Agriculture is the biggest driver of peatland loss in Indonesia, Peru and the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to the largest expanses of tropical peatlands in the world, a recent study has found.

Peatlands are crucial in the fight against climate change: They cover less than 3% of the world’s landmass, but sequester more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem. Yet, the boggy wetlands are being deforested and drained at unsustainable rates, releasing climate-warming greenhouse gases. However, scientists have lacked a clear understanding of the emissions associated with the different drivers of recent tropical peatland degradation.

In the new study, researchers analyzed satellite imagery from 2020-2021 to determine what’s driving peatland conversion in Indonesia, Peru and the DRC, and to quantify the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it.

Logging emerged as a key driver of tropical peatland loss in all three countries. Mining and road development were major factors in Indonesia and Peru. However, agriculture was by far the biggest driver across all three regions, the study found.

In Indonesia, where large-scale agriculture was the leading source of emissions, agriculture overall accounted for 67% of peatland conversion. In Peru, smallholder agriculture was most responsible, for the 61% of agricultural conversion. In the DRC, smallholder agriculture alone accounted for 93% of peatland conversion and 94% of emissions, with no significant role by large-scale agriculture.

Tropical peatlands are often cleared by burning, which the study found accounted for roughly half the total greenhouse gas emissions of the conversion. “Fire emits a very high amount of greenhouse gases over a very short period of time,” lead author Karimon Nesha, from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, told Mongabay in a video call. That’s because fire quickly releases the carbon stored in both vegetation and soil.

The study found that the initial emissions in 2020 from fires used to clear peatlands was 19-20 times higher than the emissions from decaying peat the following year. However, scientists know that peat continues to decompose for decades and can eventually release roughly the same amount of emissions as the initial period of peatland draining, clearing and burning.

Overall, researchers found the highest greenhouse gas emissions in the DRC, home to the largest tropical peatland in the world, the Cuvette Centrale. However, Shona Jenkins, a research fellow at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, who wasn’t involved in the study, questioned part of the methodology quantifying the emissions.

She said the peatland map the researchers used may overestimate peatland depth in the DRC, meaning emissions there “could be vastly overestimated.”

While some uncertainty may remain around emissions estimates, Nesha said the path to reducing peatland emissions is clear: Don’t use fire, which generates the most short-term emissions, and “rewet” drained peatlands; cover them with water to stop the decomposition that results in long-term emissions.

Banner image: Aerial view of a peatland forest in the DRC. Image © Daniel Beltrá/Greenpeace.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — At least 10 people are dead with many homes destroyed in flooding caused by torrential rains across six provinces in South Africa that have hit informal settlements especially hard.

South African authorities have declared a natural disaster for the flooding, thunderstorms, high winds and even snowfall that have affected parts of the Western Cape, North West, Free State, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Mpumalanga provinces since May 4.

The declaration enables the government to use emergency funds and other resources to respond.

Cape Town was badly affected, and the Western Cape provincial government has ordered the temporary closure of schools and parts of the city’s Table Mountain tourist attraction.

Local officials there on Tuesday said at least 26 informal settlements around the city had been affected by flooding, with over 10,000 structures damaged.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday expressed “deep sadness” over the loss of at least 10 lives due to the severe weather as winter in the Southern Hemisphere begins.

He said authorities are “making the best use of science to pre-empt some of these events and to respond to the aftermath.”

Experts have said severe floods across Southern Africa are intensifying, driven by extreme weather patterns. Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe experienced unusually heavy rains in recent months, with the region’s worst flooding in years.

In January, South Africa declared a national disaster over torrential rains and floods that killed at least 30 people in the north, damaged thousands of homes and washed away roads and bridges.

By Associated Press

Banner image: A woman walks on a waterlogged pathway of the informal settlement in Khayelitsha, on the outkirks of Cape Town, South Africa, Tuesday, May 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Bheki Radebe)

For many birds, survival depends heavily on their beaks. Beaks are used for eating, hygiene and even fighting, so a broken or deformed beak can often be a death sentence. But for one kea parrot, an endangered species endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand, scientists observed the exact opposite, despite the bird missing its entire upper beak.

Scientists found that the male kea parrot (Nestor notabilis), which they named Bruce, was using his lower beak as a jousting weapon, thrusting the implement forward — a behavior that other parrots with intact beaks did not replicate. Researchers observed Bruce participate in 36 combative interactions — and win all of them.

