A recent proposal to protect the iconic orange-and-black monarch butterfly under the U.S. Endangered Species Act could make federal protections available to help the species avoid extinction and rebound.

In a press release, Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, an NGO, said the ESA listing is a science-based decision and “a national call to action for all Americans to save this majestic species.”

The population of western monarchs (Danaus plexippus), those that live west of the Rocky Mountains, has declined by roughly 95% since the 1980s. They’re particularly vulnerable when the entire population gathers to overwinter in a stretch of forest in California. “The Bureau of Land Management cut down a grove of monarch trees intentionally a couple of months ago to build a parking lot and there was nothing we could do about it,” Tierra Curry, endangered species coordinator with the Center for Biological Diversity, another NGO, told Mongabay by phone. With ESA status, the forest will be protected.

Eastern monarchs, famous for their generational migration from Mexico to Canada and back again each year, are down by roughly 80%. Along their migration route, each of four generations of monarchs must navigate monoculture farms in search of nectar and milkweed, the only food a monarch caterpillar can eat. As wildflower meadows are replaced by monocultures of agricultural crops, the search for food has become increasingly difficult, while exposure to deadly pesticides has caused populations to plummet.

ESA funding will mean continued programs to plant milkweed, though it remains to be seen how the government will address the rampant use of neonicotinoid pesticides, which are mostly banned in Europe and toxic at every stage of monarch development.

Climate change has also been a tremendous challenge, though at present the ESA has little capacity to address that growing threat. In 2024, the combination of a cold summer, abnormally warm autumn and several large hurricanes meant monarchs didn’t reproduce as much as they should and were late to return to Mexico. “And we know that when they get to Mexico late, the population size is smaller,” Curry said.

In Mexico the entire population of eastern monarchs overwinters in the International Monarch Biosphere Reserve, which is protected. However, the forests around the reserve are being converted to avocado plantations to meet demand for the fruit in the U.S. Avocados require a lot of water and are causing drought and wildfires in the region.

“People think monarchs can’t be endangered because they’re in 48 states, that is true. But in the winter, they’re all in one basket and that basket is on fire and being exported in the form of avocados,” Curry said. “Telling vegans to put down their avocados is probably the most unpopular thing that I do,” she added.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has opened a public comment page on the proposed listing.

Banner image of a monarch butterfly by Peter Miller via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

The Amazon River and its tributaries, which make up the largest freshwater basin in the world, are showing signs of recovery after dropping to record-low levels between September and November 2024.

Abnormally low rainfall and high temperatures across the Amazon caused water levels to plummet, shutting down river transport, isolating communities and leaving industries without supplies. Indigenous children were forced to drink water contaminated with mercury, and fishers faced a mass fish die-off likely due to high water temperatures.

The Madeira River in Rondônia state in northwest Brazil, responsible for 15% of the water in the Amazon Basin, was 6.7 meters (22 feet) high on Dec. 9, marking a significant improvement over the 25 centimeters (9.8  inches) measured Oct. 12.

Farther east, on the Negro River near Amazonas state’s capital, Manaus, large grain barges owned by Cargill, Louis Dreyfus and Bunge, among others, resumed shipping soy and corn at full capacity following a 70-day hiatus. The river there is rising at an average of 3 cm (1 in) a day.

More than 118,000 hectares (291,000 acres) of the Amazon Rainforest were cleared between 2009 to 2019 to make way for large-scale soy farms, according to a recent investigation.

Deforestation is one of the leading causes of climate change in the region, which has led to the devastating droughts that have gripped the Amazon over the past two years.

Some relief has reached the region’s residents as the drought begins to ease. Water levels are now rising, but 16 of the 18 monitoring stations across the Amazon Basin in Brazil remain below normal.

“It’s very good to see that the rivers are returning,” Ane Alencar, the science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, told Mongabay in an audio message. “What we don’t know yet are the long-term impacts of this severe drought,” Alencar added.

The incoming rain poses a paradox, she said. Too much rain all at once and there will be flooding, which can cause houses to collapse and plantations to fail. But at the same time, much more rain is needed to get back to previous water levels.

“Anything is possible. The climate is very unstable, and the tendency is for these events to become more frequent and intense,” Alencar said. “Unfortunately, it’s always the most vulnerable communities that are hardest hit.”

Banner image: Rivers in the Brazilian Amazon are recovering following historic lows. Image courtesy of João Dejacy/Rios de Notícias.

From late October to November this year, six consecutive tropical cyclones battered the Philippines, affecting 30 million people. Data analyses from two separate organizations now show they were intensified by human-induced climate change.

International scientific collective World Weather Attribution (WWA) released a study on Dec. 12 showing that climate change has made conditions conducive to the formation of typhoons twice as likely. It also found the likelihood of stronger typhoons, those in categories 3-5 (on a scale of 1-5), hitting the Philippines increased by 25% this year due to climate change.

