Roughly 40% of the global fish catch comes from small-scale fisheries. It’s one of the food production systems most vulnerable to climate change, and governments are lacking data to help fishers adapt. To help address that gap, the global research partnership CGIAR recently launched its Asia Digital Hub at WorldFish’s headquarters in Penang, Malaysia.

The Hub brings together policymakers, scientists, communities and the private sector to develop and scale digital solutions for food systems. One of their key tools is Peskas, an open-source system that allows near real-time monitoring of small-scale fisheries.

In Zanzibar, WorldFish scientist Pascal Thoya is working with the government to integrate Peskas with the existing system. Currently, 100 fishing boats out of Zanzibar are equipped with trackers and at 30 landing sites, data collectors use tablets to record catch information including species, weight and length, Thoya said. Peskas then analyzes the data and displays statistics automatically. Before Peskas, data were recorded on paper and only reported annually.

“Initially, there is always a challenge to know where fishermen really fish,” Thoya told Mongabay in a video call. Peskas displays fishing grounds along with their productivity.

Arthur Tuda, the executive director of the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association, a WorldFish partner in Zanzibar, said in an email, “This integration fills a big hole. It gives decision-makers the timely, reliable information they need to manage fisheries better and meet their reporting duties at home and abroad.”

First developed in Timor-Leste in 2016, Peskas is now being expanded to Zanzibar, Malawi, Kenya and Mozambique, with interest from Brunei, Djibouti and Ethiopia, according to WorldFish.

WorldFish also piloted Peskas in Malaysia, in collaboration with a local NGO, the Malaysian Inshore Fishermen Association for Education and Welfare (JARING). JARING’s deputy chairperson, Mohd Faizal Mohd Zabri, said by phone that such information could help the government verify fishers’ operations for licensing and prevent abuse of subsidized fuel and living allowances.

Alex Tilley, the digital and data science lead with WorldFish, said the Hub looks beyond catch monitoring to integrate data on aquatic animal health, aquaculture, household nutrition and women’s empowerment.

“We need to be able to manage those in one data environment, to see how they relate to one another,” Tilley said in an interview.

It also promotes access to information through a compact genome sequencing tool kit and open-access courses.

Tuda said in an email, “This [Hub] will have effects beyond Asia. We expect that it would lead to better cooperation between countries in the South, encourage open-source solutions, and help Africa’s fisheries monitoring and climate adaptation efforts grow.”

He also noted that successful digital transformation goes beyond technology. “For these tools to work, they need to be based on the needs and realities of the people who will be utilizing them. Small-scale fishers shouldn’t just give data but also help design things.”

Banner image: Fishers at Ataúro Island, Timor-Leste. Image by Cymo Tome via Unsplash.

Citizens from around the world are increasingly holding governments and businesses accountable for their greenhouse gas emissions by filing lawsuits that frame climate change impacts as human rights violations, according to a recent episode of Mongabay’s Against All Odds video series.

César Rodríguez-Garavito, chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s School of Law, who’s featured in the video, says the climate movement has seen groundbreaking victories in recent years with cases filed by both the youth and elderly women.

Between 2005 and 2024, more than 300 cases were litigated on behalf of ordinary citizens experiencing the impacts of climate change.

One of the successes came in 2024, when an international court for the first time formally acknowledged climate change as a human rights issue, Rodríguez-Garavito says.

The European Court of Human Rights in April last year ruled in favor of KlimaSeniorinnen Switzerland, a group representing 2,500 women aged 64 and older, who argued the Swiss government’s inadequate actions had put them at risk of dying due to heat waves made more intense and frequent by climate change.

The court recognized that climate protection is a human right and that the government violated such a right by not taking the necessary steps to combat climate change. The court ordered the Swiss government to hasten and expand its efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

“It’s boosted the efforts of climate activists around the world who are taking note of the fact that judges are updating their doctrines to address and meet the challenges of climate change,” Rodríguez-Garavito says.

Another lawsuit with a successful outcome in April 2024 was the world’s first youth-led climate case seeking climate action within the transportation sector. Native Hawaiian youth filed the case against the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation to get the state government to change its transportation policies and hold it accountable for climate change impacts that have harmed their well-being.

The court ruled that the transportation department would need to invest in modes of transportation that don’t rely on fossil fuels by 2045. This includes promoting bicycle lanes and electric cars and buses.

