Brazil’s lawmakers have voted, by an overwhelming majority, to weaken the nation’s environmental licensing system, overturning key protections that Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had vetoed earlier this year.

Congress first passed the law, commonly called the “devastation bill” across national media outlets, in July 2025 despite widespread protests. In September, President Lula vetoed dozens of clauses in the bill to avoid the worst environmental setbacks.

In a Nov. 27 joint session on the General Environmental Licensing Law, Congress voted to overturn 56 of the 63 presential vetoes. The Chamber of Deputies voted 268-190 in favor of overriding the vetoes, while the Senate voted 50-18.

One of the impacts of the lawmakers’ vote is that businesses will no longer need to consider impacts on communities that haven’t completed their land titling process. Indigenous and Quilombola — descendants of enslaved people — communities will be heavily impacted.

The decision to overturn the vetoes has “cemented the institutionalization of environmental racism and deepened conflicts in traditional territories,” said Alice Dandara de Assis Correia, an attorney at the Brazilian nonprofit Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA).

“If this law stands, we will face high legal uncertainty and weaker social and environmental protections,” Correia added. According to ISA, 32.6% of all Indigenous territories and 80% of Quilombola communities would be excluded from impact studies, which until now were a prerequisite for environmental licensing.

Another overturned veto allows farms that have illegally deforested or grabbed land to operate and sell their products without an environmental license, according to the Climate Observatory, a Brazilian environmental watchdog organization.

Environmental licensing would also no longer be required for large infrastructure projects, such as paving the BR-319 highway across 885 kilometers (550 miles) of the Amazon, the Climate Observatory added. “In addition to being unconstitutional, [the law] puts the health and safety of Brazilians at risk, allows broad destruction of our ecosystems and violates the country’s climate goals,” the organization wrote in a statement.

In the coming days, Congress will vote on overturning the remaining seven presidential vetoes, including one of the most contentious clauses, which would allow an estimated 90% of medium-impact businesses to “self-license.” If overturned, companies will be able to automatically produce their own environmental licenses at the click of a button by filling out an online form.

Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva has announced that the government is considering challenging the Congressional overrides in court.

“We cannot treat environmental laws like they exist to hinder development. There is no development without a stable climate,” she said during a Nov. 28 interview on state-owned TV. “It is unconstitutional to override Article 225 of the Federal Constitution, which says that all citizens have the right to a healthy environment.”

Banner image: Brazil Environment Minister Marina Silva speaks out against the vote in Congress. Image courtesy of Fábio Rodrigues-Pozzebom/Agência Brasil.

Every Nov. 29 is International Jaguar Day, created to raise awareness about threats the jaguar (Panthera onca) faces, including habitat loss and poaching.

While the Amazon and Brazil’s Pantanal biomes are strongholds for the jaguar, hosting a high density of the animals, the species has lost most of its historic range, a reality that conservationists are working to reverse.

In places such as Argentina and Guatemala, jaguar numbers were pushed to the brink of extinction. But in some places, jaguars are finally bouncing back.

Here are some highlights from Mongabay’s recent jaguar coverage:

Crochet project helps jaguar numbers double near the Iguazú Falls

In 2009, the jaguar population in Brazil’s Iguaçu National Park crashed to just 11 individuals. Now, more than a decade later, there are at least 105 jaguar individuals roaming the Iguazú region on the Brazil-Argentina border, contributor Sarah Brown reported.

Community support and a shift in public perceptions about jaguars were vital in the conservation turnaround. The Jaguar Crocheteers project, for example, employs more than a dozen women to crochet jaguar-themed items for sale as part of an awareness campaign. For many local women, the project has become a main source of income.

“It’s not often we’re able to connect people from different towns around a shared cause. But all of them are united by the jaguars,” Claudiane Tavares, a coordinator at the Jaguar Crocheteers project, told Mongabay.

Wild jaguar cub born in Argentina’s Gran Chaco after three decades

A 5-month-old jaguar cub was spotted along the Bermejo River in northern Argentina’s Gran Chaco region in August. The sighting marks the first known wild-born cub in the region in three decades.

The conservation nonprofit Rewilding Argentina had released the cub’s mother, Nalá, into the wild one year before, in an effort to reintroduce the species into the ecosystem.

“It was a wonderful day for me,” said Darío Soraire, a guide who first spotted the cub. “I had the incredible luck of seeing Nalá with her cub on the banks of the Bermejo River as I was navigating upstream. I saw them and was struck by their beauty.”

Trust and fences are helping save Panama’s jaguars

In Panama’s Darién province, the land bridge connecting Central and South America’s jaguar populations, 395 jaguars were killed from 1989 to 2023, largely by ranchers. Globally, jaguars are listed as near threatened, but in Panama, they’re considered critically endangered.

