KANDERSTEG, Switzerland (AP) — An unstable mountain rock formation looming above the Swiss village of Kandersteg threatens a landslide that could rival the disaster that destroyed nearby Blatten last year, a collapse scientists linked to thawing permafrost and glacier dynamics.

The 1,300 residents of Kandersteg, in Switzerland’s Bern canton, live amid a quintessential Alpine landscape of sharp peaks, white glaciers, steep green valleys and the distant sound of cowbells.

But a catastrophe looms over the quiet village: a mountainside rock formation called Spitze Stei, part of a mountain landscape increasingly affected by thawing permafrost, threatens to collapse into the valley in a massive landslide.

“You are aware that it’s happening, but not afraid,” said Brigitte Jüni, an inhabitant of Kandersteg. She said authorities took all the precautions they could.

“But then it’s nature. It’s nature and you never know,” Jüni added.

As glaciers and permafrost — the frozen soil sediment and rock that acts like a glue holding mountains together — melt due to higher temperatures caused by climate change, the threat of landslides is rising in the Swiss Alps.

In May 2025, a huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier thundered down the mountainside in the nearby Loetschental valley, sending plumes of dust skyward and coating with mud nearly all of Blatten, which had been evacuated earlier as a precaution.

Markus Stoffel, professor for climate change and natural risks at the University of Geneva, said climate change leads to the melting of both glaciers and permafrost.

“In the mountains and in the unconsolidated debris, there is lots of ice,” Stoffel said. “Once this ice is melting, it acts like a cement. These mountain slopes will become increasingly unstable.”

Locals in Kandersteg say their situation is different from Blatten and that preparations made already allow them to live calmly.

“This isn’t the same case as in Blatten. It’s a different situation,” said local resident Rudolf Isler. “We are not afraid of the Spitze Stei rock. It’s been many years seeing stones falling from up there. The problem here is about global warming and rising temperatures.”

If the entire unstable section of the Spitze Stei — estimated at roughly 15–20 million cubic meters — were to collapse, it would trigger a massive natural disaster. But the rock is under constant monitoring, evacuation plans are prepared and experts say the rock is more likely to break down gradually than in one huge chunk.

Nathan Solothurnmann, a climate and energy expert for Greenpeace Switzerland, says that climate change means landslides or avalanches will become more common.

“Maybe even one day we will have to abandon certain valleys or certain villages because it’s becoming impossible to live there,” Solothurnmann said. “Or the measure you will need to take to protect infrastructure is so expensive, the efforts are so big, that it’s not worthwhile anymore living there.”

By Hernán Muñoz, Associated Press

Banner image: Areal view of the village center of Kandersteg, Switzerland, Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026. Image courtesy of Hernán Muñoz, Associated Press.

Until 2020, 99% of Liberia’s Grand Gedeh county was covered by natural forests. Since then, cacao farms have rapidly encroached on those forests, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo.

Grand Gedeh in southeastern Liberia borders Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest exporter of cacao beans. Much of Côte d’Ivoire’s forests have been cleared for cacao and many of its cacao plantations are now ageing and nutrient poor. That’s prompted cacao workers from Côte d’Ivoire to turn their attention to Liberia, where landowners have offered them their land in exchange for a share in cocoa earnings.

Data from Global Forest Watch show that in 2025, Grand Gedeh lost more forest than any other Liberian county in a single year since 2002.

“In Côte d’Ivoire there are no forests, that’s why I came to Liberia,” said Mohammed, a cacao farm worker near the town of Zleh in Grand Gedeh’s Gbarzon district.

Around Zleh, roughly 82% of the community’s 6,900 hectares (17,000 acres) of customary forest land have been given over to cacao, Zleh’s town chief said.

Yei Neagor, in charge of the regional headquarters of Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority (FDA) in Zwedru, Grand Gedeh’s capital, told Mongabay that Gbarzon has seen the worst forest loss in the county. “I will be honest to tell you that about 70% of the forest there is gone,” she said.

Forests in southeastern Liberia are communally owned, and laws regulate how private individuals can lease them for commercial agriculture. In practice, those laws aren’t being followed, said Ashai Wulu Gaye, chair of a community forest in Grand Gedeh.

Commercial cacao farming is also currently banned inside most FDA-registered community forests.

Still, residents of Boundary, a town inside a 48,600-hectare (120,000-acre) FDA-registered community forest in Konobo, a district neighboring Gbarzon, told Mongabay they recruited migrant workers to cultivate cacao after they saw it transforming lives in other communities. Boundary residents have used the income to fix the roofs of their homes and send their children to school abroad.

“It is not legal, I agree. But I live on the land,” said Prince Tarley, a youth leader in Boundary. “If you say I shouldn’t do cocoa, what do you expect me to do? I need something to live.”

In 2025, an investigation by the Liberian environmental news outlet The Daylight found government officials in Grand Gedeh had been involved in an illegal land transaction with a cocoa entrepreneur from Côte d’Ivoire.

