The South African Supreme Court of Appeal recently dismissed the government’s appeal against a ruling that struck down plans for 1,500 megawatts of new coal-fired power.

The so-called #CancelCoal case was brought by a coalition of environmental NGOs that argued the new planned coal capacity violates children’s constitutional rights to a healthy environment. Already, air pollution from coal-fired power plants kills more than 2,200 South Africans each year and “causes thousands of cases of bronchitis and asthma,” according to a statement from the Centre for Environmental Rights.

The Minister of Electricity and Energy argued that additional coal capacity is necessary for energy security. A previous High Court judgment ruled against the plan “on the basis that it violates the right to an environment not harmful to health and well-being,” per the statement.

“The High Court further found that government’s arguments about grid stability offered by coal, was not sufficient justification for the violation of constitutional rights,” said Michelle Sithole in an email to Mongabay. Sithole is senior associate in the pollution and climate change program at the Centre for Environmental Rights, the group that represented the plaintiffs in the court case.

The Minister appealed the High Court decision. The recent Court of Appeal’s decision dismissed the Minister’s appeal, meaning the previous High Court decision stands.

“While this does not mean a definitive end to the development of new coal-fired power as part of the energy security policy, it does mean that government has a higher onus/standard to justify choosing coal for electricity,” Sithole said.

“Our and our clients’ position has been that there are cheaper, cleaner and more sustainable sources of energy. Energy security should not come at the expense of people’s lives, health and well-being. We would like government’s electricity plans to reflect that,” Sithole said. She noted that the Minister of Electricity and Energy can appeal the Supreme Court of Appeal ruling to the South African Constitutional Court if he so chooses.

Banner image: South African coal-fired power plant. Image courtesy of JMK via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Deforestation, organized crime and the expansion of cattle ranching have led the government in Honduras to announce an “environmental emergency” in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, the largest protected area in the country.

The 36-month emergency, issued as a presidential decree on Nov. 10, will devote 1.5 billion Honduran lempiras (more than $55 million) over the next three years to halt “environmental deterioration,” according to an official statement.

“The initiative represents a commitment by the government to move from addressing threats to sustained intervention, with defined resources and institutional responsibilities,” presidential legal advisor Roberto Zacapa said in the statement.

The more than 832,000-hectare (2 million-acre) reserve stretches across the departments of Gracias a Dios, Colón and Olancho, and includes numerous Indigenous Miskito, Pech and Garífuna communities. In 1982, a section of it was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The reserve’s remote location along the Nicaraguan border has made it vulnerable to deforestation, drug trafficking, cattle ranching, gold mining, wildlife trafficking, roadbuilding and other illegal activities.

At least 6,691 hectares (16,533 acres) of forest were cut down between 2023 and 2025, according to the Forest Conservation Institute (ICF), the agency managing the country’s forests.

Since 2011, the reserve has been on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger, a list of sites facing serious threats to their environmental or cultural heritage.

“It’s like the wild west, where there’s no law and people come in and do whatever they want, and the rights of Indigenous communities are violated,” Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Honduras program director, Edgard Herrera Scott, told Mongabay.

WCS attended preliminary meetings about the emergency. It wasn’t shown the final version.

A copy of the decree hasn’t been made public, but the funding will likely be spent on increasing law enforcement presence in the core zone of the reserve, Herrera said. That could include new patrol posts.

The Secretariat of Natural Resources and Environment, the Secretariat of National Defense and the ICF will work together on the effort, according to the statement.

“[The institutions] will coordinate resources and capabilities to protect the forests, biodiversity and ecosystems of the reserve,” the statement noted.

This isn’t the first time that the country has used a state of emergency to combat environmental crimes. In 2024, the National Defense and Security Council declared an emergency for all the forests in Honduras. The move was part of a zero-deforestation resolution that added funding for conservation and laid out measures to increase state presence in protected areas.

However, some environmental groups have criticized the 2024 initiative, saying the plan hasn’t  been completely carried out and deforestation continues to threaten protected areas like the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve.

Herrera said he hopes the recent funding will lead to substantive change.

“We have to turn what’s on paper into action,” he said. “That much is certain.”

