Oil slicks from ships and offshore oil platforms cover nearly 1.6 million square kilometers (618,000 square miles) of the ocean surface each year, an area slightly larger than the nation of Mongolia.

The estimate comes from a recent report by Skytruth, a U.S.-based nonprofit that used satellite imagery, machine learning and vessel tracking data to trace global oil pollution in the oceans between 2023 and 2025.

According to John Amos, CEO of Skytruth, this kind of pollution was largely invisible before satellite imagery made it possible to track.

“Any vessel operator could be pretty confident that nobody was going to notice what they were doing out in the middle of the ocean,” Amos told Mongabay by phone. “So that’s changed. We can see it now.”

Much of the vessel oil slicks come from bilge waste, a mix of oil and water that collects in the bottom of a ship’s hull during operation. Tankers sometimes also wash out their cargo holds and flush crude oil residue into the sea.

“It’s nasty oily dirty gunk that you just want to get rid of,” Amos said. “And the easiest thing to do with it is just pump it out into the ocean while you’re at sea.”

According to the report, most of these discharges are illegal under MARPOL, the international treaty on pollution from ships. A MARPOL treaty adopted in 1973 allows vessels to discharge bilge water containing no more than 15 parts of oil per million parts of water.

SkyTruth used modeling to estimate ocean oil pollution between 2023 and 2025.  They found vessels were responsible for 81% of the slick area, mostly cargo ships and tankers, while oil infrastructure such as offshore oil platforms accounted for 18%.

Indonesian waters had the most verified slicks in the report, with 823, followed by Malaysia, which had 214. Both countries share the Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest waterways in the world.

“The sheer volume of large cargo ships and oil tankers transiting their waters could be largely responsible,” Amos said.

SkyTruth could only find ownership records for 9 of the 20 vessels flagged as repeat polluters.

Two of those belonged to Indonesia’s PT Waruna Nusa Sentana and another two to Nigeria’s Sea Transport Services Nigeria Ltd. Mongabay reached out to both companies for comment but did not receive a response by publication.

According to Amos, the global estimate is likely an underestimate. A ship that keeps its oily waste on board has to detour to a port with proper disposal facilities, which is expensive. A day at sea can cost a large cargo ship tens of thousands of dollars, and sometimes even more.

“So you can either do that, or you can just wait until you get out in the ocean where you think nobody’s looking, and then discharge it directly overboard,” he said.

Banner image: Oil spill in 2024 off Tibaguin Island, Philippines. Image © Noel Celis/Greenpeace.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s upcoming presidential election could reshape the Amazon’s future. Control of the country, which contains about 60% of the rainforest, could pass to Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Experts warn a Bolsonaro victory could reverse deforestation-control policies restored by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60%. Lula reinstated an anti-deforestation plan in 2023, reducing deforestation by 45%. Flávio Bolsonaro pledges to end illegal deforestation by 2029 but has not detailed how. Concerns remain about potential weakening of environmental protections.

By Gabriela Sá Pessoa, Associated Press

Banner image: A forest burns in the Amazon, in the municipality of Manaquiri in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023. Image courtesy of Edmar Barros, Associated Press. 

The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have signed a 10-year agreement to co-manage a portion of Queen Elizabeth National Park, famous for its tree-climbing lions.

WCS will take over some day-to-day roles for the Ishasha Sector in the south of the park, including those covering biodiversity management, community engagement and the development of tourist enterprises, according to WCS Uganda country director Simon Nampindo. UWA will retain responsibility for law enforcement and wildlife protection in Ishasha, he added.

The agreement follows a wider trend of “public-private” partnerships between African governments and conservation organizations to manage parks.

“Across all pillars, WCS and UWA will work closely in the co-development and implementation of all activity workplans and budgets,” Nampindo told Mongabay by email.

Queen Elizabeth’s Ishasha Sector covers around 500 square kilometers (193 square miles) of the park’s 1,978 km2 (764 mi2) area.

Historically, Ishasha’s lions have been a magnet for tourists, but the animals are becoming rare. According to UWA’s figures, the overall lion population in Queen Elizabeth declined by more than 90% between the late 1970s and 2022, falling from 400 to 39 individuals.

Nampindo said there are now fewer than five lions in Ishasha. Unless that population is supplemented — likely through translocation from elsewhere — it will not be able to recover naturally.

Queen Elizabeth’s lions have faced several overlapping threats, including conflict between the predators and local herders, habitat loss and snares set by poachers in the park. Nampindo said these causes of lion decline need to be addressed before any translocations take place.

