BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — The California Senate has unanimously approved a resolution calling for a review of its imports of crude oil from the Amazon rainforest and an eventual phase-out, following years of advocacy from Indigenous leaders in South America.

Environmental groups say oil drilling in the Amazon is driving deforestation, destroying biodiversity and violating Indigenous rights, often without the consent of local communities. California’s purchases undermine its reputation as a climate leader, even as the state works to cut greenhouse gas emissions, they say.

Senate Resolution 51, introduced by Democratic Sen. Josh Becker, passed 37-0 on Monday evening. It directs the Californian Senate to examine the state’s role as one of the world’s top buyers of crude from the Amazon — much of it from Ecuador — and explore steps to reduce and ultimately end those imports.

The vote follows a June visit by leaders from the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. They met lawmakers in Sacramento and staged a protest in kayaks near the Chevron refinery in Richmond, one of several in the state that process Amazon crude. Much of the gasoline made from this oil is sold in California, but large volumes are exported to nearby states such as Arizona and Nevada.

“I believe this Senate resolution is a call for coherence,¨ said Diana Chávez, International Relationships leader at Pakkiru, an Indigenous organization based in Ecuador’s Amazon.

“As Indigenous peoples, we are already protecting the forests, life, and culture, and resisting extractive activities,” she added. “It’s time for others to assume their social responsibility and take meaningful action.”

“This is the first step in ending California’s addiction to Amazon crude,” said Kevin Koenig, climate and energy director at Amazon Watch, a nonprofit focused on protecting the Amazon and Indigenous rights.

“Consuming oil from the Amazon is incompatible with climate leadership. As the world’s fourth-largest economy, California is sending a powerful market signal by examining its crude footprint and role in Amazon destruction,” Koenig added.

The resolution comes as Ecuador and Peru move to expand drilling.

Ecuador plans to auction more than 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) in a “Southern Oil Round,” including blocks on remote Indigenous territories — an area roughly the size of New Jersey.

The two countries’ state oil companies have also signed a deal to build a bi-national pipeline to Peru — a project Indigenous groups have condemned.

Supporters say California could stop using Amazon crude without raising costs for drivers if refineries made more fuel for local use instead of exporting.

Although nonbinding, the measure outlines potential changes to California’s fuel sourcing that supporters say would align with the state’s climate targets and protections for Indigenous communities.

By Steven Grattan, Associated Press

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

Turtles and tortoises have outlived dinosaurs, endured ice ages, and survived the shuffling of continents. Yet despite their evolutionary stamina, these ancient mariners and land dwellers now find themselves in peril. A sweeping global assessment published in Nature Communications offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of extinction risks facing the order Testudines, which includes turtles, tortoises and terrapins — and the results are grim.

More than half of the 378 evaluated species are either threatened or already extinct. Particularly imperiled are those with large body sizes, narrow geographical ranges, or high ecological distinctiveness. The Indo-Malayan region, home to species such as the Asian giant softshell turtle (Pelochelys cantorii) and the Assam box turtle (Cuora praschagi), has emerged as a hotspot of chelonian crisis. Entire families, including Trionychidae (softshell turtles) and Geoemydidae (Asian river turtles), are on the brink.

The study doesn’t stop at diagnosis. Using models that incorporate ecological traits, geographical distributions and anthropogenic pressures, researchers projected extinction risk for 43 data-deficient species — those whose extinction threat hasn’t been assessed for the IUCN Red List. Nearly one in five of these is likely threatened, including the Sicilian pond turtle (Emys trinacris) and the flatback turtle (Natator depressus), which nests exclusively on northern Australian shores.

But perhaps most alarming is the study’s conclusion that turtles’ evolutionary adaptations are unfolding far too slowly to keep pace with today’s environmental shifts. Traits such as body size or reproductive lifespan evolve over millennia. Meanwhile, climate change, habitat degradation and human expansion are advancing at a speed that outstrips turtles’ ability to adapt by several orders of magnitude.