Banner image: Honduran Navy officers patrol in Patuca river, near Ahuas, a remote community in La Mosquitia region, Honduras. Image by Rodrigo Abd via Associated Press.

A record number of wildfires burned more than 14,062 square miles in the U.S. this year, leaving behind charred trees and scorched vegetation. But less-obvious are the impacts they had on the streams and rivers that provide drinking water to urban and rural communities across the country. After a wildfire burns a watershed, rain will carry ash and organic matter into the streams that feed water treatment plants for towns and cities. Utilities must turn off the intake to keep the sediment-filled water from contaminating their systems and switch to another source, if it’s available. New studies found that wildfires can contaminate water for up to 15 years. These findings are especially concerning as climate change has led to an increase in the number and size of wildfires in the U.S.

By Martha Bellisele, Associated Press

Banner image: A helicopter drops water on the Grizzly Creek Fire on the east end of Glenwood Canyon, Aug. 17, 2020 near Glenwood Springs, Colo. Image courtesy of Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via Associated Press

A Mongabay investigation that revealed large-scale government purchases of shark meat for schools, hospitals, prisons and other public institutions in Brazil has been named as a finalist for two Brazilian journalism awards               .

Published in 2025 in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center, the investigation tracked 1,012 public procurements issued since 2004 to purchase more than 5,400 metric tons of shark meat, worth at least 112 million reais ($20.1 million).

The findings sparked environmental and public health concerns. Sharks, some of them endangered, accumulate heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic in their tissues. High levels of these contaminants can pose health risks, particularly for children.

Mongabay’s reporting is one of three finalists for the Cláudio Weber Abramo Data Journalism Award in the investigation category, which recognizes “work of high social impact that applies data analysis to shed light on topics of public interest.”

The series is also one of 25 finalists for the Mosca Award, which honors investigative reporting and projects focused on transparency, access to public information and open data.

Senior editor Philip Jacobson and investigative reporters Karla Mendes and Fernanda Wenzel reported the series for Mongabay, working with Kuang Keng Kuek Ser, then data editor at the Pulitzer Center.

The investigation has had widespread impact, prompting a request for a public hearing in Brazil’s lower house of Congress and stirring debate in the fishing industry over the risks of eating shark meat. Shark meat was banned in 1,200 schools run by the Rio de Janeiro State Department of Education. The move came after the marine conservation NGO Sea Shepherd Brasil also released a report about shark meat in Brazil, following Mongabay’s report.

Brazil’s National Environmental Council, known as CONAMA, cited the series in a motion to ban shark fin exports, while the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change said the reporting contributed to a review of the legal framework governing the shark trade.

In February, the investigation took first place in the higher education category of Brazil’s National Association of Directors of Federal Higher Education Institutions (Andifes) awards and second place in the national category of the 67th ARI/Banrisul Journalism Award in December 2025. The investigation was also featured on several multimedia platforms including the U.S. public radio program The World; Rádio Novelo, Brazil’s largest journalistic podcast production company; Mongabay’s podcast; and in the video series “Unpacking the Story” produced by the iMEdD International Journalism Forum.

Banner image: Shark meat labeled as cação. Image by Philip Jacobson/Mongabay.

Human-caused climate change significantly amplified extreme heat during Indonesia’s 2026 fire season, turning an El Niño-driven drought into a severe regional crisis, according to a recent rapid analysis.

The report was released by World Weather Attribution (WWA), a global network of researchers who analyze the influence of climate change in extreme weather events.

The researchers analyzed weather conditions across western Indonesia during the dry season between August and October 2026, when fires burned approximately 1.9 million hectares (4.7 million acres) of peatland and rainforest. The resulting toxic haze exposed 12.5 million people across Southeast Asia to hazardous air pollution and caused more than 400,000 respiratory infections in Indonesia alone, according to findings from the WWA report.

Researchers found that while a strong El Niño was the primary driver of an “extreme lack of rainfall,” cutting seasonal precipitation by roughly 50% during the three months, record-breaking temperatures were overwhelmingly driven by global warming. Human-induced climate change made the season 1.6° Celsius (2.9° Fahrenheit) hotter; such extreme heat would be virtually impossible without greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers found. Meanwhile, El Niño added 0.3°C (0.5°F) of warming. Climate change also tripled the likelihood of weeklong hot, dry atmospheric extremes.

