Incumbent Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was reelected on Oct. 25 in a surprise defeat of his far-right rival who had promised to remove “environmental obstacles” in the Amazon rainforest.

Lula won 51.8% of valid votes. Flávio Bolsonaro, eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is imprisoned after being convicted of attempting a coup d’état when he lost the previous election, won 48.2% of the vote. Flávio was favored to win after he got 2% more of the first-round votes on Oct. 4. However, neither candidate got more than 50% of the vote, triggering a runoff election. Lula was able to secure an additional 10 million votes in 20 days.

“This election was a defeat for denialism, a defeat for lies,” Lula said in his first speech after the election results.

“We are going to teach the world how climate policy is done, here in this country. This year is the first time we have managed to reduce deforestation for four consecutive years.”

Deforestation soared to its highest level in 15 years under Jair Bolsonaro’s government. Lula took office in 2023 pledging to end both legal and illegal deforestation by 2030. Since then, deforestation has gradually slowed to its lowest rate since records began in 1988, though the Amazon rainforest is still shrinking.

Between August 2025 and July 2026, around 333,500 hectares (824,000 acres) of forest were cut, an area equivalent to roughly 7,300 Olympic-size swimming pools cleared every day.

“The reduction in deforestation in recent years was fundamental, but we still need to go much further,” Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of São Paulo, said in a statement.

Lula won a majority in four Amazonian states, while Flávio had more than half of the votes in five.

In Manaus, the Brazilian Amazon’s largest city, the skies were covered in forest fire smoke for much of October. Lula gained more than 80,000 votes in Manaus between the first and second rounds, an 18.5% increase, while Flávio Bolsonaro saw a 2.5% increase.

At an Oct. 19 rally in Marabá, a city in southeastern Pará state, Flávio Bolsonaro promised “the largest land regularization Pará has ever seen” and an end to environmental regulations, without specifying which rules he would remove.

In 2019, as a senator, Flávio Bolsonaro also co-authored a bill to abolish the requirement for landowners to keep native vegetation on 80% of their property in forested areas of the Legal Amazon, 35% in the Cerrado savanna and 20% in the rest of Brazil. The bill was shelved the same year.

Lula is set to begin his fourth term on Jan. 5, 2027. Voters elected Flávio Bolsonaro’s far right Liberal Party to the most seats in both chambers of Congress.

Banner image: Incumbent Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in São Paulo, Brazil, after his election win. Image courtesy of Ricardo Stuckert.

YEREVAN, Armenia — Like the dark spaces they often prefer, mushrooms, yeasts, and some 160,000 known species of fungi rest in the background of conservation efforts. But their crucial role as ecosystem engineers makes protecting them vital, said Greg Mueller, chief scientist emeritus at the Chicago Botanic Garden in the U.S.

“They really are responsible for life on Earth,” he said, “and life as we know it would not exist without fungi.”

Mueller called fungi “nature’s recyclers” at the launch of the first global conservation strategy for fungal conservation on Oct. 21 at the United Nations biodiversity conference (COP17) in Armenia. Many fungi also form symbiotic relationships with plants, helping shuttle nutrients and water between them; they can sock away carbon in soil and help provide food for animals and people.

Historically, international negotiations to stem the global loss of species haven’t fully considered fungi. Now, a team of fungi conservationists from 30 countries led by Mueller has set out to integrate fungal conservation into the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a central part of negotiations at COP17.

To date, mycologists — scientists who study fungi — have little data on the conservation status for most species known to science.

“When we talk about … halting extinction risk, how can we talk about it [while] ignoring a whole kingdom of life?” Cátia Canteiro, a conservationist with U.K.-based NGO Plantlife International who co-led the strategy, said during the launch.

The guidelines aim to spur new research and the protection of rare species, make fungi part of restoration and rewilding efforts, and balance the sustainable use of species that provide humans with food and medicine. Its authors also collected real-world examples of how fungi boost ecosystems, wildlife and communities.