There are glimmers of hope. Some species are demonstrating behavioral adaptability, such as shifting nest timing or location. Yet the broader picture remains one of biological inertia clashing with planetary acceleration. For creatures that once epitomized resilience, the Anthropocene may prove too swift and too brutal a test.

Read related coverage by Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough here.

Banner image: Giant Galápagos tortoises. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Sharks continually shed and regrow teeth throughout their lives, replacing worn or lost teeth with new ones. That makes them particularly good at catching prey. However, these top marine predators could lose their literal edge as ocean acidification damages their teeth and makes it harder to keep and replace them, a new study says.

“Shark teeth are highly evolved and diverse feeding tools developed over millions of years,” lead author Maximilian Baum, a biologist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany, told Mongabay by email. “If their functionality is reduced due to acidification this could affect hunting success and energy balance and in the long run potentially impact survival and reproductive fitness.”

The world’s oceans are becoming more acidic as seawater absorbs the excess carbon dioxide (CO2) that humans pump into the atmosphere. This acidification disrupts the availability of calcium and other minerals in seawater, which harms organisms like corals and shellfish that use the minerals to form their shells and skeletons.

Shark teeth regeneration also depends on seawater minerals like calcium and phosphate. To find out how acidification might affect shark teeth, Baum’s team scuba-dived and collected naturally shed teeth from captive blacktip reef shark (Carcharhinus melanopterus), a critical predator in tropical coral reefs. “The sharks themselves were not an issue as blacktip reef sharks are very shy and peaceful,” Baum said. “The real difficulty was finding the small, shed teeth among sand and substrate and especially locating intact and freshly lost teeth that were suitable for the experiments.”

Studies project that as CO2 emissions continue to rise, the average pH of the ocean could drop from the current 8.1 to as low as 7.3 by 2300. So the researchers placed 26 undamaged teeth in water with pH 8.1, and 26 others in slightly more acidic water at pH 7.3.

At the end of eight weeks, the teeth exposed to more acidic water were significantly more damaged and weaker than the other group. “[W]e were surprised by how clearly the acidified teeth showed damage even after relatively short exposure times,” Baum said. “The difference in surface structure between the teeth from acidified and control conditions was obvious and consistent across our samples.”

While the experiment tested only shed teeth, Baum said they would expect to see similar damage in wild sharks as ocean acidification intensifies. This is because sharks swim with their mouths slightly open, so their teeth are constantly exposed to seawater.

In acidified seawater, the availability of minerals like calcium and phosphate necessary for new tooth formation may also be lower, Baum said, which could make the teeth regeneration process “even more difficult.”

“An increased need for new teeth combined with reduced mineral availability could create a biological bottleneck that affects shark performance and resilience,” he added. “Future studies on living animals are needed [if] we want to understand these dynamics better.”

Banner image: A blacktip reef shark by Charles J. Sharp via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Indigenous leaders say land-grabbers are setting fires inside the Karipuna Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s Rondônia state, in the northwest Amazon. The fires come less than one month after Indigenous leaders warned authorities about renewed invasions.

Satellite monitoring detected more than 90 fire alerts in the territory between Aug. 14 and Aug. 25, according to an analysis by Mongabay using data from Brazil’s space agency, INPE.

“These fires are happening because of land-grabbing,” André Karipuna, the chief of the Karipuna people, told Mongabay in an audio message. “The land-grabber comes in, sections the land into lots, then clears it. First, they cut the smaller vegetation, then bigger trees. They leave it to dry and then set it on fire.”

In July 2024, Brazil’s federal government carried out an operation to dismantle illegal access routes and other structures inside the territory. Officials reported destroying 17 bridges and 38 illegally built roads, but no one was arrested.

Karipuna leaders and the global nonprofit Survival International raised the alarm about increased invasions on the land in late July 2025.

According to Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, a federal police unit has been alerted. But as of Aug. 26, Karipuna leaders say no help has reached them on the ground.   

