspections, in what the MPF described as “clear retaliation and an attempt at intimidation.”

“What worries us most right now is the fire situation,” Helena Palmquist, deputy coordinator of the Observatory of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples (OPI), who has been monitoring the situation via satellite imagery and field reports, told Mongabay over WhatsApp voice messages. “We are experiencing an Amazonian dry season with the prospect of an El Niño event far more severe than previous ones; this makes the forest more volatile and prone to catching fire.”

Evidence attached to the MPF’s case file includes audio recordings that circulated among invaders, in which a man rallies around 100-200 people to surround the Funai team, burn their vehicles and force them out on foot. Officials also found a state government cargo vehicle being used to support the illegal settlement’s infrastructure during inspection activities, the MPF statement said.

Palmquist told Mongabay that after IBAMA, Brazil’s environment agency, carried out inspections and destroyed some machinery and trucks the week of Aug. 31, invaders set fire to the forest.

Banner image: Cattle graze in a deforested area near Novo Progresso in the state of Para, Brazil. Image by Andre Penner/AP Photo.