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

In the world of conservation, good intentions have not always made for good outcomes. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), one of the most recognizable environmental organizations on the planet, learned this the hard way. In 2019, it faced allegations that park rangers it supported had committed serious human rights abuses — including torture and killings — in several countries. The ensuing scandal did more than tarnish the organization’s reputation. It forced a reckoning.

Six years on, WWF says it has overhauled not just its protocols, but its philosophy.

“What started off as a response to a criticism … has now really been internalized at the highest strategic levels of WWF,” Kirsten Schuijt, the group’s director-general, told Mongabay’s David Akana in a recent conversation at the Villars Institute Global Learning Conference in Switzerland.

At the heart of this change is a shift away from “fortress conservation” — the long-dominant model that prioritizes protected areas often at the expense of the communities that live in them — toward what Schuijt calls “locally led conservation.”

WWF has implemented nearly all of the 170 reforms recommended by an independent panel it commissioned after the scandal. Among them: grievance mechanisms, risk assessment protocols and an ombuds office. It has also appointed its first Indigenous board member and created a consultative group of Indigenous leaders to advise senior management.

Yet trust, once lost, is slow to rebuild. Critics point out that power over conservation planning remains concentrated in the hands of international actors. Representation, while improved, is not the same as devolution. Schuijt acknowledges the challenges.

“We’re achieving that in some places,” she said, “but still have a long way to go in others.”

That ambivalence reflects a broader tension in conservation: between technocratic ambition and social legitimacy. WWF’s new strategy, Roadmap 2030, recognizes that saving biodiversity requires not only science and funding but the consent and leadership of those who live closest to nature. It also highlights that conservation outcomes cannot be separated from the global economic system.

“Biodiversity loss is being driven by the way we produce and consume food, how we power our economies and how finance flows,” Schuijt said.

WWF remains a large, complex bureaucracy. But in places like Madagascar and Colombia, its rhetoric of change is beginning to translate into action. Whether this signals a structural shift in global conservation or simply institutional adaptation remains to be seen. What is clear is that the future of conservation will be shaped as much by humility as by ambition.

Read the full story here.

Banner image: Kirsten Schuijt, director-general of WWF International, during a field visit to local communities in Madagascar. Photo courtesy of WWF Madagascar.

Researchers have devised a way to make a commonly used pain and fever reduction medication from plastic waste. Yes, you read that right.

They used genetically engineered microbes to transform a molecule obtained from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic into paracetamol. Also known as acetaminophen, paracetamol is the active ingredient in widely available over-the-counter pain and fever reduction medicines, sold under brand names like Tylenol, Panadol or Dolo.

Upward of three-quarters of the common medicines that we rely on are currently derived from fossil carbon. “Paracetamol is a really good example of that,” Stephan Wallace, the study’s corresponding author and professor of chemical biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, told Mongabay in a video call.  “It’s currently derived from benzene, which is a really unsustainable petrochemical, by industrial processes that emit, quite frankly, unacceptable amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

Nearly all plastic is derived from fossil fuels and very little is recycled. The vast majority of plastic waste ends up in landfills, incinerators or the environment, especially oceans. So, the researchers wanted to see if they could turn a problem waste product into something useful.

They first discovered that a commonly used synthetic chemical reaction called the Lossen rearrangement can actually occur in living bacterial cells. The reaction has previously only been observed in labs but not in nature.

The researchers found that phosphate within bacterial cells can catalyze this Lossen rearrangement, converting terephthalic acid — derived from the breakdown of PET plastic — into para-aminobenzoic acid (PABA), inside the bacteria. They then engineered the bacteria by introducing genes from soil bacteria and mushrooms, enabling the bacteria to convert PABA into paracetamol.

“And not only did that give us a sustainable way to make paracetamol in biology for the first time, but we were able to connect that to plastic waste so that we could complete that whole sort of transformation of waste into paracetamol,” Wallace said.

The researchers could convert more than 92% of the degraded PET plastic, commonly used in food packaging and textiles, into paracetamol using this method. The emissions from this new process “are fractional” compared with those from the current paracetamol manufacturing process, Wallace said.

