In the Indian Western Himalayas, women are the primary first responders to escalating forest fires. They risk their physical safety to protect homes and livelihoods despite receiving little formal support or equipment and no pay, reports contributor Swati Thapa for Mongabay.

Uttarakhand is the most fire-prone state in India’s Western Himalayas. High-elevation warming exceeds global rates there, extending the wildfire season into the winter and hinting at bigger ecosystem-level changes. More than 71% of the state is forested, supplying the region with essential drinking water, firewood, and fodder for cattle. Climate change is both increasing fire risk and impacting local agriculture, such that men are migrating to cities for work, leaving rural women behind to manage farming, livestock, and fire defense.

Kavya Pandey, a researcher at the Centre for Wildlife Studies in Bengaluru, has studied extensively the relationship between women in Uttarakhand and forest fires. Pandey notes that a traditional gender role for women is collecting firewood, so they’re often in the forest for hours and, by default, on the frontlines when forest fires start.

Men are occasionally hired as paid seasonal fire watchers, and while authorities also call on women to help, they’re rarely paid for the work and don’t receive protective gear.

“If a woman sees fire anywhere, and she does not have a phone, she calls out to others by ululating or whistling, and all the women go together to snuff the fire,” said Kamla Devi, head of the Marhmanley village van panchayat, a community-managed forest council.

Armed primarily with household sickles, women cut green branches to make jhapa, or makeshift fire brooms. “When the flames are not too high, we use jhapa to beat back the fire,” said Asha Devi, a resident of Bhetuli village. “If they are [high], we clear a fire line instead; some of us push the fire back toward the already-burnt ground, while others use their sickle to pull away dry grass and twigs so it has nothing left to catch on.”

The physical toll is significant. Women battle fires wearing flammable synthetic nylon sarees, often suffering burnt hands, singed eyebrows, and foot injuries. “We are all coughing our lungs out; during that time, our eyes are bloodshot, irritated by all the smoke, and it’s hard to breathe in the thick air,” said Tulsi Devi, a resident of Ayarpani village.

But community-led prevention has worked in places where women hold genuine authority. Roughly 95% of forest fires in India are human-made, so Kamla has organized community women to stop fires before they start, keeping Marhmanley free of major blazes for three consecutive years.

“Before, people burned brush haphazardly, but now we insist on planning. We show them where and how to set small, controlled burns,” Kamla said.

Read the full story by Swati Thapa here.

Banner image: Kamla Devi, left, and Lila Devi with the tools they use to beat back forest fires. Image by Swati Thapa for Mongabay.

Isolated and contacted Indigenous tribes in India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands face threats from illegal fishing, mega-development projects and misinformed government welfare policies that undermine their self-sufficiency, says Manish Chandi, a former research scholar who has spent decades working with tribal communities in the region.

Chandi worked with the communities while he was with the Andaman Nicobar Environment Team and the Nature Conservation Foundation. He is also a former advisory board member of the Tribal Research Institute under the Andaman and Nicobar Administration. In an interview with Mongabay’s Latoya Abulu, Chandi says that protecting Indigenous autonomy is vital for both tribal survival and environmental conservation in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which lie southeast of mainland India.

The archipelago’s tribal reserves — home to Indigenous groups that live in voluntary isolation, such as the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island and the Shompen of Great Nicobar Island — contain some of the region’s richest biodiversity, outperforming the roughly 100 official national parks and wildlife sanctuaries across the islands, Chandi says.

This is because the tribal reserved areas are both large and “have not been used for timber extraction and settlement and therefore retain the biodiversity of both various habitats and also species,” Chandi tells Mongabay.

However, several escalating pressures threaten these communities.

Chandi notes that commercial trawlers and poachers frequently infiltrate coastal buffer zones, harvesting sharks, lobsters and turtles that island communities depend on for subsistence. On Great Nicobar Island, a government-proposed development project directly overlaps with ancestral foraging grounds and the Shompen’s habitations without their consent.

Overall, there is ignorance about the communities as well, Chandi says.

Some government officials, for example, view traditional hunting-and-gathering practices as “primitive”, and have replaced food that communities grow themselves with external food sources, he says. This has increased communities’ dependence on foods that they cannot grow or gather themselves.

Chandi adds that substituting natural self-sufficiency with dependence on government welfare supplies from the market, forces once-independent communities into small, sedentary reservations, opening their larger traditional territories to denotification (where the state can remove a legally protected status), and commercial tourism.

“Autonomy and self-sufficiency are critical indicators of human welfare and well-being,” Chandi says. “Rather than creating dependencies and imposing our ignorance on their community interests, welfare plans for tribal communities should incorporate these perspectives.”