Since 2018, lions have been killed by people living in and around the park in a series of incidents. In 2021, a poisoned carcass caused the death of at least six lions. In late 2025, another three lions died under similar circumstances.

Mongabay’s reporting from Queen Elizabeth has found a tense relationship between some pastoralist communities and the UWA. Attacks on livestock by lions have fed long-standing grievances over strict grazing rules and contributed to retaliatory killings.

Nampindo said that WCS plans to recruit “lion guardians” and scouts from towns around Ishasha to build support for conservation. It has also financed the construction of enclosures and water boreholes for livestock.

“[Human-wildlife conflict] measures will be further strengthened under the [collaborative management partnership] and launched through a series of extensive community consultations in the first six months,” Nampindo said.

WCS’s role at Queen Elizabeth will come with new oversight responsibilities for law enforcement at Ishasha. A 2024 Mongabay investigation found credible allegations of extrajudicial killings and other violence by UWA rangers at the park. Nampindo said its agreement with UWA includes human rights protections, such as a grievance structure and a code of conduct.

“WCS is aware of the allegations and has discussed them directly with [UWA], with both organizations agreeing to a series of concrete measures to strengthen human rights protections, accountability, and community engagement,” he said.

Banner image: A pride of lions inside Queen Elizabeth National Park. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.

In the Indian Western Himalayas, women are the primary first responders to escalating forest fires. They risk their physical safety to protect homes and livelihoods despite receiving little formal support or equipment and no pay, reports contributor Swati Thapa for Mongabay.

Uttarakhand is the most fire-prone state in India’s Western Himalayas. High-elevation warming exceeds global rates there, extending the wildfire season into the winter and hinting at bigger ecosystem-level changes. More than 71% of the state is forested, supplying the region with essential drinking water, firewood, and fodder for cattle. Climate change is both increasing fire risk and impacting local agriculture, such that men are migrating to cities for work, leaving rural women behind to manage farming, livestock, and fire defense.

Kavya Pandey, a researcher at the Centre for Wildlife Studies in Bengaluru, has studied extensively the relationship between women in Uttarakhand and forest fires. Pandey notes that a traditional gender role for women is collecting firewood, so they’re often in the forest for hours and, by default, on the frontlines when forest fires start.

Men are occasionally hired as paid seasonal fire watchers, and while authorities also call on women to help, they’re rarely paid for the work and don’t receive protective gear.

“If a woman sees fire anywhere, and she does not have a phone, she calls out to others by ululating or whistling, and all the women go together to snuff the fire,” said Kamla Devi, head of the Marhmanley village van panchayat, a community-managed forest council.

Armed primarily with household sickles, women cut green branches to make jhapa, or makeshift fire brooms. “When the flames are not too high, we use jhapa to beat back the fire,” said Asha Devi, a resident of Bhetuli village. “If they are [high], we clear a fire line instead; some of us push the fire back toward the already-burnt ground, while others use their sickle to pull away dry grass and twigs so it has nothing left to catch on.”

The physical toll is significant. Women battle fires wearing flammable synthetic nylon sarees, often suffering burnt hands, singed eyebrows, and foot injuries. “We are all coughing our lungs out; during that time, our eyes are bloodshot, irritated by all the smoke, and it’s hard to breathe in the thick air,” said Tulsi Devi, a resident of Ayarpani village.

But community-led prevention has worked in places where women hold genuine authority. Roughly 95% of forest fires in India are human-made, so Kamla has organized community women to stop fires before they start, keeping Marhmanley free of major blazes for three consecutive years.

“Before, people burned brush haphazardly, but now we insist on planning. We show them where and how to set small, controlled burns,” Kamla said.

Read the full story by Swati Thapa here.

Banner image: Kamla Devi, left, and Lila Devi with the tools they use to beat back forest fires. Image by Swati Thapa for Mongabay.

Isolated and contacted Indigenous tribes in India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands face threats from illegal fishing, mega-development projects and misinformed government welfare policies that undermine their self-sufficiency, says Manish Chandi, a former research scholar who has spent decades working with tribal communities in the region.

Chandi worked with the communities while he was with the Andaman Nicobar Environment Team and the Nature Conservation Foundation. He is also a former advisory board member of the Tribal Research Institute under the Andaman and Nicobar Administration. In an interview with Mongabay’s Latoya Abulu, Chandi says that protecting Indigenous autonomy is vital for both tribal survival and environmental conservation in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which lie southeast of mainland India.