“This later part of the 2024 [Philippine] typhoon season was extraordinary,” study co-author Clair Barnes, a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, said at an online press briefing. “There were five typhoons and a tropical storm that affected the country within just 30 days. At one point in November, there were four typhoons active simultaneously in the Pacific Basin, which is the first time this has happened since records began in the ’50s.” 

Barnes said only three storms normally form in the Pacific Basin in November.

Co-author Ben Clarke, from Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy, said the team used observations of past cyclones and climate models. “So from these two analyses, we find that the conditions in which the storms developed in 2024 have become about 70% more likely due to warming of 1.3° [Celsius, or 2.3° Fahrenheit],” he said.

“The chance of multiple major typhoons making landfall will continue to increase as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels,” the report said.

Climate Central, an organization of scientists and communicators, also released an analysis last month about how climate change-driven ocean warming has intensified typhoon activity in the Western Pacific Ocean, as observed using their Climate Shift Index: Ocean tool.

Climate scientist Daniel Gilford told Mongabay in an email that higher sea surface temperatures fuel typhoons to reach higher wind speeds.

“The Climate Shift Index: Ocean scores show that the water temperatures encountered by Typhoons Yinxing, Toraji, Usagi, and Man-Yi [in November] were made up to 40 times more likely by climate change,” he said, adding that for October, climate change made unusual warmth up to 100 times more likely. This resulted in “higher-than-normal” water temperatures that fueled typhoons that month. 

Besides these four storms, two others struck the Philippines in October: Severe Tropical Storm Trami, which left at least 151 people dead, and Super Typhoon Kong-Rey, which also wreaked havoc in Taiwan.

Afrhill Rances, communications head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Asia-Pacific office, said at the WWA briefing that in addition to ramping up anticipatory disaster risk management, climate financing must also be strengthened “to address systemic vulnerabilities, enhance resilience and ensure that communities can recover and adapt in the face of foreseeing climate impact.”

Banner image of four storms over the Western Pacific Ocean in November 2024, by NASA Earth Observatory via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

The crew of the research vessel E/V Nautilus erupted in excited chatter as they watched live video from a remotely operated vehicle traversing the German Channel in the Pacific island state of Palau.

“It’s finally happened!” someone could be heard saying as the camera on board the ROV Hercules zoomed in to reveal a lone deep-sea mollusk that shares the same name as the research vessel: a nautilus.

Nautiluses are very rarely seen in the wild, and this was the first time one was spotted in the 15 years of the E/V Nautilus mission. Adding to the mystique, nautiluses are ancient animals, ancestors to modern cephalopods, the class containing octopuses and squids.  They first appeared 38 million years ago but their evolution can be traced back almost 500 million years, to a time before life evolved to live on land. Nautiluses are often referred to as a “living fossil.”

“It’s like watching a dinosaur,” someone says in the video, marveling at how the nautilus’s structure hasn’t changed in millions of years.

Founded by renowned oceanographer Robert Ballard, the Ocean Exploration Trust (OET) operates the E/V Nautilus, which is equipped with ROVs for ocean exploration and a live video feed that can be viewed by researchers and the global public.

OET communications lead Marley Parker wrote on the NautilusLive blog: “Dreams come true indeed. After more than 1,000 ROV dives all around the world, we are filming the beautiful animal that shares our name.”

After the first one, the OET team saw three more nautiluses throughout the dive.

Coral Reef Research Foundation director Pat Colin, who was watching the live feed from shore, could be heard saying in the video that the nautilus they were looking at is a Palau nautilus (Nautilus belauensis). “Palau has been a hotbed for nautilus research for the past 50 years,” he said, adding that the population in the waters of Palau is stable.

The Palau nautilus is listed as near threatened on the IUCN Red List and protected from the international trade under the CITES convention. So little is known about other nautilus species that a conservation assessment can’t be made.

Parker said the E/V Nautilus’s ROVs hadn’t spotted a nautilus before because they’re usually found in shallower depths, between 90 and 500 meters (about 300-1,640 feet) in Palau. Normally, the Hercules operates at a depth of 1,000-4,000 m (3,300-13,100 ft), but it was traveling at a depth of 380 m (1,246 ft) when it spotted the four nautiluses.

Joining the OET and the Coral Reef Research Foundation for the dive is the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. During the expedition, the E/V Nautilus team documented the seabed and sand ripple features in the German Channel, an artificial passage cut through Palau’s barrier reef. The ROVs also encountered sixgill sharks (genus Hexanchus), according to the Nautilus Live press release.

Banner image of a Palau nautilus, courtesy of the Ocean Exploration Trust.

The United Nations Environment Programme recently released a report detailing 10 existing human rights standards and how they should be applied to conservation organizations and funders (COFs).