In Uganda and Rwanda, mushroom cultivation provides households with income while easing the pressure on wetland areas that support threatened cranes. And women in Benin, home to 70 species of edible mushrooms, have benefited from learning to grow and sell them.

The country’s fungal diversity is “incredible,” said Bernice Bancole, a plant pathologist from Benin.

Bancole, now with the University of KwaZulu-Natal and GreenHill Laboratories in South Africa, contributed to the strategy specifically around the array of fungal species that impact forestry and food production, she told Mongabay in an interview. Her own work has looked at how fungi can be used as “biocontrols” for insect pests like cereal borers that can decimate critical food crops like sorghum, rice, and maize.

The strategy draws on the global work of scientists who, like Bancole, bring their unique expertise to bear on the case for protecting fungi around the world.

“There is so much Africa can bring to the table when we are talking about fungi conservation and fungi being incorporated into biodiversity strategy,” she said.

Banner image: Studying fungi in Indonesia’s Bantimurung-Bulusaraung National Park. Image © Garry Lotulung/SPUN-Indonesia.

The Bezos Earth Fund and eight other organizations have pledged more than $500 million over five years to help rescue some of the world’s most threatened plants and animals, giving species recovery greater attention in global conservation funding.

The Species Recovery Alliance, announced Oct. 16 at the United Nations biodiversity summit, or COP17, in Yerevan, Armenia, will coordinate funding and conservation efforts rather than establish a single pooled fund.

Cristián Samper, managing director and leader of nature solutions at the Bezos Earth Fund, said the initiative grew out of concerns that efforts to expand protected areas were overshadowing the urgent needs of threatened species.

“We’re forgetting some of the other targets, in particular, the Target 4 on recovery of endangered species,” he told Mongabay in an interview at COP17.

Target 4 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for urgent action to halt human-induced extinctions and help threatened species recover. Yet biodiversity continues to decline. WWF’s 2026 “Living Planet Report” found that populations of monitored vertebrate wildlife declined by an average of 73% between 1970 and 2022. Africa recorded an 80% decline. A new U.N. assessment also found that fewer than half of assessed biodiversity targets are on track.

“Setting up protected areas and dealing with the other issues is not enough,” Samper said. Many threatened species, he added, require targeted interventions to recover.

The Species Recovery Alliance includes Re:wild, Rainforest Trust, Fondation Segré, and five other organizations alongside the Bezos Earth Fund. Its members will coordinate investments and support recovery projects through conservation organizations and local partners.

The announcement builds on the $200 million Phoenix Species Project, launched by the Bezos Earth Fund in August to support the recovery of 100 critically endangered species across 30 countries.

But not all of the $500 million for the new initiative is new financing, with about a third of it “incremental, new money,” Samper said.

The commitment also comes amid difficult negotiations over biodiversity finance. Under Target 19, governments agreed to mobilize at least $200 billion annually for biodiversity by 2030, including $30 billion in international financial flows to developing countries.

“Philanthropy can play a catalytic role,” Samper said, but he argued that public financing, particularly domestic resources, would ultimately have to shoulder much of the responsibility.

For the alliance, success will be measured by whether threatened species actually recover, using indicators developed by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. Samper acknowledged that results could take decades for some slow-breeding species.

“We recognize not everything is going to work. Some of these species may go extinct,” he said. “But we’re hoping that by having the right focus, the right capacity, the political commitment, and some additional resources, that this will help turn things around.”

Banner image: The rufous-necked hornbill is found in the dense forests of northeast India, with some of the highest numbers in Arunachal Pradesh state. Image by Shiv’s fotografia via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

A 1,000-year ecological reconstruction reveals that Australia’s ongoing wildfire crisis stems from the colonial disruption of Indigenous fire management rather than climate change alone, according to a study published in Nature.

For more than 800 years prior to British colonization in 1788, the Indigenous Gunaikurnai people maintained stable, open eucalypt woodlands across southeastern Australia using frequent, low-temperature “cool” burning, the study says. Researchers analyzed sediment cores from Purghagoolah (also known as Lake Elusive) in the East Gippsland region of southeastern Australia and found tree cover averaged roughly 10% under Indigenous stewardship. High-temperature crown fires and severe soil erosion were virtually nonexistent, according to the researchers.