The researchers acknowledge that converting plastic into paracetamol will not solve the enormous plastic crisis. However, Wallace said it’s a step in the right direction. He said he sees plastic waste as an untapped resource that can be transformed into something useful, though it will take time.

“It’s going to be a while until you can go to the bar and get your beer in a plastic cup, take it home, put a bacterium in it and turn it into your hangover cure the next day.”

Banner image of plastic bottles ready for recycling. Image by Hans Braxmeier via  (Pixabay Content License).

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — A wildfire along the Grand Canyon’s North Rim grew rapidly over the weekend and destroyed a historic lodge and visitors center. Firefighters are working to slow down the fire that began on July 4 after a lightning strike. The fire is in a less popular area of the Grand Canyon that draws only about 10% of the park’s millions of visitors. Evacuations were ordered over concerns that include chlorine gas exposure after a treatment plant burned. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has called for a federal investigation into the fire’s management. Another wildfire in Colorado has closed Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, prompting evacuations and a disaster declaration by the state’s governor.

Reporting by Felicia Fonseca and Jaimie Ding, Associated Press 

Banner image: This photo provided by National Park Service shows the charred remains of a building at the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, in northern Arizona, on Sunday, July 13, 2025. (National Park Service via AP)

The more we try to understand chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, the more we find ourselves humbled by the richness and complexity of their lives — and of their intelligence.

Today, on World Chimpanzee Day, we look back at some of the latest studies that reveal facets of these great apes’ long, powerful memories.

Finding hidden ant nests

Previous research has confirmed chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in the wild remember where their favorite fruit trees are, season after season. A recent study that monitored chimpanzees in Dindefelo Community Nature Reserve in Senegal has found chimps also remember locations of hidden underground ant nests for years. They repeatedly return to these sites, using their sight, smell, taste and touch to detect the availability of ants in the nests, Mongabay contributor Charles Mpaka reported in February 2025.

“We realized that the fact that the chimpanzees in our study were going back to the same ant nests, even though these were almost never visible, was really important because it suggested that their repeated ant nest visits were not opportunistic, but rather that the chimpanzees relied on their memory to find the nests and revisit them over and over again,” said study co-author R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar.

Remembering friends and family

Another study found that chimpanzees also have rich, long social memories. In an experiment, zoo chimpanzees and bonobos were shown images of former group mates and of individuals who were strangers. The participating chimps and bonobos paid more attention to the known faces than those of the strangers, suggesting the great apes can remember friends and family even when they’ve been apart for years, Mongabay’s Malavika Vyawahare reported in September 2024.

They also paid more attention to individuals they’d shared a more positive relationship with previously, compared to those with whom they hadn’t been very close. “Their social relationships seem to shape their memory,” said study lead author Laura Simone Lewis.

Losing love language

The flip side of this culture of building up long-term memories is that the loss of individuals in a population can lead to the slow erosion of learned practices and traditions. A recent study found that a group of chimpanzees in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï National Park that lost many male individuals to poaching over the past decades has lost the distinct auditory mating gestures the males would use to attract females, contributor Ryan Truscott reported in March 2025.

“We’ve shown that a behavior that is totally learned can be lost,” said study lead author Mathieu Malherbe.

This loss of a mating signal suggests other socially learned skills, such as using tools to access insects in hard-to-reach-places, are also at risk of disappearing as chimps are lost to poaching or habitat destruction. “If you go and disrupt, basically, the possibility for individuals to pass on any knowledge, then you have a huge issue,” Malherbe said.

Banner image: A family of chimpanzees. Image by Michele W via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).

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

Natural climate solutions, or NCS, range from reforestation and agroforestry to wetland restoration, and have long been championed as low-cost, high-benefit pathways for reducing greenhouse gases. In theory, they could provide more than a third of the climate mitigation needed by 2030 to stay under 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) of warming above pre-industrial levels. But in practice, progress is stalling. A sweeping new study, led by Hilary Brumberg of the University of Colorado Boulder, U.S., reveals why.

Drawing on 352 peer-reviewed papers from across 135 countries, researchers cataloged 2,480 documented barriers to implementing NCS. The obstacles aren’t ecological. Rather, they’re human: insufficient funding, patchy information, ineffective policies, and public skepticism. The result is a vast “implementation gap” between what is technically possible and what is politically, economically or socially feasible, the authors write.