In an effort to address the dramatic loss of global biodiversity and the climate crisis, private conservation organizations, many from the Global North, have stepped in to establish conservation areas, many of which are located in the Global South. But without adequate safeguards for the often marginalized communities living in would-be protected areas, reports of human rights violations abound.

For example, in the DRC, the World Wild Fund for Nature, WWF, which manages the Salonga National Park and appoints its director, learned of allegations of human rights abuses by eco-guards against communities near the park but continued to provide financial and material support. The Frankfurt Zoological Society, which supports conservation and sustainable development in Tanzania’s iconic Serengeti, provided conservation funding and equipment to the Tanzania National Parks Authority, which took part in nonviolent and violent evictions of Maasai people.

“A human rights-based approach to conserving, protecting and restoring the extraordinary diversity of life on Earth is the only ethical, equitable and effective way forward,” said David R. Boyd, a contributor to the report and former United Nations special rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.

The UNEP report notes that marginalized communities including women, Indigenous peoples and people of African descent are particularly vulnerable to abuse in the name of conservation of the land on which they live.

To address the growing issue, the UNEP report outlines 10 existing human rights principles and explains how they should be implemented by COFs.

1. Respect human rights by committing to a high-level policy to respect established norms for human rights.
2. Respect the rights of Indigenous peoples, including their rights to ancestral lands, and obtain free prior and informed consent to equitably share the benefits of conservation projects.
3. Respect the rights of all groups including women, children, African descendants, human rights defenders and the disabled.
4. Exercise due diligence to support and fund only conservation projects that respect human rights.
5. Engage in good faith consultation with local stakeholders who may be negatively impacted by conservation activities.
6. Prevent human rights abuses and cease any adverse impacts caused by COFs.
7. Provide effective remedies if any negative impacts result from conservation projects and provide a way for local communities to effectively report complaints and concerns.
8. Protect human rights in relationships with local governments and businesses. COFs should restrict or eliminate support for third-party groups that violate human rights.
9. Protect human rights in law enforcement including anti-poaching, eco-guards and local police. COFs should restrict or eliminate support for law enforcement that violates human rights.
10. Report regularly on how the COF is upholding these established standards of human rights.

Banner image  courtesy of Molly Bergen/WCS, WWF, WRI via Flickr

A few years ago, while having lunch with colleagues in my previous newsroom, we started talking about thrift stores. One of my co-workers said, “I get all of my clothes from thrift stores,” and quickly added, “I’m not trying to brag though.” And I thought: How great that she sees thrifting as something to brag about.

She’s not alone. In the U.S., recommerce is a $200 billion per year market and growing. As the holiday season approaches, researchers find an increasing number of people are turning to secondhand gifts. A survey in Europe found 64% of Europeans see secondhand gifts as a good way to save money and shop more sustainably. A 2022 survey in the U.S. found roughly half of Generation Z planned to purchase secondhand gifts.

The stigma of used items can be hard to overcome, but not impossible.

“To be viewed as a suitable gift, a secondhand item must meet certain standards,” says Ilya Malkin, CEO and co-founder of Sort A Brick, a company that uses AI to sort mixed bins of plastic Lego bricks and repackage them into new sets. Malkin adds that secondhand gifts need to “perform well, look presentable and be safe to use.”

Regifted and thrifted gifts typically come without excess packaging that can end up in a landfill or the ocean. And, as part of a circular economy, existing items require far less energy and fewer resources than newly manufactured products, making them a win for the planet and your wallet.

Do’s:

• Cast iron pans can last for generations. Often found at thrift stores in rough shape, with a bit of elbow grease, they can be restored to like-new condition.
• Thrifted containers like baskets, baking dishes and mugs can be used to hold holiday treats.
• Terra-cotta pots can be cleaned up and planted with a new houseplant.
• Outgrown children’s items including beloved books, toys and clothes can find a second life with younger friends or cousins.
• Clothing platforms like Kidre, Poshmark and ThredUp specialize in finding new homes for pre-loved clothing.
• Refurbished electronics, including laptops and phones, reduce the need for mining critical minerals like cobalt, nickel and lithium that can lead to deforestation and pollute local ecosystems.
• Thrifted picture frames can give a new look to a family photo or artwork.
• Sustainable wrapping with thrifted napkins or tablecloths cut down on holiday waste.
• A pet rock is an enviro-friendly gift that just keeps on giving.

Don’ts

• Teflon pans and black plastic cooking utensils both contain chemicals linked to serious health concerns, and damaged pans are more likely to flake toxins into food.
• Plastic cutting boards can impart microplastics into food with every cut.
• A lump of coal, while a traditional stocking stuffer for those on the naughty list, in terms of climate change, fails Malkin’s test of being “safe to use.”

Banner image courtesy of Ylanite Koppens via Pexels.