On Nov. 26, the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) dismissed an appeal filed by four African NGOs, marking the end of a landmark case against the construction of a contentious oil pipeline.

The case against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), expected to become the longest heated crude oil pipeline in the world, was first filed in 2020.

“It was a very huge disappointment, especially as we ran to court and thought that at least we would find justice in the courts of law,” Balach Bakundane, an affected community representative for the Uganda-based EACOP Host Communities organization, told Mongabay by phone.

The 1,443-kilometer (897-mile) EACOP runs from oil fields in Uganda to the Port of Tanga in Tanzania. The pipeline is being constructed by the French oil giant TotalEnergies and involves state-owned companies from China, Uganda and Tanzania.

Its route runs through more than 40 protected areas and areas near Lake Albert and Lake Victoria, which are some of Africa’s most important freshwater sources. The project’s carbon footprint is estimated at about 34 million tons of CO₂ per year, considerably more than what Uganda and Tanzania emit annually.

The NGOs in their case argued that the construction of EACOP had started without adequate environmental and social impact assessments or public participation, harming both local communities and ecosystems.

After the first set of hearings, the EACJ in November 2023, dismissed the case based on a technicality, agreeing with the governments of Tanzania and Uganda that the NGOs hadn’t filed their complaint within 60 days of the 2017 agreements. The NGOs say they learned about the project’s details much later in 2020.

The NGOs filed an appeal with the court, arguing for the case to be heard on merit. However, in its latest ruling, the court upheld its previous decision, dismissing the appeal and thereby the case.

“Land has been taken, livelihoods shattered and people intimidated or arrested for speaking out — yet none of that will even be heard in this courtroom,” Justin Semuyaba, a lawyer representing the NGOs, said in a statement.

Bakundane told Mongabay the judges never took into consideration the damage caused by EACOP. “They have been excavating everywhere, and the floods that are running from these cuttings are destroying our farmlands, destroying our water bodies.”

He added that he is being pressured by the authorities and summoned by the police because of his opposition to the project. “Of course, their only interest is that we stop what we are doing, we stop mobilizing ourselves to challenge these injustices,” he said.

Despite this setback, Bakundane said they are looking at alternatives to continue challenging this project. “We want to build a very strong resistance within our communities. And we are not alone; other communities along Lake Albert have also filed complaints. We are not going to give up.”

Banner image: Ugandan and Tanzanian EACOP-impacted community representatives attending the hearing at the EACJ. Image courtesy of Stop Eacop Movement.

The cliffs above Cala de Moraia are steep and inaccessible. To most people, the terrain would signal danger rather than duty. But dangerous places often shelter life that needs defending. Rare plants cling to the cliff face, surviving only because most people cannot reach them. On November 25th, 2025, one person did. She was there because she always was, working to ensure that wild places could endure. That afternoon, something went wrong. She fell. Rescuers arrived quickly, but there was nothing to be done.

Her name was Cristina Gallardo Gomez. She was 39.

She worked as an environmental agent for the Valencian Community, part of a specialized intervention group trained for places where conservation demands rope, strength, and resolve. Her days were spent suspended over ravines, climbing coastal walls, and entering caves to help protect species that have little room left to exist. She saw these places not as hazards but as responsibilities.

Her commitment began much earlier. She studied biology, convinced that safeguarding the natural world could be both her passion and her purpose. “Poder contribuir en la prevención y cuidado del monte” (to help prevent harm and care for the lands) would be, she once wrote, deeply gratifying. She fought for years to make a place for herself in that pursuit, never losing conviction.

Her work spanned protecting threatened raptors, installing nest boxes for kestrels, and helping barn owls return to farmland. In caves, she helped survey rare ferns and bats. On cliffs, she helped remove sport-climbing routes that disturbed nesting birds and monitored endangered plants like Silene hifacensis, found only on a handful of coastal outcrops in Alicante. She believed conservation was not just counting living things but giving them room to survive.

Nature was also her joy. She climbed and cycled and felt most at home outdoors. But she did not separate sport from stewardship. She knew climbing could affect the places she loved, so responsibility mattered.

Her family said she “dedicated her life to the protection of nature and to the service of the community with a generous, professional and courageous delivery.” They offered gratitude “for all the displays of affection, support and respect” since her death, adding that such gestures “have helped us cope with their loss and feel that their memory will live on in each and every person they touched with their humanity and commitment.”

Friends and colleagues describe someone generous, cheerful, and brave. They say she showed up when the task was hardest. They say she made others better.

The grief in the days since her death says much about the impression she left. Her example will remain a reminder of what it means to protect what is fragile.