“My experience with these situations is that there is always a line from that local guy who’s making the case about his livelihood being in jeopardy that comes up to some big shot somewhere up the chain,” Silas Siakor, a long-time environmentalist and community rights advocate, told Mongabay.

Read the full story by Ashoka Mukpo here.

Banner image: A migrant worker in a cacao farm in Grand Gedeh, Liberia. Image by Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay.

In the last four years, Nepal’s wild tiger population has experienced a historic increase.

In 2022, the tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) population was numbered at 355 individuals. Now, it has reached an estimated 429 individuals — nearly a four-fold jump from 16 years ago, reports Mongabay’s Abhaya Raj Joshi.

Bed Kumar Dhakal, spokesperson for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, said that the department’s latest tiger monitoring survey results “reflect the positive outcomes of ongoing efforts in the field of tiger conservation in Nepal, such as habitat conservation and management, poaching control, conservation of prey species, and biological corridor conservation.”

However, a closer look at the latest numbers reveals an uneven recovery. Growth is concentrated almost entirely within the country’s newest national parks, Banke, Parsa and Shuklaphanta, while Bardiya, the country’s second-oldest park, experienced a population decline.

Shant Raj Jnawali, a researcher and conservationist, said the uneven growth of tiger numbers across Nepal’s parks is due to water availability, spread of weed species and improved connectivity with potential habitats in India, rather than administrative or management changes.

“We have seen some areas of Bardiya, especially the banks of the Geruwa River, and Chitwan (west) are facing droughts due to changing river course,” Jnawali said. This dry spell, he added, may be pushing tigers toward parks with better water infrastructure, such as Banke and Parsa, where officials have heavily invested in artificial ponds.

Additionally, older parks are suffering from invasive weeds such as bitter vine (Mikania micrantha) and common lantana (Lantana camara), Jnawali said. “The younger national parks, to some extent, don’t face the problem, as until recently their grasslands were used for livestock grazing, which helped keep the invasives out,” he added. This grazing history preserved high-quality grasslands for deer, drawing tigers to follow their prey, Jnawali said.

A 2025 study also suggests water availability, specifically proximity to artificial waterholes, is a stronger predictor of tiger distribution than prey abundance. Bardiya’s prey density actually rose by 74% between 2022 and 2026, the highest gain of any park, even as tiger numbers fell.

The increase in tiger numbers in the new national parks may not only lead to more tiger-human conflict, but also more conflict between people and leopards, studies have found. As tiger populations expand, they displace common leopards (Panthera pardus) from core habitats, pushing them into surrounding human settlements, said researcher Saneer Lamichhane, a PhD candidate at the wildlife ecology and conservation department at the University of Florida.

Read the full story by Abhaya Raj Joshi here.

Banner image: Bardiya National Park is among the many protected areas in Nepal that are known for their tigers. Authorities here focus on keeping the habitat suitable for tigers. Image by The Advocacy Project via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

A recent investigation from Grist, a U.S.-based nonprofit media organization, raises questions about environmental activist Juan Mancias’ Indigenous claim to the land he works to protect in the U.S. state of Texas.

In 2017, Mancias traveled to France and helped pressure French banks to withdraw support for oil and gas projects that he said threatened ancestral Indigenous lands and a rare coastal ecosystem. Since that success, the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe, which Mancias is the chairman of, has received recognition in the United Nations and financing for environmental work.

The Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe isn’t currently recognized by U.S. federal or state governments; Indigenous groups seeking recognition, as Mancias has, must establish a substantially continuous tribal existence as an autonomous entity. Experts believed “Carrizo” or “Comecrudo” people disappeared from the area after violence, disease or assimilation dramatically reduced their populations.

For years, Mancias has said that his grandfather and dozens of tribal families fled their Rio Grande homeland in the 1940s and moved north to the Texas panhandle where they blended in with Mexican farm workers. According to Mancias, they kept their culture alive, secretly speaking their native language and sharing oral histories.

Mancias says he lives by two guiding principles from his grandparents. His grandmother told him, “Know your people, know who you are,” while his grandfather told him, “Go get our land back,” according to news reports.

However, Grist found inconsistencies in Mancias’ account that raise questions about the accuracy of his family history. For example, he has repeatedly cited an alleged 1871 document he discovered describing a massacre of the Carrizo/Comecrudo people. However, the original document to corroborate that event has never been produced, according to Grist.

“I know that it exists somewhere, and maybe they changed it,” said Mancias. “I didn’t make it up.”

Grist examined genealogical records for Mancias and found his Indigenous ancestors likely lived six to seven generations ago in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental mountains, not the Rio Grande delta, the historic territory of the Carrizo/Comecrudo.

In the 1990s, Mancias established a nonprofit under the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribal name and raised more than $5 million for environmental work opposing the U.S.-Mexico border wall, oil and gas development and SpaceX operations in the region.

Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council, told Grist that funding for unsubstantiated Indigenous groups, “may be taking funding, time, representation, and resources away from Indigenous Peoples’ and their organizations that are really struggling to participate [at the United Nations].”

The Schmidt Family Foundation, First Nations Development Institute, Rockefeller Family Fund, Sierra Club and others have helped fund the Carrizo/Comecrudo’s environmental work.

“We do not fund based on identity,” Joseph Sciortino, executive director of the Schmidt Family Foundation, told Grist. “Our job as a philanthropy is to support important work, not to serve as the arbiters of who does and doesn’t get to be Indigenous.”

Banner image: Juan Mancias. Image courtesy of Sharon Ellman, Associated Press.

The water level at Lake Powell, the United States’ second-largest reservoir, has fallen to a record low, heightening concerns about the ongoing crisis in the Colorado River system.

The alarming milestone at Lake Powell, reached Saturday, comes about a week after the river’s other major reservoir, Lake Mead, also hit a historic low. Plummeting water levels pose a major threat to the Colorado River Basin, which is a key resource for wildlife, hydropower and more than 40 million people in seven U.S. states.

The historic lows come as the federal government and states that rely on the river — California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado — struggle to reach agreement on a long-term management plan for the dwindling resource. Persistent overuse combined with a record-dry winter and rising temperatures have been depleting both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Lake Powell’s elevation dropped to 3,519.91 feet (1072.9 meters) above sea level on Saturday, dropping just slightly below a previous record set in April 2023, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The lake is more than 20 feet (6.10 meters) lower than it was at the start of the year, USBR data shows.

The reservoir is now about 30 feet (9.1 meters) away from the point at which turbines would stop producing hydroelectric power. Federal officials warned in April that a “major intervention” would be necessary to avoid reaching that threshold by the end of this year.

USBR in July proposed a 10-year plan that includes major potential water cuts for Arizona, California and Nevada.

The crisis has been in the making for years. Both reservoirs are at the lowest they have been in nearly seven decades, and levels may continue to drop, USBR data shows.

The last time their combined storage was this small was in May 1957 when Glen Canyon Dam that holds back Powell was being built, according to a recent paper published by a group of academics and retired water officials. Powell began to fill in 1963.

The depletion has also impacted Lake Powell’s substantial tourism industry, forcing marinas in the reservoir to adapt. Boat ramps have closed or moved, new ones are being added and marinas have been temporarily relocated to deeper waters.

By Associated Press

Banner image: The Wahweap Marina floats on Lake Powell at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Wednesday, July 15, 2026, near Page, Ariz. Image courtesy of John Locher, Associated Press. 

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

On April 20, on the south coast of Timor-Leste, Jafet Potenzo Lopes saw three green pigeons. He had not seen the species for years. The birds were Timor green pigeons, and the site, in Manatuto municipality, had no previous record of them. With the species nearing extinction, finding three birds in a new place was encouraging.

The latest estimates suggest how few remain. A study published this year in Oryx, drawing on more than 1,400 days of field surveys between 2002 and 2025, estimates the global population at 100-500 birds across eight sites. The true number may be near the lower end of that range. Only Nino Konis Santana National Park in eastern Timor-Leste is thought to hold more than 50 birds. The researchers recommend changing the status of the Timor green pigeon (Treron psittaceus) on the IUCN Red List from endangered to critically endangered, reports contributor Timothy Mihocik for Mongabay.

In Indonesia, where many older records came from West Timor and nearby islands, the pigeon may already be functionally extinct. Most of the remaining birds are in Timor-Leste, where hunting continues even in protected areas.

Timor green pigeons gather at fruiting trees and are unusually vulnerable: After one bird is shot, others may stay in the canopy. Forest conversion has also reduced their habitat. More than 80% of known records come from protected areas, yet researchers say those areas lack the funding and staff needed to control hunting effectively. 

The danger has been recognized for years. The species has been classed as endangered since 2000, while dedicated recovery work, regular monitoring and sustained investment have remained limited. The Timor green pigeon was not among the initial 100 species selected by the Phoenix Species Project, a $200 million initiative by Re:wild and the Bezos Earth Fund to support recovery of some of the world’s most threatened species.

Researchers say the pigeon can still be saved. They recommend more surveys, monitoring of its main population every three to five years, a national action plan and work with hunters and local communities to reduce hunting. Timor-Leste already protects the species under national law and customary systems protect some of the forests where it survives. Researchers have also suggested involving former hunters in surveys and conservation work.

The three birds found in Manatuto do little to change the species’ overall position. They do show that some birds remain in places where they had not previously been recorded. With perhaps only a few hundred Timor green pigeons left, the margin is narrow. The steps needed to improve their chances are already known.

Read the full story by Timothy Mihocik here.

Banner image: A Timor green pigeon is seen on Apr. 20, 2026, during a Conservation International wetland survey on the south coast of Timor-Leste. Image courtesy of Jafet Potenzo Lopes.