Costa Rica’s highest court has ruled that government agencies and the national electricity utility failed to adequately protect wildlife from electrocution caused by power lines. The case centers on the Nosara region in northwestern Costa Rica, but conservationists say the landmark ruling could strengthen wildlife protections across the country.

The lawsuit was filed with the Constitutional Court by the law firm Alta Legal on behalf of a coalition of NGOs that argued that local electricity infrastructure was not adequately secured, as required by law.

“Bare electrical wiring is a widespread problem in Costa Rica especially affecting rural areas,” Francisco Sánchez Murillo, a Costa Rican veterinarian who provided information for the case, told Mongabay in an email. He cited exposed wires, poor infrastructure maintenance and inadequate insulation for cables and transformers as key hazards.

“In Nosara, the issue has been especially visible due to the constant wildlife electrocutions in the area,” Murillo said.

Such electrocutions primarily harm tree-dwelling species like sloths and monkeys, and the recent court case largely focused on howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata). According to Elena Kukovica with the International Animal Rescue Center, one of the NGOs involved in the lawsuit, howler monkey mothers are frequently electrocuted on power lines.

“That means you get a child that’s with her that becomes orphaned or dies as well,” Kukovica told Mongabay in a video call. She added that male troop leaders are also frequently killed. “And what happens is in the hierarchy of howler monkeys, the next leading male, then, to basically secure his position, he would kill all the offspring of the previous howler monkey lead male. So, then you get a lot of other monkeys dead.”

Beyond animal welfare concerns, howler monkeys serve a vital ecological role as seed dispersers in the area. Their loss therefore “also creates a big consequence for the flora and fauna in that particular region,” Kukovica said.

The Constitutional Court confirmed that bare wiring was being improperly used in the Nosara area and ordered ICE, the national electricity provider, and the Ministry of Environment and Energy to correct the problem within six months. Failure to do so, according to Kukovica, can include “fines or even prison time for them.”

This case focused on the Nosara region because that’s where documentation of the problem existed, but conservationists say the ruling could have a broader national impact.

“We hope it will serve as a platform for other regions facing similar issues,” Murillo said.

Banner image: A howler monkey crossing power lines in Costa Rica. Image by Rhett A. Butler/ Mongabay.

Levels of some of the most persistent industrial chemicals in the North Atlantic appear to be falling, at least in one unlikely place. Long-finned pilot whales (Globicephala melas) now carry markedly lower concentrations of several legacy PFAS compounds than they did a decade ago, according to a new multidecade analysis of tissue samples from the Faroe Islands. For a class of substances often described as indestructible, the finding is notable, reports Liz Kimbrough.

PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — have been used since the mid-20th century in everything from nonstick cookware to firefighting foam. Their chemical stability allows them to persist in water, soil and living tissue. In marine food webs, that persistence is magnified. Apex predators such as whales tend to accumulate the highest burdens, making them useful sentinels of ocean contamination.

The new study examined pilot whale samples collected between 1986 and 2023. Concentrations of bulk organofluorine, a proxy for total PFAS exposure, rose steadily until around 2011, then declined by more than 60% by 2023. The timing matters. Major manufacturers began phasing out several long-chain PFAS in the early 2000s. The decade-long delay before whale levels began to fall reflects the slow movement of chemicals through ocean currents into the open North Atlantic.

That lag also helps explain why the result is unusual. In human blood samples, total organofluorine levels have not fallen in the same way. Newer replacement PFAS appear to be accumulating closer to where they’re produced and used, rather than dispersing widely into the deep ocean. As Jennifer Sun, the study’s lead author, put it, “Production phase-outs … have been quite effective at reducing concentrations of these chemicals in near-source communities as well as more remote ecosystems.”

The good news is incomplete. While older PFAS compounds declined, at least one replacement chemical continued to rise in whale tissue, increasing steadily over two decades. This pattern of swapping banned substances for chemically similar alternatives has become familiar in environmental regulation.

The whales, then, offer a mixed lesson. Regulation can work, even for chemicals once thought permanent. But as long as controls focus on individual substances rather than addressing them as a chemical class, the gains may remain partial — and temporary.

Read the full article here.

Banner image: North Atlantic long-finned pilot whales (Globicephala melas) now have 60% lower concentrations of some legacy PFAS than they did a decade ago. Image by Charlie Jackson via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

In parts of Africa most affected by biodiversity loss and climate stress, the problem is not an absence of events worth reporting. It is the difficulty of translating slow-moving ecological change, fragmented governance and contested evidence into journalism that travels beyond borders. The signals are often local, technical and politically inconvenient. Yet they shape global outcomes all the same.

Over the past decade, international interest in the Congo Basin, the Sahel and Central Africa has waxed and waned. Attention spikes around summits or crises, then recedes. What remains is the steady work of reporters who stay with these regions long after headlines move on, tracing how land use, energy choices, wildlife trade and misinformation interact on the ground.