Header image: Cristina Gallardo Gomez. Courtesy of AEAFMA (la Asociación Española de Agentes Forestales y Medioambientales)

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

Patricia Wright arrived in Madagascar nearly four decades ago to look for a lemur thought to be extinct. She found it, along with a new species, and then ran headlong into a broader reality: protecting wildlife would depend on the well-being of the people living alongside it. Her discoveries eventually led to the creation of Ranomafana National Park, today a UNESCO site. Yet the forces that threaten the island’s forests have only grown more entangled.

“Poverty is the enemy of conservation here in Madagascar,” she says.

It is not a line delivered lightly. Roughly four out of five Malagasy live in poverty, and for many families forests are still the last resort when the economy falters. In a year marked by political turmoil and a slump in tourism, Wright says she has seen the pressure intensify. Empty planes mean empty hotel rooms, and eventually empty stomachs. When that happens, people fall back on slash-and-burn agriculture or small-scale logging, even inside protected areas. The conservation gains built over decades start to fray.

Wright’s argument is that any lasting strategy must braid together conservation, health, and education rather than treat them as separate fields.

“Both health and education are very important… but it has to be connected to the fact that [people] have forests,” she says.

Her research station, Centre ValBio, has tried to model this by training local residents as biodiversity monitors and field researchers, while also supporting clinics, fellowships for rural students and small experiments in forest-friendly agriculture. Vanilla vines trained on native trees and peppercorn grown on reforested hillsides are small steps, but they offer income streams that do not require burning land.

If this sounds like a development program as much as a conservation effort, that is the point. Madagascar’s challenges are not abstract. Fires, deforestation, political upheaval and cyclones all feed into each other. Conservationists who ignore this reality, she suggests, are unlikely to succeed.

Where Wright sees a clearer path is in storytelling. She has long used film to draw global attention to the island’s biodiversity collapse, from IMAX productions to recent documentaries such as Surviving Alone: The Tale of Simone.

“It plays a pivotal role in the public understanding what the real issues are,” she says.
Images of a lone greater bamboo lemur, searching for companions she can never truly join, make the stakes visible in a way research papers cannot.

Madagascar still holds pockets of forest where new species wait to be described. But saving them, Wright argues, means confronting the forces draining the country’s human communities as well. Conservation cannot stand on its own here. It must carry the weight of everything around it.

Wright recently spoke with Mike DiGirolamo for the Mongabay Newscast.

Header image: Bamboo lemur. By Rhett Ayers Butler.

Brazil’s Senate approved an environmental licensing bill that could expedite major infrastructure projects, including paving a highway that cuts through one of the most intact parts of the Amazon Rainforest in northwestern Brazil.

The BR-319 highway runs through 885 kilometers (550 miles) of rainforest, connecting Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, with Rondônia state farther south. It was built in the 1970s but is currently in disrepair.

Local politicians say it will help integrate Brazil’s northern Amazonas state with the rest of Brazil, bringing economic benefits to the region. But environmentalists fear paving it will bring more deforestation, pushing the rainforest past its tipping point.

The new special environmental license bill, first introduced as a temporary decree in August by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, gives the executive branch power to speed up and simplify environmental regulations for projects they define as strategic.

On Dec. 2 and 3, the bill sped through both houses of Congress before the decree’s 180-day deadline, officially converting it into law. It is now pending the president’s final approval.

Supporters see the law as essential for development. “The special environmental license will unlock thousands of projects that are paralyzed in this country,” Senator Eduardo Braga, leader of the centrist MDB party, said during the Dec. 3 Senate session.

Others call it a setback for environmental and human rights protections.

“From now on, large projects with high potential for social impact and environmental damage will be able to bypass a rigorous licensing process, which includes consultations with affected communities,” the Climate Observatory, a Brazilian environmental watchdog organization, wrote in a statement.

“Large hydropower plants, railways, waterways, oil blocks, ports and roads, including in environmentally sensitive areas of the Amazon, will be able to be licensed in one year, merely requiring a political decision that classifies them as ‘strategic,’” it added.

The new bill, once law, mandates a 12-month deadline for licensing authorities to reach a final answer for strategic projects. Today, the timeline for environmental licensing is based on need, with no limitations on the duration of the process; some take several years.

“Repaving preexisting highways” is considered a special case, requiring a licensing window of just 90 days, and business owners can file recent secondary data instead of official studies carried out by technical staff if the timeline is exceeded.

“Why do people’s lives, which are at the mercy of increasingly intense socioenvironmental disasters, not seem to be considered when we discuss what a strategic project is? In what sense is it strategic?” Tarcísio Motta, a member of the Chamber of Deputies with the Socialism and Liberty Party, said during a Dec. 2 parliamentary session to discuss the bill.