“The top line of the study is that this year’s El Niño set the conditions for very low rainfall, a major fire season drought, and that this drought was then exacerbated by record heat throughout the fire season, which was made possible due to human-caused climate change,” report co-author Theodore Keeping, extreme weather and wildfire researcher at Imperial College London, U.K., said at an online press briefing.

Co-author Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London, said climate change impacts are increasingly outweighing natural variability. “Especially on the temperature effects of El Niño, we have already seen in past years … that the effect of climate change is surpassing the effect of El Niño in many cases,” Otto said.

The WWA authors said changes in climate compounded decades of severe landscape degradation. Between 1990 and 2010, peat swamp forest cover declined by 45% in Borneo and 63% in Sumatra due to agricultural drainage and logging. Drained, dried-out peatlands ignite easily, and fires there smolder underground for weeks, releasing massive carbon reserves.

“Indonesian landscapes have changed dramatically over the last 30 years, with extensive peatland drainage and deforestation creating a landscape that is extremely vulnerable to ignition,” said co-author Pramudhian Firdaus, a meteorologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and with the Indonesian meteorological agency. “The El Niño effect set the stage, but the peatland also is what makes Indonesia fires so severe.”

WWA researchers added that protecting intact forests, restoring drained peatlands, and enforcing zero-burning land clearing are essential to prevent future catastrophic haze events as global temperatures rise further.

Banner image: Satellite imagery of the smoke emitted by wildfires in Indonesia. Image by VIIRS Imagery captured by the NOAA-20 satellite via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

Every weekend, several residents of Pune in India set out to map trees along the city’s riverbanks. It’s not just a weekend hobby; it’s meant to serve as evidence to protect the city’s greenery when developmental projects come up in the area, reports contributor Stephin Thomas for Mongabay.

The volunteers are from Pune River Revival, a grassroots movement that formed in response to the Pune Riverfront Development Project, which aims to create promenades, recreational spaces, and infrastructure along the Mula and Mutha rivers. The project is estimated to cost around 47 billion rupees (about $500 million).

“Personally, I want to protect the environment, but without this data, we cannot even grasp how much damage has already occurred,” Raghunandan Patil, a volunteer with the group, told Mongabay. “So to any nature lover, this gives an idea on what’s left to be saved. Apart from this, tree mapping provides evidence to present to the government or authorities when advocating for sustainable alternatives.”

Patil said the group had been manually mapping the trees for a while, but began doing so more systematically in 2024 using the citizen-science app iNaturalist. The app allows all the data to be easily accessible and documented in specific projects.

Such detailed documentation has already helped the group highlight the importance of some areas, such as the Ram-Mula Devrai, a sacred grove located at the confluence of the Ram and Mula rivers. This small forest patch is said by local communities to be the home of a village deity.

According to official reports, the grove is home to some 1,000 old-growth “heritage” trees and hundreds of animal species, including the Bengal monitor (Varanus bengalensis) and checkered keelback snake (Fowlea piscator).

“We documented the Ram-Mula Devrai to highlight its ecological value to both the public and local authorities, rather than letting those trees be cut down,” Patil said. “We organized butterfly walks, insect walks, tree-painting competitions and other sustainable activities. We gave an alternative to the government that the area could be commercialized sustainably instead of clear-cutting the forest. As a result, that stretch now faces a much lower risk of heavy development.”

Ashok D. Ghorpade, joint municipal commissioner and chief garden superintendent with the Pune municipal authority, told Mongabay that the city conducts regular tree censuses every five years using the latest mapping technologies, including geographic information systems (GIS).

“The process involves field-level enumeration and geo-tagging of individual trees, recording relevant attributes such as species, trunk girth, height, geographical coordinates and photographs, and compiling the collected information into a GIS-based digital database,” Ghorpade said.

He added the city welcomes the volunteers’ data “as supplementary information during the tree census process.”

Read the full story by Stephin Thomas here.

Banner image: Vivek Lanjewar capturing the resin coming out of a moringa tree. Image by Stephin Thomas.