“The Federal Police has already been called in and is monitoring fire alerts and other criminal activities in the region,” the ministry wrote to Mongabay by email. “For security reasons, details of these actions remain confidential, but it is important to stress that they are underway and will continue in order to suppress illegal activities, protect the community and ensure the preservation of natural resources.”

Adriano Karipuna, another Karipuna leader, told Mongabay in July that federal agencies had guaranteed monitoring and surveillance of their territory but were not following through. “Because it is not happening, the invaders are coming back again,” he said.

The Karipuna are one of Brazil’s least-populous Indigenous peoples, with only 63 people left, down from thousands before colonization. Their territory is entirely surrounded by cattle ranching farms and logging operations.

Banner image: A forest fire in the Brazilian Amazon in 2022. Image © Nilmar Lage/Greenpeace.

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Officials say rescuers in eastern Pakistan have evacuated tens of thousands of people to safer areas after neighboring India released water from overflowing dams and swollen rivers into low-lying border regions. The move came a day after New Delhi alerted Islamabad about possible cross-border flooding, marking the first public diplomatic contact between the two nuclear-armed rivals in months. Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority said Tuesday it had issued an advance alert about a surge in the Sutlej River and the risk of flooding. It said more evacuations from various districts in the eastern Punjab province are still underway.

By Barbar Dogar and Munir Ahmed, Associated Press  

Banner image: In this photo released by Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, rescue workers evacuate villagers from a low-lying area due to rising water level in the Sutlej River following a release of water in overflowing dams in neighbouring India Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025. (Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority via AP)

The critically endangered Manapany day gecko has long been known only from a small part of Réunion Island, a French territory in the Indian Ocean. A recent study finds the bright green lizard no longer appears in 28% of its previous habitat, but has cropped up in newer, more urban areas where it hasn’t been recorded before.

From 1995-2011, many subpopulations of the Manapany day gecko (Phelsuma inexpectata) disappeared or were close to extinction on the island, the researchers write. To find out where the gecko is now found, they first mapped areas where it had previously been recorded, working with grids of 20 by 20 meters (66 by 66 feet). From 2020-2022, they visited each grid cell up to three times during the gecko’s active hours.

The researchers write the species is brightly colored and doesn’t move away when people appear, which makes it easy to spot if it’s around.

The team found that between 2008 and 2020, the Manapany day gecko had been spotted within an area of 19.44 hectares (48 acres), equivalent to 486 grid cells. Of these, 320 cells contained human-modified habitats, such as housing, farmland and private gardens. Only 97 cell grids had natural habitats, while 69 had mixed natural and human-modified habitats.

During the 2020-2022 survey, the researchers also searched 459 of the previously occupied cells; they didn’t find the gecko in 128 of those — a decline of 28%.

The sharpest decline was in areas with natural habitats. However, the team did find the gecko in 268 new cells, or in about 10.72 hectares (26.5 acres), where it hadn’t been previously observed. Most of these areas contained human-influenced habitats like gardens.

With the species now occupying just 24 hectares (59.3 acres) along Réunion’s southern coast, it is likely “the rarest endemic terrestrial vertebrate on the island in terms of its distribution,” the researchers say.

They further speculate that the recent shift in its distribution to garden-like habitats could be because such areas contain diverse species of palm trees that are frequently watered. The gecko prefers to bask or hide in palm-like trees. Natural habitats, by contrast, support fewer palm species and are more exposed to heat and drought, the authors say. Additionally, gardens provide food sources all year round, including flowers and fruits that attract insect prey, while structures like pipes and buildings protect the geckos from predators and extreme weather. The invasive gold-dust day gecko (P. laticauda) is a rising competitor and threat to the Manapany day gecko.

The researchers recommend urban areas could be made more suitable for the Manapany day gecko by planting gecko host plants. Additionally, educating local people about the gecko,  and preserving the remaining 2.72 hectares (6.7 acres) of its natural habitat would safeguard the gecko’s survival in its historical range, they say.

Banner image of a Manapany day gecko by B.navez via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).