“Bruce shows us that behavioral innovation can help bypass physical disability, at least in species with the cognitive flexibility to develop new solutions,” Alexander Grabham, lead author of a recently published study describing the findings, said in a statement. “Previous research has shown links between large brains, behavioral flexibility, and survival at the species level.”

Kea parrots are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, with an estimated 4,000 adults left in the wild.

Bruce was born in the wild but was taken into captivity around 12 years ago, after he was found with his entire upper beak missing. He has since lived in the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch, where the study was carried out.

Researchers found that Bruce was jousting more frequently than other keas, using different techniques and targeting different areas of his opponents’ body. Usually, keas target the neck, but Bruce distributed his attacks across the back, head, wings and legs. In total, researchers recorded 227 combative interactions among 12 different parrots, nine males and three females. Bruce participated in around 16% of them.

Fecal testing showed that Bruce had the lowest levels of a stress hormone metabolite called corticosterone in his group. They also noted that he had priority access to feeders, and he was the only male groomed by other males. In fact, four other males participated in his grooming.

“Bruce is the alpha male of his group,” said Grabham, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Canterbury. “Our findings also raise an important welfare question: if a disabled animal can innovate its way to success, well-intentioned interventions like prosthetics might not always improve their quality of life. Sometimes the animal can do better without help.”

A previous study, published in 2021, recorded another innovative behavioral adaptation by Bruce: he used pebbles to preen his feathers, a behavior that had never been seen before by other individuals of his species with intact beaks.

Banner image: Kea parrot Bruce at New Zealand’s Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. Images courtesy of Alexander Grabham.

Forest authorities in central India have successfully helped establish a new breeding population of the vulnerable hard-ground swamp deer, an animal previously restricted to just one protected area, reports contributor Sneha Mahale for Mongabay India. 

Once widespread in India, the hard-ground swamp deer (Rucervus duvaucelii branderi) was until recently reduced to a single, isolated population of around 1,100 individuals, restricted to Kanha Tiger Reserve in central India’s Madhya Pradesh state.

The hard-ground swamp deer is the only subspecies of the swamp deer — or barasingha, meaning “12-horned” in Hindi — that’s adapted to solid grassland. The two other subspecies live in swampy grassland habitats in other parts of the country.

“Confining the entire subspecies to Kanha effectively created a single point of failure,” Neha Awasthi, a member of the Deer Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, told Mongabay India. She said small isolated populations face risks from fluctuations in population, gene patterns and inbreeding, as well as external threats including disease outbreaks or large-scale environmental disturbances.  

To help the deer survive future catastrophes, the Madhya Pradesh forest department translocated 98 deer from Kanha to Satpura Tiger Reserve, also in Madhya Pradesh, between 2015 and 2023. The deer were first transferred into a 50-hectare (124-acre) predator-proof enclosure to allow for acclimatization, before being released into open grassland.  

Awasthi is a co-author of a recently published study that found that the hard-ground swamp deer population had increased from the original 98 to 172 individuals by 2023. The researchers recorded fawns, including second- and third-generation deer, annually, suggesting they were successfully breeding.

“Several independent indicators suggest the population is establishing rather than simply persisting with management support,” Awasthi said.

During the monitoring period, the researchers also found that the swamp deer in Satpura were in good physical condition, comparable to that of deer in Kanha, suggesting that Satpura’s grasslands offered sufficient food, water and shelter for the subspecies.

The forest department actively managed much of the habitat inside Satpura to aid the swamp deer’s translocation, Awasthi said. These interventions included restoring grasslands and planting key forage species such as black speargrass, kangaroo grass and wild sugarcane. They also removed invasive plants such as lantana and congress weed.

Awasthi cautioned that the project’s long-term success will depend on continued management.

Since 2023, 48 hard-ground swamp deer have also been introduced to Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, also in Madhya Pradesh. That population has already grown to 64, according to Anish Andheria, president of the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Trust, who wasn’t involved in the Satpura study.

“The swamp deer (barasingha) translocation programme in Madhya Pradesh is a landmark effort to secure the future of the species,” Andheria told Mongabay India.

Read the full story by Sneha Mahale here.

Banner image: Hard-ground swamp deer in their new habitat in Satpura Tiger Reserve. Image courtesy of L. Krishnamoorthy.

Herpetologists are calling for greater inclusion of amphibians in African conservation planning, in a recent letter published in the journal Science. 