Rodríguez-Garavito says this case was one among many in recent years showing that “young people would be the ones who would suffer the worst consequences of climate change in the second half of the 21st century and beyond.”

“The law is ultimately a way to tell stories, to frame them in the language of dignity, in the language of justice,” Rodríguez-Garavito says. “And many activists and litigators pursue lawsuits mostly because they want to energize and they want to invoke emotions in the general public that remind us all that we’re connected with the more-than-human world,”

Watch the full Mongabay video here.

Banner image of César Rodríguez-Garavito, chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the NYU School of Law. Image © Carmen Hilbert.

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Dozens of rescuers searched the banks of a mountain river Wednesday looking for people missing after monsoon floods swept away Nepal’s main bridge connecting the country to China and caused at least nine deaths.

Police said dozens of rescuers were already at the area and more are expected to join the rescue efforts. Nine dead bodies have been recovered from the river. Security forces have rescued 55 people, including four Indians and a Chinese person so far, according to the Rasuwa District Administration Office.

Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli, along with top ministers and officials, flew to the area. Oli called an emergency meeting Tuesday night and instructed all security forces and government offices to assist the rescue and recovery efforts.

The flooding on the Bhotekoshi River early Tuesday destroyed the Friendship Bridge at Rasuwagadi, which is 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of the capital, Kathmandu. Several houses and trucks that were parked at the border for customs inspections also were swept away. Hundreds of electric vehicles imported from China had been parked at the border point.

The 19 missing are 13 Nepali citizens and six Chinese nationals, said the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority.

The Chinese and eight of the Nepalis were workers at a Chinese-assisted construction project on the Nepali side of the border, according to the Chinese Embassy in Nepal, quoted by state media.

The destruction of the bridge has halted all trade from China to Nepal through this route. The longer alternative is for goods to be shipped from China to India and then brought overland to Nepal.

Monsoon rains that begin in June and end in September often cause severe flooding in Nepal, disrupting infrastructure and endangering lives.

Reporting by Binaj Gurubacharya, Associated Press

Banner image: People watch the damage caused by flooding on the Bhotekoshi River 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of Kathmandu, Nepal, Tuesday, July 8, 2025. (Nepal Army via AP)

Deforestation figures can be frustrating to look at, but there are a number of success stories when it comes to protecting tropical forests that we can learn from, Crystal Davis, global program director at the World Resources Institute, says in a recent Mongabay video.

“We know what works. We know how to do it,” Davis says. “We have more tools than ever to help us combat deforestation.”

One of those tools is Global Forest Watch, an online platform that uses satellite data, artificial intelligence and cloud computing to track where exactly deforestation is happening and where forests are growing back.

Part of the tool is the Forest Watcher app, which allows forest rangers like those working for Madagascar’s National Parks Association to monitor deforestation. The app has led to swifter responses to drivers of deforestation, such as fires, WRI said in a 2024 post.

“Data and transparency of data play an incredibly important role in protecting tropical forests,” Davis says.

In Peru, the Rainforest Foundation US helped train more than 30 communities in using Forest Watcher. Data visualized on Global Forest Watch showed that in the first year alone, the territories of those 30 communities had 50% fewer deforestation alerts compared to another 30 communities that didn’t use the app.

Another map shown in the Mongabay video reveals the critical role of local communities and Indigenous peoples in conservation in the Amazon, with much lower deforestation within their territories than outside.

“You can see that the areas where Indigenous peoples manage the forests are actually protected. But outside those areas, deforestation is often increasing,” Davis says, adding this is a trend in other countries as well.

Playing a critical role for Indigenous peoples is the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which protects Indigenous communities’ rights to their land and resources, and to self-determination, Davis says. It also includes provisions for the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) process, which requires the involvement of communities in consultations about projects that may affect their land and resources.

“We estimate that about 50% of the world’s land is managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities, and that actually includes around a third of the remaining intact tropical forests,” Davis says. “Those are the most pristine and undisturbed forests that hold the most carbon, the most biodiversity.”

While much of Indigenous-managed lands still aren’t legally recognized, an additional 100 million hectares (247 million acres) of such land gained legal recognition since 2015, according to NGO coalition Rights and Resources Initiative.

With better data and technology, Davis says, it will be interesting to see how financing for tropical forest conservation can be increased, especially to support the work of Indigenous peoples and local communities.