The archipelago’s tribal reserves — home to Indigenous groups that live in voluntary isolation, such as the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island and the Shompen of Great Nicobar Island — contain some of the region’s richest biodiversity, outperforming the roughly 100 official national parks and wildlife sanctuaries across the islands, Chandi says.

This is because the tribal reserved areas are both large and “have not been used for timber extraction and settlement and therefore retain the biodiversity of both various habitats and also species,” Chandi tells Mongabay.

However, several escalating pressures threaten these communities.

Chandi notes that commercial trawlers and poachers frequently infiltrate coastal buffer zones, harvesting sharks, lobsters and turtles that island communities depend on for subsistence. On Great Nicobar Island, a government-proposed development project directly overlaps with ancestral foraging grounds and the Shompen’s habitations without their consent.

Overall, there is ignorance about the communities as well, Chandi says.

Some government officials, for example, view traditional hunting-and-gathering practices as “primitive”, and have replaced food that communities grow themselves with external food sources, he says. This has increased communities’ dependence on foods that they cannot grow or gather themselves.

Chandi adds that substituting natural self-sufficiency with dependence on government welfare supplies from the market, forces once-independent communities into small, sedentary reservations, opening their larger traditional territories to denotification (where the state can remove a legally protected status), and commercial tourism.

“Autonomy and self-sufficiency are critical indicators of human welfare and well-being,” Chandi says. “Rather than creating dependencies and imposing our ignorance on their community interests, welfare plans for tribal communities should incorporate these perspectives.”

Chandi adds that the establishment’s reluctance to make “ethically positive and scientifically genuine efforts to understand the tribal communities and to share that information with the island settlers is a festering wound that needs serious attention.”

“There’s so much to learn of the Indigenous communities, to comprehend their space and perspectives their world and ours, and to share that with others,” he says.

Read the full interview with Manish Chandi here.

Banner image: Fishermen from South Andaman lay gillnets around North Sentinel Island, exploiting the rich fishery. This picture is from 1999. The exploitation of marine resources has only increased, Manish Chandi says. Image courtesy of Manish Chandi.

SCHIPKAU, Germany (AP) — A wind turbine described by its developer as the world’s tallest now rises 365 meters (1,197 feet) above the sparsely populated landscape of eastern Germany, surpassing the height of the Eiffel Tower.

The colossal turbine has been built at an existing wind farm in Lusatia, southeast of Berlin. Once a major center of lignite mining, the region has increasingly turned to renewable energy in recent years. The prototype reached its full height this week and is due to be inaugurated in mid-November.

Jochen Grossmann, chief executive of Gicon, the Dresden-based engineering company that built the tower, said the structure would harness the stronger, more reliable winds found at greater heights. Conventional wind turbines typically have a hub height — the distance from the ground to the center of the rotor — of well below 200 meters (656 feet).

“At 300 meters, we have such constant and strong wind that we can produce more than twice as much electrical energy as with the same facility at today’s heights,” Grossmann said on Thursday. He added that it would also be possible to produce electricity for much more of the year than with existing turbines.

The turbine has a hub height of 300 meters (984 feet), and its rotor blades bring its total height to 365 meters. That makes it taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, at 330 meters (1,083 feet), and leaves it just short of Berlin’s television tower, Germany ‘s tallest building at 368 meters (1,207 feet).

Work on the turbine is not yet complete, with internal wiring still to be installed ahead of its planned inauguration on Nov. 19. The prototype is intended to measure the potential gains from building turbines at such heights.

Gicon plans to use the findings to develop a wind farm containing three to five extra-tall turbines, paving the way for possible full-scale production.

Grossmann also sees the giant turbines as a potential solution to the shortage of suitable land for wind farms. Existing sites could be expanded into “two-story” wind farms combining shorter and taller turbines, while new sites could be designed that way from the outset.

Germany has been working for years to expand the use of wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. It switched off its last nuclear power plants in 2023 in a long-planned move, though that drew criticism after energy prices surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Germany also plans to stop generating electricity from coal by 2038.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, 59.1% of energy produced in Germany in the first half of 2026 came from renewable sources. Wind was the largest single source, providing 29.4% of the total.

Banner image: A newly constructed wind turbine, whose rotor tips reach a maximum height of 365 meters (1,198 feet), stands in Schipkau, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. Image courtesy of Markus Schreiber, Associated Press