A local project installed solar-powered electric fences around pastures to protect herds and reduce conflict, contributor Marlowe Starling reported. As a result, locals say killings have dropped and the mindset around jaguars is shifting.

“We need to learn to coexist with nature, not to try to go against it,” Luis Gutiérrez, one of the ranchers who joined the project, told Mongabay. “If we destroy nature, it will charge us with the consequences.”

Banner image: Jaguars in Mexico. Image courtesy of Andrea Reyes/Jaguars in the Wild Foundation.

Delegates at last month’s U.N. climate change summit, or COP30, adopted a new mechanism to coordinate action on a just energy transition worldwide toward a low-carbon economy, away from fossil fuels. However, a proposal at the conference in Brazil to include language on critical minerals within the mechanism’s scope was scrapped at the last minute after China and Russia failed to support it.

Critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and nickel are crucial for renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles, but their mining and processing has been linked to negative environmental and social impacts.

An earlier draft text on the just energy transition included a paragraph recognizing “the social and environmental risks associated with scaling up supply chains for clean energy technologies, including risks arising from the extraction and processing of critical minerals.”

This is the first time that critical minerals were included in a text within climate negotiations under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Sources told Mongabay that Australia, the EU, the African Group of Negotiators, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and many Latin American countries supported the inclusion. 

“In the second week, however, China made it clear that any inclusion of language about minerals governance was a red line, and thus ensured its exclusion even when many countries and large negotiating blocs had tabled language and argued in favor,” Emily Iona Stewart, head of transition minerals policy and EU relations at the NGO Global Witness, told Mongabay by email. “The text that was tabled in the first week did not make it into the final version of the just transition work program.”

Clement Sefa-Nyarko, a lecturer in security, development and leadership in Africa at King’s College London, told Mongabay by phone that this wasn’t the first time a mention of critical minerals has been severed from a U.N. conference. In 2015, when U.N. members adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a road map to tackle global challenges, critical minerals were excluded from the final text.

“This debate about where to place critical minerals is not a recent one,” Sefa-Nyarko said. “As far back as 2015, when the SDGs were being discussed, there was also controversy. That is repeating itself now at COP.”

Sefa-Nyarko said China or Russia were likely unsupportive of language on critical minerals because of the potential impact on their industries. China, in particular, is a global leader when it comes to processing and refining critical minerals. It processed 70-95% of the world’s lithium, cobalt, phosphate and graphite in 2024.

“That’s why it’s not surprising that China and Russia, which also have quite a good amount of those minerals, are the main ones opposing the inclusion of the language that will streamline mining to make how you mine more environmentally friendly,” Sefa-Nyarko said.

Banner image: The Quilapilún solar energy plant, a joint project by Chile and China in Colina, Chile. Image by AP Photo/Esteban Felix.

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

Paul Barnes, who leads the Zoological Society of London’s EDGE of Existence program, has spent the past few years listening to the frustrations of early-career conservationists. The stories are rarely about fieldwork itself. They’re about making rent, juggling unstable contracts, harassment in remote sites, and the steady grind of burnout. After four workshops held across several regions, he returned to an inbox with 1,700 applicants for roughly 10 fellowship slots. It’s a familiar ratio across the sector. Demand is soaring, while funding pipelines sputter.

In a commentary for Mongabay, Barnes argues that conservation is entering an “opportunity bottleneck.” The talent exists. So do viable projects, from species recovery to community-based monitoring. What is missing is the capacity to absorb these people and ideas into workable, durable careers. The larger funding world, dependent on slow disbursements and heavy reporting requirements, has not adjusted. And recent pauses in major government aid programs have revealed just how fragile big pipelines can be.

Small grants, he writes, are proving unexpectedly resilient. They are quick to deploy, accessible to emerging organizations, and flexible enough to respond to local realities. Evidence from long-running funds supports the claim: modest sums have helped establish protected areas, advance species recovery, and strengthen locally led conservation in ways that larger donors often struggle to achieve. They act as financial “capillaries,” keeping local systems functioning when larger arteries clog.

Yet the small-grants model needs more than praise. It needs reform and significant scaling. Barnes outlines recommendations for how that might happen:

• Radical expansion of small-grant opportunities, increasing supply at least tenfold.
• Better pooling mechanisms among donors to improve scale, diversity and visibility of support.
• Funding people and organizations directly, including salaries, caregiving and insurance.
• Making multiyear grants the norm, aligned with ecological and political timelines.
• Strengthening regional or thematic regranting hubs to reduce risk and administrative burdens.
• Light, outcome-focused reporting using standardized templates.
• Maintaining rapid-response funds of about $15,000 with decisions within two weeks.
• Dedicated duty-of-care budgets covering legal, safety and mental health support.
• Lowering access barriers through local language applications and flexible eligibility.
• Hedging against currency volatility with FX buffers and staged payments.
• Publishing short, evidence-based notes on both successes and failures.