Watch the full Mongabay video here.

Banner image of Crystal Davis, global program director at the World Resources Institute. Image © Carmen Hilbert.

Bangladesh has initiated efforts to revive five species of plants currently listed as critically endangered on the country’s red list, as well as bring back two species declared locally extinct, reports Mongabay’s Abu Siddique.

The critically endangered plants include two species of orchids: bulborox or the Sikkim bulb-leaf orchid (Bulbophyllum roxburghii), and the small-bulb orchid (Bulbophyllum oblongum), both found only in parts of the country’s Sundarbans wetland.

The three other critically endangered species are the dwarf date palm (Phoenix acaulis), a small palm species currently present only in Dinajpur district’s sal (Shorea robusta) forest; chaulmoogra (Hydnocarpus kurzii), an evergreen tree found in the forests of Bandarban, Rangamati, Cox’s Bazar, Chittagong, Moulvibazar and Habiganj districts; as well as bash pata (Podocarpus neriifolius), a conifer with only 111 individuals known to exist across several districts.

To help these five species recover, the Bangladesh Forest Department in collaboration with the Bangladesh National Herbarium, National Botanical Garden and IUCN Bangladesh are working to grow their seedlings in nurseries, before moving them to suitable habitats.

“Our team is working to protect the species from extinction. Besides the conservation of the five critically endangered species, we are trying to collect two [locally] extinct plants — gola anjan [Memecylon ovatum] and fita champa [Magnolia griffithii] — from our neighboring countries as we share nearly similar ecosystems,” Syeda Rizwana Hasan, adviser to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, told Mongabay.

All five plant species identified for revival were categorized as critically endangered in Bangladesh’s first-ever plant red list published in November 2024.

Of Bangladesh’s known 3,813 plant species, the conservation status of only around 1,000 species has been assessed, red list project coordinator A.B.M. Sarowar Alam told Mongabay.

“[I]f we can finish the rest of the species, we will be able to do the Red List indexing properly, which will help to protect all the species from risk of extinction,” Alam added.

Read the full story by Abu Siddique here.

Banner image: Bulborox orchid (Bulbophyllum roxburghii), critically endangered in Bangladesh. Image by Plant.Hunter via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

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

As governments and corporations scramble to meet climate pledges, the search for reliable and scalable carbon removal strategies has turned increasingly toward forests. But while tree planting captures the public imagination, a new study suggests a simpler, less costly strategy may deliver better results: Protecting young secondary forests already on the landscape.

In the study, researchers led by Nathaniel Robinson from the environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy mapped aboveground carbon accumulation across more than 100,000 forest plots worldwide, spanning a century of regrowth. The work confirms that forests don’t store carbon at a constant rate — carbon removal rates vary wildly by forest age, region and ecological conditions. In fact, the study finds a 200-fold difference between the slowest- and fastest-growing sites.

The sweet spot? Forests aged 20 to 40 years. At this stage, many exhibit peak carbon uptake — far exceeding the removals achieved in the first few decades of new regeneration. Tropical forests, in particular, perform best, reaching maximum sequestration levels around 23 years of age. Mediterranean and savanna ecosystems, by contrast, peak later and less dramatically.

This temporal dynamic has practical implications. If natural regeneration began in 2025 across 800 million hectares (1.98 billion acres) of degraded land — an area larger than Australia — the study estimates that 20.3 billion metric tons of carbon could be sequestered by 2050. Delaying that timeline by just five years could slash the benefit by nearly a quarter. Yet existing young forests could outperform freshly planted ones by as much as 820% on a per-hectare basis in some regions.

That efficiency comes with urgency. Secondary forests are disproportionately at risk of clearance. In Latin America, they are 10 times more likely to be lost than old-growth. In Brazil’s Amazon, half are destroyed within eight years. Yet current carbon market mechanisms provide little to no credit for preserving them, focusing instead on planting or managing older stands.

The study’s 1-kilometer resolution maps of carbon growth curves — tied to environmental variables such as soil, climate and topography — offer policymakers and project developers sharper tools.

In the race to close the emissions gap, protecting a forest already hard at work may be faster and cheaper than waiting for a sapling to grow.

Banner image: Patchwork of cassava fields, regenerating secondary forest, and natural forest in the Amazon. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.