However, that long-term stability collapsed after colonization in the 1840s forcibly severed Indigenous care for Country, the Indigenous concept of a holistic, living entity encompassing the physical land, waters, skies, and all living things.

Without cultural burning, woody fuels accumulated and eucalypt tree cover — oily and highly flammable — roughly quadrupled to 34% by the 1970s. Once-open woodlands thus became dense, flammable forests, the study says. Evidence of more intense burning emerged alongside this transition, in the form of high-temperature charcoal, whose abundance doubled or even tripled. Its presence indicates a shift to canopy-consuming crown fires that also destroyed ground vegetation and exposed the topsoil to erosion.

Crucially, these changes occurred long before modern human-caused climate warming began, suggesting that the buildup of woody fuels under colonial forestry practices had already rendered the region more prone to severe fires, according to the study.

“The starkness of the before and after” stood out most in the findings, lead author Michael-Shawn Fletcher, an Indigenous Wiradjuri geographer at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told Mongabay by email. “Cared-for Country did not carry catastrophic fire,” Fletcher said. Hot, dry conditions were common in Australia long before the European invasion, but they didn’t trigger the severe bushfires seen today, he added. “After colonization severed that care, the record flips: hot fires appear, eucalypt cover roughly quadruples, open woodland thickens into dense forest, and soil starts washing into the lake,” Fletcher added.

The authors said unmanaged postcolonial forests have created a “catastrophic wildfire loop,” where severe fires trigger dense eucalypt regrowth, boosting fuel loads and amplifying future climate-driven fire risk. Contemporary national vegetation baselines treat these postcolonial dense forests as “natural reference points,” which entrenches wildfire vulnerability, according to the study.

To break this cycle, the study says fire management must look beyond climate adaptation and hazard reduction to empower Traditional Owners to restore Indigenous fire stewardship.

“Climate change is amplifying a vulnerability [that] colonization created,” Fletcher said. “Managing fire in southeastern Australia has to go beyond hazard-reduction burning and climate adaptation to restoring Indigenous land management, with Traditional Owners resourced and supported to lead. Where Country is cared for, climate does not dictate how it burns.”

Banner image: Mallacoota foreshore in Croajingolong National Park, which encompasses the study area. Image by ElPhantomero via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Twenty species of gibbons swing through the tropical forests of Asia, all are threatened by human activities like deforestation, hunting and trafficking baby gibbons for the exotic pet trade.

In recognition of International Gibbon Day on Oct. 24, here are three recent Mongabay stories about the threats gibbons face and the people working to protect them:

A growing demand for the exotic pet trade

In 2025, gibbon trafficking seizures reached an all-time high; 336 individuals were recorded between January and August alone, Mongabay’s Ana Norman Bermúdez reported.

A Malaysian woman who asked to be called Esther (not her real name) unwittingly became part of the illegal trade. “When we first got Joy, we thought she was a monkey,” Esther said.

A hunter had come to Esther’s village on the island of Borneo, to sell wild meat. He showed Esther and her husband a weeks-old primate with long arms, dark skin and large, round eyes. Worried the animal might otherwise be killed for food; Esther decided to take her home. It was only later that she realized Joy was not a monkey, but a gibbon.

Gibbons are small apes, more closely related to chimpanzees and humans than to monkeys. They are highly social animals and will defend their young to the death, so the capture of an infant gibbon often represents the annihilation of an entire family group.

Trafficked baby gibbons overwhelm rehabilitation centers in North Sumatra

To capture baby gibbons for the illegal pet trade, hunters often shoot mothers in treetops and wrest the baby from her body when she falls to the ground, Mongabay’s Carolyn Cowan reported. Many babies are injured in that process or sickened during transportation to markets.