Chandi adds that the establishment’s reluctance to make “ethically positive and scientifically genuine efforts to understand the tribal communities and to share that information with the island settlers is a festering wound that needs serious attention.”

“There’s so much to learn of the Indigenous communities, to comprehend their space and perspectives their world and ours, and to share that with others,” he says.

Read the full interview with Manish Chandi here.

Banner image: Fishermen from South Andaman lay gillnets around North Sentinel Island, exploiting the rich fishery. This picture is from 1999. The exploitation of marine resources has only increased, Manish Chandi says. Image courtesy of Manish Chandi.

SCHIPKAU, Germany (AP) — A wind turbine described by its developer as the world’s tallest now rises 365 meters (1,197 feet) above the sparsely populated landscape of eastern Germany, surpassing the height of the Eiffel Tower.

The colossal turbine has been built at an existing wind farm in Lusatia, southeast of Berlin. Once a major center of lignite mining, the region has increasingly turned to renewable energy in recent years. The prototype reached its full height this week and is due to be inaugurated in mid-November.

Jochen Grossmann, chief executive of Gicon, the Dresden-based engineering company that built the tower, said the structure would harness the stronger, more reliable winds found at greater heights. Conventional wind turbines typically have a hub height — the distance from the ground to the center of the rotor — of well below 200 meters (656 feet).

“At 300 meters, we have such constant and strong wind that we can produce more than twice as much electrical energy as with the same facility at today’s heights,” Grossmann said on Thursday. He added that it would also be possible to produce electricity for much more of the year than with existing turbines.

The turbine has a hub height of 300 meters (984 feet), and its rotor blades bring its total height to 365 meters. That makes it taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, at 330 meters (1,083 feet), and leaves it just short of Berlin’s television tower, Germany ‘s tallest building at 368 meters (1,207 feet).

Work on the turbine is not yet complete, with internal wiring still to be installed ahead of its planned inauguration on Nov. 19. The prototype is intended to measure the potential gains from building turbines at such heights.

Gicon plans to use the findings to develop a wind farm containing three to five extra-tall turbines, paving the way for possible full-scale production.

Grossmann also sees the giant turbines as a potential solution to the shortage of suitable land for wind farms. Existing sites could be expanded into “two-story” wind farms combining shorter and taller turbines, while new sites could be designed that way from the outset.

Germany has been working for years to expand the use of wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. It switched off its last nuclear power plants in 2023 in a long-planned move, though that drew criticism after energy prices surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Germany also plans to stop generating electricity from coal by 2038.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, 59.1% of energy produced in Germany in the first half of 2026 came from renewable sources. Wind was the largest single source, providing 29.4% of the total.

Banner image: A newly constructed wind turbine, whose rotor tips reach a maximum height of 365 meters (1,198 feet), stands in Schipkau, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. Image courtesy of Markus Schreiber, Associated Press

Renewable energy companies are driving most of Brazil’s plans for new data centers, according to a recent joint analysis by The Intercept Brasil and Mongabay.

As of December 2025 there were 68 requests to connect data centers to Brazil’s national power grid with 65% registered by renewable energy companies, including wind and solar power plants, the investigation found.

Brazil produces more renewable energy than it can distribute across its territory, and the national power grid cannot always absorb all the power generated by renewable energy plants. Doing so would cause disruptions in provision, and potentially even blackouts. To avoid this, the national grid operator frequently orders plants to halt production. In the first half of 2025 such measures cost power generators an estimated 3.2 billion reais ($617 million). One solar plant was forced to cut production by nearly 40% in 2025.

Renewable energy companies argue that data centers, which constantly demand large amounts of energy, can provide more stability and income for the renewable energy sector.

The Brazilian government has been actively seeking deals with big tech companies, advertising Brazil as an environmentally friendly host for data centers. On Sept. 15, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a law exempting data centers from several taxes on equipment purchases if they meet water efficiency criteria and use renewable or low-emission energy.

In April 2026, Brazil’s foreign trade agency, Apex, organized a roundtable in the U.S. to attract foreign investment for sustainable data centers.

“Renewable energy companies are able to sign long-term power purchase agreements with data centers and Big Tech firms,” Mikaelle Farias, a climate activist and renewable energy engineer at the Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil, told Mongabay and The Intercept Brasil. “This guarantees the sale of that surplus for 15 or 20 years without needing to feed it into the interconnected grid or losing the energy.”

However, the rollout of data centers raises problems for local communities. For example, a wind power company in the northeastern state of Bahia asked to connect their plant to nine data centers. The area is home to a Quilombola community, a traditional territory founded by enslaved and formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilians.

In fact, at least 29 municipalities with plans for data centers are home to protected Quilombola communities or Indigenous communities working to have their land officially demarcated, the investigation found.