The entry point may be human, but the subject is systemic. Forest governance that looks sound on paper but frays in practice. Conservation policies that succeed in one district and fail in the next. Communities adapting to climate stress with tools that are promising but incomplete. The task is not to simplify these dynamics, but to make them clear and relatable to audiences.

Aimable Twahirwa, a senior science journalist based in Kigali, has spent much of his career doing precisely that. After two and a half decades reporting across Central, East and West Africa, he joined Mongabay in 2024 to focus on regions that are often described in the abstract, but shaped by local realities. His work has examined wildlife trafficking routes, Indigenous roles in forest governance and the uptake of renewable energy in rural economies, including solar-powered irrigation for smallholder farmers.

What distinguishes this reporting is its persistence. Stories are built from fieldwork, long networks of scientific and local sources and a willingness to follow outcomes after publication. A recent multimedia project on solar-powered irrigation in Rwanda traced how smallholder farmers adopt new technologies, where costs remain prohibitive and how public and private actors shape access. The response, Twahirwa noted, did not end with clicks. It prompted follow-up inquiries from agricultural groups across the continent.

Underlying this approach is a concern about the information environment itself.

“Countering misinformation and science denial is critical to bolster public trust and fortify the news ecosystem against manipulation,” he told Alejandro Prescott-Cornejo in a recent interview.

In regions where environmental reporting can be politically sensitive and technically dense, accuracy is not an abstraction. It is a prerequisite for credibility.

Such work is rarely celebrated in real time. It accrues value slowly, as sources return, stories compound and audiences learn to trust that coverage will not disappear when attention shifts. In that sense, the measure of impact is not virality, but continuity.

Read the full article here.

Banner image: Twahirwa posing at Kuwinka, the main entrance for visitors at Nyungwe rainforest in southwestern Rwanda for field coverage. Image courtesy of Viateur Nzeyimana.

PARIS (AP) — The aftermath of a deadly storm continued to disrupt parts of France on Friday, with flooding concerns persisting in the southwest even as wind alerts were lifted, according to weather service Météo-France.

Government spokesperson Maud Bregeon said on TF1 that France had recorded two deaths linked to Storm Nils: one on Thursday in the Landes department and a second “in the last hours” in Tarn-et-Garonne.

She said the second victim was a man who was found in his garden.

Network operator Enedis said the storm left up to 900,000 customers without power at its peak; by Friday morning it had restored service to about half of those affected and mobilized 3,000 personnel, including 2,100 technicians.

Flood vigilance remained high. Météo-France maintained red flood alerts for Gironde and Lot-et-Garonne — to remain in place Saturday — due to a significant Garonne river flood episode.

Météo-France said the storm had “uncommon strength” and swept in from France’s western seaboard overnight Wednesday into Thursday and has now moved on tracking east into Europe.

By Associated Press

Banner image: People walk in a flooded street of Confolens as severe flooding hits western France amid storm Nils, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Yohan Bonnet)

On Feb. 12, the United States repealed the so-called endangerment finding, a 2009 cornerstone rule that enabled the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant.

Established under former President Barack Obama, the rule codified the long-held scientific consensus that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

In repealing the endangerment finding, the EPA removed the legal and scientific foundation for regulating greenhouse gases, effectively clearing the path to do away with climate-related emissions limits for vehicles, industry and fossil fuel extraction.

“This decision betrays the American people,” California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote in a social media post. He said the decision will “lead to more deadly wildfires, more extreme heat deaths, more climate-driven floods and droughts … all while the EPA dismisses the overwhelming science that has protected public health for decades.”

The move comes as climate scientists warn that the last three years have been the warmest three years on record, and global emissions are set to push the Earth past 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) of warming since the industrial revolution, passing the threshold set by the Paris climate agreement.

Although that limit has not yet been formally crossed, the world is already feeling widespread climate impacts. In 2025, more than 87 million people were affected by climate-related disasters. Meanwhile, conservationists warn that climate change is pushing vulnerable species toward extinction and threatening human health.

Philip Landrigan is director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health with Boston College. In an email to Mongabay, Landrigan gave a laundry list of the many ways that “increased emissions will have serious negative consequences for human health.” Those include increased deaths from heat exhaustion, preterm birth, increased spread of diseases and waterborne illnesses, crop failures and subsequent hunger, heart disease, stroke and lung disease.

Despite the scientific consensus otherwise, U.S. President Donald Trump has dismissed climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

In a press release, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said, “The Endangerment Finding has been the source of 16 years of consumer choice restrictions and trillions of dollars in hidden costs for Americans.”

In a social media post, former President Obama said that without the rule, “we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.”

The oil industry directly donated some $75 million to President Trump’s campaign for president.

Governor Newsom and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) have already announced plans to sue the administration over the decision.

“EDF will challenge this decision in court, where evidence matters, and keep working with everyone who wants to build a better, safer and more prosperous future,” EDF president Fred Krupp said in a statement.

Banner image: Smokestack pollution. Image courtesy of Robert S. Donovan via the National Security Archive.