Sea salt sold in markets across Lombok Island, Indonesia, is contaminated with microplastics, according to a recent study.

Microplastics are small plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in length that form when larger plastic waste breaks down. Microplastics have been found everywhere scientists have looked for them, including seafood and table salt, raising concerns for public health. 

Much of the plastic waste generated on land ends up in the ocean where it can break down into microplastics. Because sea salt is created by evaporating salt water, it is particularly vulnerable to microplastic contamination when the source water contains suspended microplastics. Scientists estimate that there are millions of tons of plastic pollution in the ocean, by far the largest form of marine pollution. 

The research team lead by Anna Ida Sunaryo Purwiyanto collected 20 salt samples from vendors at 10 markets across Lombok Island. They extracted potential microplastic particles from the samples and identified the particles using a stereo microscope.

Every salt sample contained microplastics, “indicating widespread contamination across the surveyed markets,” the study notes. The researchers found some variation in microplastic contamination levels in different markets and in crystal versus fine sea salt. However, the results consistently showed that the source material for the salt, the ocean surrounding Lombok Island, is contaminated with microplastics.

The researchers note that crystal sea salt had higher levels of microplastics than fine salt, likely because fine salt is washed and filtered, which removes some microplastic particles. They conclude that additional washing and filtering of salt could further reduce microplastic contamination levels.

“From a regulatory perspective, the absence of standardized guidelines for microplastics in salt products remains a key limitation [to reducing microplastic contamination],” the study notes.  “Integrating microplastic monitoring into national food safety and salt quality standards would provide a more consistent framework for assessment and control.”

Tamara Galloway, a microplastics researcher at Exeter University in the U.K. who was not involved with the study, told Mongabay in an email that the presence of microplastics in sea salt has been known and reported on for some years, and that the findings from Lombok Island confirms previous work. 

“Given the low density of plastic compared to seawater, its tendency to float near the surface is highly likely to lead to accumulation hotspots in certain locations,” Galloway said. “The risk to human health from ingestion of microplastics in sea salt is very low, especially when compared to the many other sources of microplastics and associated contaminants in our diets and daily lives.”

Banner image: Women in Lombok harvesting sea salt. Image courtesy of the Millenium Challenge Corporation (public domain).

PARIS (AP) — About 20,000 people were evacuated from towns and vacation resorts along the French Atlantic coast Thursday as the latest in a series of wildfires raged and hundreds of firefighters were dispatched to tackle it.

Local authorities said the fire in a forest near the town of Lège-Cap Ferret, southwest of Bordeaux, spread over more than 31 square kilometers (12 square miles), though no injuries have been reported.

The prefect, or head of the surrounding Gironde region, Sophie Brocas, said some 700 firefighters have been deployed, including forces sent from the Paris region. The fire came within 300 meters (980 feet) of the first homes in Lège, and water bombers were being used.

Later in the day, the prefect’s office said the wildfire had not yet been brought under control but remained contained to the north of Lège.

More than 10,000 people, including tourists staying at holiday camps and campgrounds, were moved to safety overnight, along with more than 1,000 residents living in residential areas along the forest edge. Authorities later evacuated the village of Claouey, including residents staying at several campsites, as a precautionary measure. Brocas said the evacuation involved 8,800 people.

Several municipalities have opened reception and respite centers for evacuees, the prefecture said.

Southern Europe has seen multiple large fires this summer. Scientists warn that climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness, making the region more vulnerable to wildfires.

Following a succession of heat waves that started even before the summer, wildfires have raged across France, devastating large swaths of land amid record temperatures and dry weather. Plants and vegetation are under severe water stress, adding to the danger of fires.

According to Interior Minister Laurent Nunez, more than 12,500 wildfires have broken out since the beginning of the year, and almost 44,000 hectares have already burned.

Wildfires in Spain and Italy

Elsewhere in Europe, wildfires continued to rage across Sicily on Thursday, a day after a firefighter was killed during operations to put out a blaze in Caltanissetta, the national fire department said.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella sent a note of condolences to the family and colleagues of the firefighter, Alessandro Marchì, who was a department head.

In Spain, firefighters battled multiple blazes amid a heat wave with the worst temperatures expected to reach 44 C (111 F) in the southeast. A fire near Alcalá de Henares near Madrid caused the high-speed train service between the capital and Barcelona to be briefly suspended Thursday.

Meanwhile, firefighters in the province of Guadalajara continued to extinguish a week-old fire that is the second-largest on record for the country with 320 square kilometers (123 square miles) burned. Other fires raged across central Spain, including one near Toledo that destroyed some 20 homes and triggered evacuations.

By Associated Press

Banner image: A water bomber drops water while fighting wildfires in the Lège-Cap-Ferret region, western France, Thursday, July 23, 2026. Image by Caroline Blumberg, Associated Press. 

A songbird species previously thought to occur across two Indonesian islands has turned out to be two distinct species, according to a recent study.