Some analysts argue that renewable energy should be used to meet domestic energy needs, not feed Big Tech’s data center demand.

“Companies say, ‘Look how we are unlocking this renewable energy,’ but they don’t specify the intended use,” climate analyst Ketan Joshi said. “Why didn’t you build a transmission line or a battery or something to have that energy be used by society and to displace fossil fuels?”

Read the full story here.

Banner image: Wind farm complex in Gentio do Ouro, Bahia, where dozens of data centers are planned. Image by Thomas Bauer/Intercept Brasil and Mongabay.

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

For much of the 20th century, Cuba’s spiders and scorpions received limited attention beyond specialist circles. Identifying them required careful research in museum collections and comparing them with descriptions published abroad.

Giraldo Alayón García spent much of his career documenting Cuba’s arachnids and bringing them to the public’s attention. In San Antonio de los Baños, southwest of Havana, he used Radio Ariguanabo to discuss wildlife with a general audience. At the National Museum of Natural History of Cuba, where he spent almost four decades, he helped build one of the Caribbean’s principal collections of arachnids.

At the museum, he curated specimens collected in Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and added the records that made the collection useful to other researchers. Under Alayón, the museum’s arachnological collection became one of the Caribbean’s most substantial.

In 1994, he published a list of Cuba’s spiders, which became a standard point of reference for work on the island’s arachnids. Across his career, he described about 95 species and genera, most of them endemic to Cuba.

He also worked abroad. From 1993 to 1995, he directed the Arachnological Project of Yucatán in Mexico. In 1999, he led an expedition to Navassa Island — contested between Haiti and the U.S. — where researchers identified several species new to science. One, the scorpion Cazierius alayoni, was named for him.

Alayón first took wildlife to a wider audience on Radio Ariguanabo, Cuba’s first regular radio program devoted to environmental topics. He later appeared as a specialist on television, taught courses, gave public lectures, and served as president of the Cuban Society of Zoology.

In later years, his attention returned increasingly to his hometown of San Antonio de los Baños, where he served as president of the Ariguanabo Foundation, supported work to clean up the river, and campaigned against the illegal trade in wild birds.

Alayón died on Sept. 24 at the age of 79.

Banner image: Giraldo Alayón García via his Facebook page.

Rising sea levels due to climate change could damage hundreds of thousands of properties and millions of hectares of land along Australia’s coastline by 2100, according to a recent study. This could cost the country an economic loss of $855 billion, researchers estimate.

To calculate the costs, researchers in Australia used existing projections of sea level rise and storm surges to map out the areas that could suffer flooding by 2100. Then they identified all the houses, properties, agricultural land, and other land and infrastructure in the vulnerable areas and used real estate sources to estimate their values and arrive at what their damage could cost.

The analysis showed that by 2100, under a scenario where greenhouse gas emissions remain moderate, sea level rise and storm surges could damage roughly 268,000 properties and 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of land in Australia. That’s a present-value economic loss of $855.1 billion.

Under a high-emissions scenario, nearly 720,000 properties and 3.7 million hectares (9.1 million acres) of Australian coastal properties could suffer damage, amounting to present-value losses of up to $1.91 trillion.

“Sea level rise may physically affect a large number of Australians who live near the coast, as the majority of Australians live within 50 kilometres [31 miles] of the coastline,” Tom Kompas, study lead author and a professor of environmental economics and biosecurity at the University of Melbourne, said in a statement.

Australia’s coastline is massive, extending roughly 34,000 kilometers (21,000 miles). The analysis found that every region of the country will see considerable damage from sea level rise. Queensland state has the most at-risk properties, more than 93,000, followed by New South Wales and Western Australia. Among cities, the Gold Coast is most at risk, potentially facing losses of $84.4 billion.

The analysis is the foundation of a new report, “Rising Seas, Rising Bills,” released recently by the Australian nonprofit Climate Council. Climate scientist and report co-author Andrew Watkins said, “The science shows that the most extreme sea levels we see in a typical year now, will occur monthly by 2090. That’s simply too often to repair the damage.”

Scientists estimate that a 1-centimeter (0.4-inch) rise in sea level leads to a potential horizontal loss of roughly 1 meter (3.3 feet) on average. Global average sea level has already risen by at least 22 cm (8 in) over the past century, the report notes, and could rise by between 30 cm (11.8 in) and a meter compared to 2014 levels.

“Our least costly option is to avoid building in places where we know the risks are highest, and there’s a lot we can do to restore our coastlines and build in ways that reduce future risks,” Kompas said. “These are hard, but necessary decisions that communities are already facing.”

Banner image: Townsville city in Queensland suffered significant damage during Tropical Cyclone Yasi in 2011. Image by Bannon Keft via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).