Barnes’s argument is blunt: the next generation of conservationists is ready, but the funding architecture is not. Small grants, he says, “must step forward, not as charity, but as infrastructure for resilience.”

Read the full commentary by Paul Barnes here.

Banner image: Early-career conservationists take part in the 2025 EDGE Conservation Tools Course, part of a global fellowship program that supports emerging leaders to drive locally led conservation. Image courtesy of Paul Barnes/EDGE of Existence, Zoological Society of London.

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

She moved slowly, as if time were something best savored. Visitors leaned over railings or knelt at the edge of her enclosure as she stretched her neck toward a leaf of romaine. Children noted she was older than their grandparents. Their parents did the math and realized she was older than the zoo itself. Few paused to consider that she once walked on a very different kind of ground.

Gramma, the Galápagos tortoise who died recently in San Diego at an estimated 141 years of age, carried with her a past that was not merely long but instructive. When she hatched on one of the islands that gave Darwin his insight into evolution, giant tortoises were still common. Tens of thousands roamed the lava plains. But she was born into a landscape already thinned by more than a century of human appetite.

To sailors in earlier centuries, a tortoise was a barrel of fresh meat that moved itself. Crews dragged them across jagged rock and stacked them in ship holds, alive for months without food or water. Oil rendered from their fat lit lamps. Their abundance made caution seem unnecessary.

Her own journey north was a quieter chapter of that same story. Taken from the Galápagos, she passed through The Bronx Zoo before arriving in California around 1930. The San Diego Zoo became her home: concrete underfoot, predictable meals, and the curiosity of crowds replacing the scrub and open horizons she once knew.

Meanwhile, the islands changed without her. Settlers brought goats, pigs, and cattle that stripped the plants tortoises needed. Rats, dogs, and cats devoured eggs and hatchlings. Even when hunting stopped, the young could not survive. Some islands held only aging survivors. Several tortoise lineages disappeared entirely.

The losses built up slowly, mostly unnoticed. In species that can outlive humans, the oldest individuals carry knowledge of where to go and when. When they vanish, stability disappears with them.
At the zoo she was treated as the elder she had become. She arrived in an era of collection. She lived into an era of protection. The tortoise, once a resource, had become a responsibility.

Her death invites reflection. She was not the oldest tortoise or the most famous. She did not help save a lineage as one on Santa Cruz Island did, nor did she become a symbol of solitude like Lonesome George. Instead, she lived long enough for humans to change their minds.

Today, thousands of juveniles have been returned to the wild. Invasive animals have been cleared from some islands. Scientists now watch over nests once ignored. Recovery is uneven, but it has begun.
Gramma’s life reminds us that the creatures we nearly lost can become the center of our efforts to make amends. She will not walk again under the Pacific sun. Yet in the islands she left behind, and in the children who saw the wrinkles time left, the future of her ancient line looks a little brighter than the past she survived.

Full piece: Gramma, a giant who transcended eras, has died, aged about 141

One small Indigenous territory is currently the site of roughly 70% of deforestation in Indigenous territories across the Brazilian Amazon due to illegal mining over the last two years, according to government data.

The Sararé Indigenous Territory in Mato Grosso state is home to about 200 Nambikwara people. From January 2024 to August 2025, illegal gold mining razed more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of forest within their territory — more than 4% of its total area of 67,000 hectares (165,600 acres).

The aggressive encroachment of illegal gold miners into the Sararé territory is relatively recent. According to a Greenpeace report, just 78 hectares (193 acres) of the territory had been impacted by mining until 2018. This began to grow gradually starting in 2021.

In 2023, there were an estimated 250-300 miners in the territory. This year, government agents estimate that around 2,000 miners were operating on the land.

From January to August this year, Sararé experienced 85% higher deforestation due to illegal mining than the combined total recorded in the next nine most impacted Indigenous territories, which together lost 640 hectares (1,581 acres) in the same period.

Sararé was not included in any top mining alerts up to 2023, but has now emerged as the number one territory, by far, impacted by mining.

The Kayapó Indigenous Territory, located in the state of Pará, appeared in second place for land lost to mining in 2024. Despite the territory being around 49 times larger than Sararé, it lost nearly 10 times less land to illegal mining operations.

Federal police forces have carried out several large raids to destroy mining equipment in the Sararé territory.

The latest operation, in September, located 14 bunkers filled with supplies and destroyed four underground mining areas, 42 stationary engines used to run pumps and machinery, and more than 100 campsites.

Banner image: Satellite image showing the destruction of the Sararé Indigenous Territory in Mato Grosso state, Brazil, left behind by illegal gold mining. Image via Google.