“Most gibbon babies die — that’s the sad reality,” said Sinan Serhadli, a support officer with the gibbon rehabilitation and release program. “Probably only one in 10 actually makes it to an end buyer. But the traffickers take that into account, right? They calculate losing about 80-90% of them.”

Hundreds of the small apes have been confiscated by authorities across the region in the past decade and inadequately funded rehabilitation centers are struggling to keep up with the number of animals in need of rescue and care.

In Java, a women’s collective is helping save gibbons through forest-inspired textiles

Roughly half of the world’s remaining Javan gibbon population are believed to survive in Gunung Halimun-Salak National Park on the Indonesian island of Java. There, a local women’s textile-printing collective is creating fabrics inspired by local plants and gibbons, Mongabay’s Falahi Mubarok reported.

Local women said that through the collective they’ve learned more about the animal’s ecological role as “forest farmers,” or seed dispersers. The project is building local appreciation for the forest and its wildlife while creating opportunities for women.

For younger readers, Mongabay Kids has an explainer about gibbon social lives and their forest habitats.

Banner image: Southern yellow-cheeked gibbon. Image courtesy of Next Continent: Wildlife, Photography and Natural History Tours via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)

YEREVAN, Armenia — A Mozambican safari operator credited with helping restore wildlife populations in Mozambique’s Zambezi Delta, has won the 2026 Markhor Award, which recognizes contributions to conservation through sustainable wildlife management.

Zambeze Delta Safaris, led by professional hunter Mark Haldane, received the award on Oct. 22, 2026, at the ongoing U.N. Biodiversity Conference, COP17, in Yerevan, Armenia. The company combines regulated trophy hunting with wildlife restoration, anti-poaching efforts and community development in an area of Mozambique that was devastated by the country’s civil war.

“There is no other way to describe it than it’s a truly humbling feeling,” Haldane told Mongabay in a WhatsApp interview. “In my wildest dreams I never imagined this or anything close to this.”

The award comes as governments at COP17 review progress toward global biodiversity targets adopted in 2022. One of them, Target 9, calls for sustainable wildlife management that also benefits communities. A new U.N. assessment warns that the world remains off track to meet its biodiversity commitments by the 2030 deadline.

Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), welcomed the recognition. “Here is something we can celebrate,” she said during a press conference announcing the winner.

Haldane began working in Coutada 11, a hunting concession in central Mozambique, in 1994, after years of conflict had severely depleted wildlife populations. He later established Zambeze Delta Safaris with Mozambican businessperson Carlos Pacheco Faria.

According to the company’s award nomination, since the safari outfit began working in the region, the African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) population has risen from about 1,100 to 35,000, while sable antelopes (Hippotragus niger) have increased 100-fold from just 40 to 4,000. Twenty-four lions (Panthera leo) were reintroduced in 2018, roughly 120 live there now. Mongabay has not independently verified all the figures, although Mozambique’s Foundation for the Conservation of Biodiversity has documented substantial wildlife recovery.

Trophy hunting remains controversial though amid questions about who benefits. A 2013 study conducted in Mozambique’s Niassa National Reserve, for example, found that a single leopard could generate approximately $24,000 in hunting revenue, however little of that money went back to local communities.

More recently, however, a 2026 review of 89 studies across 13 sub-Saharan African countries found that nearly two-thirds of documented trophy-hunting “outcomes were positive,” for either wildlife or local people.

Haldane told Mongabay that Mozambique’s law directs that 20% of government revenue collected from concessionaires, like him, to be paid to local communities. He said the money goes to community-nominated committees and is used to fund projects benefiting residents.

Established in 2008, the Markhor Award is presented every two years. Previous winners include conservation initiatives in Tanzania, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Iran.

Looking ahead, Haldane hopes to expand conservation efforts beyond Coutada 11. “We are not islands in conservation,” he said. Reflecting on three decades of work, he added: “Look after nature and she will bounce back.”

Banner image: A Livingstone’s eland (Taurotragus oryx livingstonii) bull in Coutada 11, Mozambique. Image courtesy of Zambeze Delta Safaris.