For more than 120 years, many scientists believed that Indonesia’s Babar Islands in eastern Banda Sea, and Tanimbar Islands, roughly 135 kilometers (84 miles) east of the Babar Islands, were both home to the cinnamon-tailed fantail (Rhipidura fuscorufa). But a team of researchers led by James A. Eaton of Birdtour Asia Limited and Alex J. Berryman of BirdLife International has confirmed that the songbird on Babar Islands is a distinct species, which they’ve named the cheerful fantail (Rhipidura laguceria).

To confirm these findings, the researchers analyzed 19 museum specimens of birds labeled cinnamon-tailed fantail, historically collected from both Tanimbar and Babar islands. They also recorded songs of the birds on both islands, then played the recorded calls back to the wild birds 132 separate times over several years.

The researchers found that physical differences between the populations on the two islands are subtle: The cheerful fantail possess slightly darker upperparts and less extensive cinnamon plumage below than the cinnamon-tailed fantail.

However, their songs vary considerably. The researchers said in the study that songs of the birds on Babar typically consist of “single whistles that rise in pitch towards the end.” By contrast, the Tanimbar birds combine very short and longer whistles, which gives their songs a “much more rhythmic cadence,” with pitch that typically goes up and down.

The song recording experiments also revealed that birds routinely responded to recordings of their own population, but ignored song recordings of birds from the other island.

Many birds rely on songs and calls to identify individuals of their species and find mates. So, birds from the two populations failing to recognize each other’s songs suggests they’re less likely to pair up and reproduce, the study authors said.

The cinnamon-tailed fantail is currently classified as least concern on the IUCN Red List. However, with the two populations on Babar and Tanimbar islands representing two different species, the known ranges for both species are significantly reduced, meeting the initial thresholds for listing as threatened, the authors said.

“However, both species are highly tolerant of habitat degradation (the only plausible threat), and are commonly found in edge habitats, clearings and glades, as well as scrub with taller mango trees,” the authors said, adding that both fantails seem to favor “heavily modified habitats” while generally avoiding “closed-canopy forests.”

Indonesia’s Babar Islands remained largely unvisited by ornithologists for a century until 2009.

Banner image: The Cheerful Fantail (Rhipidura laguceria). Image courtesy of James A. Eaton via iNaturalist (CC0 1.0).

Wildfires have burned thousands of hectares of forest and savanna in the Chacobo-Pacahuara Indigenous territory in the Beni department of northern Bolivia, according to satellite imagery and on-the-ground sources. The fires likely resulted from illegal burns in pastures surrounding the Indigenous territory.

The fires hit Chacobo-Pacahuara in September and October 2025, the third consecutive year of unusually high fire activity in the Indigenous land, according to the most recent data released by Global Forest Watch, a platform that uses satellite data to track forest loss worldwide.

The flames consumed Indigenous subsistence crops and homes. Locals also expressed worry for the safety of isolated Indigenous communities. 

“We have Indigenous relatives who live in voluntary isolation, and we do not know what has happened to them because the forest and the forest islands where they lived burned,” Constantino Toledo Ortiz, a leader of the Chácobo people, told Mongabay in a voice message. “We think they may have crossed into Brazil.”

According to a bulletin published by the Center for Legal Studies and Social Research (CEJIS), 1,141 heat hotspots, typically caused by fire, were recorded in the territory between Jan. 1 and Sept. 12, 2025. CEJIS recorded an additional 845 heat hotspots between Sept. 29 and Oct. 16, 2025. The sharp increase is in line with the Bolivian Amazon’s typical fire season, which usually peaks around August and September when the climate is at its driest.

Chacobo-Pacahuara was the most affected Indigenous territory in the Bolivian Amazon in 2025.

In 2024, the same organization reported that 47% of the territory was burned by fire between January and October 2024, or 228,348 hectares (564,260 acres) of the territory’s 485,260 hectares (1.2 million acres).

Ortiz told Mongabay that the fires originated from cattle pastures surrounding the territory, which spread into the protected area. Before 2023, the Chacobo-Pacahuara territory recorded stable, low fire activity. Satellite data analyzed by Mongabay show that fire alerts almost doubled between 2022 and 2023, then reached a record high in 2024.

“In 2023 and 2024, the forest and the savanna burned one after the other … We felt very, very sad because homes were lost. Houses burned down. Our fields burned. Cassava, banana, corn, and rice crops burned. Everything burned completely. It was a very serious ordeal,” Ortiz said.

“The forest provides our food,” he said. “The animals also burned. The monkeys, wild pigs, tapirs, and birds were burned.”

According to Ortiz, the community leaders reported the fire and impacts to the authorities, including the municipal leaders and governor, but said they have not received any assistance.

Mongabay contacted the Beni departmental government, the Riberalta municipal government and Bolivia’s Forest and Land Control and Social Authority (ABT) for comment. None responded by the time of publication.

Banner image: Fire in the Chiquitania forest in the south of Bolivia, September 2024. Image © Juan Karita/AP photo.

Decades of unchecked deforestation for coffee production has devastated Vietnam’s Central Highland forests, according to a new investigation by the Berlin-headquartered watchdog group Coffee Watch.