“Seeing nature as an obstacle to be overcome … in a context where people are dying from heavy rains, drought, fires, is, in my view, misguided,” he added.

Banner image: BR-319 highway in Amazonas, Brazil. Image © Nilmar Lage/Greenpeace.

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

Alejandro Prescott-Cornejo, Mongabay’s senior marketing associate, recently interviewed me about my journey with Mongabay. Here’s my response to his question about pivoting our business model.

The transition in 2012 was a turning point. At the time, the advertising model was still working, but I had ideas that went beyond what ads could support. Based on my experience reporting in Indonesia, I thought launching an Indonesian-language news service could have a real impact.

Much of the environmental degradation in Indonesia then was driven by corruption and mismanagement in the natural resources sector, and there was little environmental coverage that spanned the archipelago. I believed journalism itself could be an intervention — one that increased transparency and accountability. It reminded me of Brazil in the mid-2000s, when the country achieved major reductions in deforestation even as its economy grew, challenging the notion that protecting forests and improving livelihoods were incompatible.

Mongabay Indonesia took off, and I saw the potential for the rest of Mongabay to follow that model. But I wasn’t sure it would work. My only management experience at that point was overseeing a handful of employees at a tropical fish store (as pets, not to eat) as a teenager. I had no background in fundraising, no experience running a nonprofit, no philanthropic network, and no connections to wealth. So the decision wasn’t without risk. Still, advertising was strong enough that it didn’t feel reckless.

I fundamentally believed that credible, fact-based journalism was a public good, and that there were people and institutions willing to support it. That hunch proved right. Eventually, I donated all the news articles to the nonprofit and dropped advertising from the site entirely.

The nonprofit model required a different mindset. Advertising rewards traffic, not impact. It pushes you to chase clicks rather than dig into complex stories that might reach fewer readers but matter more.

The new model let Mongabay focus on impact over pageviews and collaboration over competition. We began releasing stories under Creative Commons so other outlets could republish them freely, which helped our journalism reach policymakers, community leaders and audiences we’d never have reached otherwise. It allowed Mongabay to scale globally while staying true to its values.

Read the full interview here.

Banner image of Butler in Ecuador in 2023 by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

A wildfire in California’s Joshua Tree National Park burned through some 29 hectares (72 acres) of land during the recent federal government shutdown in October and November. That’s a small fire by California standards, but firefighters estimate it scorched roughly 1,000 of the park’s iconic Joshua trees, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The burned area was considered one of the most climate-resilient refuges for the trees as the region grows hotter and drier amid climate change.

Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) provide critical food and shelter for wildlife species in the Mojave Desert ecosystem. The trees are listed as least concern on the IUCN Red List and currently have no federal protection outside the park. But they’re increasingly threatened by habitat loss and the effects of climate change.

Adult trees are relatively drought-tolerant but scientists are concerned about young trees, which are more sensitive to drought, heat and predation. Adding to their vulnerability, Joshua trees can take up to 70 years to reach sexual maturity and depend on a single pollinator, the yucca moth (Tegeticula synthetica), which is also stressed by climate change.

The recent fire took place near the park’s Black Rock Campground, “the location of some of the most robust and healthy Joshua tree forests in Joshua Tree National Park,” Mark Butler, a former superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park, told Mongabay in a video call. The area sits at a higher, cooler elevation and was considered the climate-resilient Joshua tree habitat in the park.

Since 1895, precipitation has fallen in the park by nearly 40% while temperatures have increased by an average of roughly 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit), according to the National Park Service.

“So, Joshua trees have got this double impact,” Butler said. “They’re being affected chronically by the long-term effects of a changing climate and then acutely by things like wildfire that can take out significant numbers of trees in a very short amount of time.”

Invasive grasses have also worsened wildfire risk. Historically, the arid landscape lacked fuel to spread fires, but grasses now sprawl across the land, often right to the base of trees, creating a pathway for flames to spread.

Experts estimate that as many as 30% of the Joshua trees damaged in the recent fire may survive and regrow from the roots. However, most trees won’t survive without active intervention, a growing challenge as National Park budgets and resources have been slashed in the second Trump administration, Butler said.

“Without some changes to how we manage and protect the Joshua tree, we can reasonably say that its days might be numbered. I think that we need to decide as a society if we are going to take the steps to preserve this tree for the enjoyment of future generations,” Butler said.

Banner image: A Joshua tree in California’s Joshua Tree National Park. Courtesy of Michael Faist, National Park Service.