Africa is home to roughly 1,170 known species of amphibians, 99% of which are endemic. Some 37% of the amphibians are recognized as threatened with extinction.

The researchers note that amphibians — frogs, salamanders and caecilians — are especially important as early-warning detectors of ecological disruption, given their sensitivity to pathogens, thermal stress, pollution and hydrological changes in their wetland habitats. Yet amphibians as a group remain poorly represented in protected-area planning and management tools in Africa, the authors write. They note there are only 12 documented amphibian-specific action plans across the continent. These include a conservation plan for frogs in Cape Town, South Africa, and for the golden mantella frog (Mantella aurantiaca) in Madagascar.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, doesn’t yet have conservation action plans specifically dedicated to amphibians, according to the letter’s lead author, Bienvenu Mwale, an expert on amphibians in the DRC and Cameroon. “To date, the DR Congo existing legal frameworks remain broad and give limited attention to this taxonomic group, with a stronger focus on large mammals,” Mwale told Mongabay by email.

Cameroon, on the other hand, has given full protection to six amphibian species, including the Goliath frog (Conraua goliath), the world’s largest, through a ministerial decree. This could be a good model for African conservation planning, Mwale said.

He added that several African amphibian species are currently classified as data deficient on the IUCN Red List, meaning there’s not enough information to assess their conservation status.

“One of the needs for amphibian conservation plans in Africa (that citizens can help with) is specific information on distribution,” Amaël Borzée, a co-author of the letter and member of the Amphiban Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, told Mongabay by email. “This is something anyone can help with, and for instance, doing it through the iNaturalist platform is a great way for people to get engaged. This is easy: take a picture of any amphibian and upload it on iNaturalist, and the job is done, and it helps.”

Karen Lips, an amphibian expert not affiliated with the letter, told Mongabay in an email: “I agree that much more research and much more conservation is needed in Africa. It is a continent with incredible richness of biodiversity, but still needs research to understand patterns of distribution and threats to that biodiversity.

“Africa is one of the regions with the least amount of information on amphibian population biology, meaning that we are not able to assess how land use change, climate change, disease, or other factors affect those species, because we have no baseline population data for comparisons,” Lips added.

Banner image: The golden mantella, an endangered frog species found only in Madagascar. Image by Frank Vassen via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

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

Stop telling people to protect wildlife. Start paying them instead.

That’s the idea in a new experiment in Kapuas Hulu district, in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province, which is testing whether conservation can be made to work with local incentives rather than against them. The initiative, known as KehatiKu, asks residents to record wildlife sightings in exchange for modest payments. In its first year, the program has generated a large volume of data while drawing hundreds of participants into regular contact with the forests around them, reports contributor Linnea Hoover for Mongabay.

The premise is straightforward. Participants download an app and use it to submit photos, audio or video of animals they encounter. Payments vary by species, from a few thousand rupiah for common birds, to more substantial sums for rarer animals such as orangutans. Observations are verified before payments are distributed at month’s end. The process is simple enough to fit into daily routines, yet structured enough to produce usable data.

The scale is notable. More than 800 observers across nine villages have recorded roughly 300 to 400 sightings a day. That has produced a data set covering species from hornbills to gibbons. The cost, by the standards of conservation programs, is low. Biologist Erik Meijaard, managing director of Borneo Futures, the scientific consultancy that organizes the project, estimates spending of less than $1 per hectare (40 U.S. cents per acre) annually across a 200,000-hectare (nearly 500,000-acre) area.

The effects extend beyond data collection. In some villages, residents have begun to discourage hunting and trapping. Informal agreements have taken hold, supported by the new income stream tied to living wildlife. For a few participants, the activity has become a primary source of earnings, comparable to or exceeding typical local wages.

The approach reflects a frustration with earlier efforts. Large sums have been spent on species protection, with mixed results. KehatiKu attempts a different route, placing small, direct incentives in the hands of those who encounter wildlife most often.

Early results suggest that modest incentives can shift attention and, in some cases, behavior. If that alignment between livelihoods and living wildlife holds, it may offer a practical model for conservation that grows from the interests of the people most closely tied to the forest.

Read the full story by Linnea Hoover here.

Banner image: Photograph of a Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) submitted by a KehatiKu citizen observer. Participants can earn 100,000 rupiah (nearly $6) for finding and photographing orangutans. Image courtesy of Borneo Futures.