Vietnam is currently the world’s second largest coffee producer, supplying nearly 40% of the world’s exports of Robusta coffee (Coffea canephora).

The investigation, which analyzed satellite data and government records, found that tropical forest cover in Vietnam’s Central Highlands region, which produces 95% of the country’s coffee, plummeted from 42.8% in 1990 to just 19% by 2020.

Forest loss was most rapid between 1995 and 2010, and stabilized at low levels in the 2020s, the investigation found. Much of the remaining tropical moist forest is now confined to “steeper, less accessible terrain, often at higher elevations and within formally designated protected areas,” the Coffee Watch’s report notes.

Historically, government policy and international development financing incentivized the rapid expansion of coffee in the Central Highlands, according to Coffee Watch. The ecological cost has been severe, the nonprofit adds, resulting in fragmented habitats, accelerated soil erosion and a “nutrient treadmill” where farmers must use increasing amounts of fertilizer to maintain yields in exhausted soils.

The Coffee Watch report notes that forest loss has affected water flow and recharge, soil stability and moisture, carbon storage and pests in the Central Highlands. It warns that 50% of Vietnam’s robusta belt could become unsuitable for coffee owing to the added impacts of climate extremes such as rising temperatures and erratic rainfall.

Ly Thi Minh Hai, Vietnam country director at the international environmental nonprofit RECOFTC, who wasn’t involved in the report, told Mongabay by email  that historically, “coffee expansion was indeed one of the major drivers of forest loss in parts of the Central Highlands”. She said, however, that the coffee sector is now shifting focus toward “improving the productivity, resilience, and sustainability of existing coffee-growing landscapes” rather than further expansion.

Minh Hai agreed that climate change is putting increasing pressure on coffee production in the region and that coffee farmers there need help to adapt to the pressures of climate change.

“This entails rejuvenating or replanting aging coffee plantations and introducing intercropping (such as shade trees) to avoid monoculture; adopting climate-smart and regenerative farming practices; improving water-use efficiency; and helping farmers boost yields and income from existing plantations rather than expanding into natural forests,” she said.

RECOFTC is currently working with local communities to promote agroforestry and secure forest tenure, which provides an essential foundation for preventing further encroachment, Minh Hai said.

“Vietnam’s coffee sector should not be defined by the deforestation challenges of the past,” she said. “The future of Vietnam’s coffee sector will not be measured by how much land we cultivate, but by how well we manage the landscapes we already have.”

Banner image of a coffee landscape in Gia Lai province, Central Highlands, Vietnam. Image courtesy of Stef vnmq via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

A beekeeping initiative is enabling women in India’s Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot that runs parallel to India’s west coast, to strengthen their livelihoods with more reliable honey harvests.

The 50 women are part of the Women for Bees project, launched in India in April 2025 by UNESCO in partnership with local nonprofit the Keystone Foundation. The project provides training and equipment to women from the Irula, Kurumba and Kattunayaka Indigenous communities across the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, reports Mongabay-India’s Arathi Menon.

Traditionally, many of these communities were skilled wild honey hunters, a practice that is often risky and increasingly restricted by forest protection laws. Managed beekeeping, using hive boxes, offers a safer, more predictable alternative.

The women are trained to rear the native Asian honey bee (Apis cerana indica), which is more resistant to local diseases and parasites than the commercially dominant European honey bee (Apis mellifera). A 2023 study comparing the two species suggests that, while the life cycles are generally similar, A. cerana colonies are better able to defend themselves against threats, diseases and disruptions.

The economic impact of the honey harvests from the hive boxes has been immediate, providing many participants with their first taste of financial independence. Neelavathi, an Irula woman from Tamil Nadu state, has used her earnings to support her family and purchase household goods. “Since I am the beekeeper at home, my family lets me keep the income for my own needs,” she told Mongabay-India.

Malavika Jayakrishnan, who leads the project at UNESCO, told Mongabay-India that the women have reported good honey yields with some women able to market their honey at premium prices.

The 2023 and a 2025 study has shown that pollination by Asian honey bees can improve yields of certain crops such as bitter gourd.   While the ecological impacts of the Women for Bees project are yet to be assessed, some of the participants said they have observed improved flowering and higher yields in surrounding fruit farms.

Lakshmi Babu, a Kattunayaka woman from Kerala’s Nilambur Elephant Reserve, said that the project has helped bring neighbors together to share knowledge and support one another.

“Bees have brought a lot of joy into my life,” she said. “The bees work hard and take very good care of those who care for them.”

With a 100% retention rate among participants, UNESCO project organizers hope to expand this model to other biosphere reserves.

Read the full story by Arathi Menon here.

Banner image of beekeepers at work in Nilambur, Kerala. In April 2025, UNESCO’s Women for Bees project debuted in India at the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, engaging 50 Indigenous women from Sigur, Pillur, Kuzhiyoor, Wayanad and Nilambur to learn beekeeping as a livelihood. Image by Shawn J. Stephen/Keystone Foundation.