The analysis found that “lack of funding” was the most commonly cited constraint globally, identified in nearly half of all countries surveyed. Yet it rarely stood alone. Most regions face a tangle of interconnected hurdles. Constraints from different categories often co-occur, compounding difficulties: poor governance erodes trust; disinterest stems from unclear benefits; technical know-how is stymied by bureaucratic confusion.

These patterns vary by region and type of intervention. Reforestation projects, for instance, face particularly high scrutiny over equity concerns, especially in the Global South, where land tenure insecurity and historical injustices run deep. Agroforestry and wetland restoration often struggle with the complexity of design and monitoring. Meanwhile, grassland and peatland pathways remain understudied, despite their importance.

The study’s most striking insight may be spatial. Countries within the same U.N. subregion tend to share a similar profile of constraints, more so than across broader development regions. This geographic clustering suggests an opportunity: Supranational collaboration, if properly resourced and attuned to local context, could address shared challenges more efficiently than isolated national efforts.

Crucially, the authors argue that piecemeal fixes will not suffice. Because most countries face an average of seven distinct constraints, many from different domains, effective solutions must be integrated and cross-sectoral. Adaptive management — a flexible, feedback-based approach — could help. By identifying which barriers arise at each stage of an NCS project’s life cycle, it may be possible to design interventions that are not just technically sound, but socially and politically viable.

Natural climate solutions still hold vast potential, the authors believe. But unlocking it will require less focus on where trees grow best — and more on where people can make them thrive.

Banner image: Harapan rainforest canopy in Jambi, Sumatra, Indonesia, by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Around 2,300 people died in 12 European cities due to an extreme heat wave that hit the region from June 23 to July 2, a rapid scientific analysis has found.

Researchers also estimated that roughly 1,500 of those deaths, or 65%, were attributable to anthropogenic climate change.

“Climate change has made it significantly hotter than it would have been, which in turn makes it a lot more dangerous,” Ben Clarke, a researcher at Imperial College London, told Reuters.

The heat wave, which hit most of Europe and northern Asia in June and early July, was found to be 2-4° Celsius (3.6-7.2° Fahrenheit) hotter during the 10-day stretch than it would have been without fossil fuel-driven climate change in 11 of the 12 cities evaluated.

The study’s authors looked at a dozen large metropolitan centers in Europe, including Rome, London, Paris and Frankfurt, and found that only Lisbon experienced a smaller climate-driven increase, of less than 2°C.

Data on the actual number of observed deaths during the heat wave weren’t officially available at the time of the analysis, so the researchers estimated excess heat-related deaths that may have occurred during the 10-day period by using epidemiological models that establish the relationship between heat and deaths as well as historical mortality data.

They estimate there were 2,305 excess heat-related deaths during the heat wave, with 1,504 deaths attributable to climate change. More than 80% of the deaths were estimated for those older than 65 years.

While heat-related deaths tend to be underreported officially, the media did report several such cases during the heat wave.

In Italy, Brahim Ait El Hajjam, a 47-year-old construction worker and business owner, died while working on a building site near Bologna, Italy. Following his death, the regional government prohibited outdoor work under direct sun from 12:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. until Sept. 15.

In Spain, where June temperatures “smashed” historical records, according to Spain’s meteorological agency, a 2-year-old boy who had been locked in a car for four hours from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. died of heatstroke in Tarragona on July 1.

On July 2, two people died in a wildfire in rural Lleida, a province in Catalonia that had not recorded wildfire deaths since 2012.

Several cities across Europe reported record June temperatures, including 46.6°C (115.9°F) on June 29 in Mora, a town in the Évora district of eastern Portugal. England faced its warmest June since records began in 1884, according to the U.K. Met Office.

The heat wave was also felt across much of Asia, with Japan’s June temperatures at their historical highest since record-keeping began in 1898, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

In Kazakhstan, air temperatures 7°C (12.6°F) degrees above average deformed roads, while in South Korea, 59 out of 97 climate observation stations recorded new all-time highs.

Banner image: A man fans himself on a hot day in Retiro Park in Madrid, Spain, on June 28, 2025. Image © Paul White/AP.