A two-year investigation into 139 complaints lodged by communities in Africa and Asia affected by tropical plantation company Socfin has confirmed that many of the allegations are at least partly valid, according to a statement released by a collective of 33 civil society organizations from around the world.

The statement follows the final report by the Earthworm Foundation (EF), a nonprofit that was commissioned by Socfin to look into the allegations of communities in Côte d’Ivoire against Socfin’s Ivorian subsidiary SOGB in Grand Béréby.

In its visit to Côte d’Ivoire, EF confirmed SOGB concessions encroached village land, labor issues, and the plantation’s history of non-compliance with free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) standards.

Previously, during its two-year investigation, EF visited 12 Socfin-owned plantations in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Cambodia. These visits also found ongoing severe human rights violations, prompting EF to urge Socfin to take meaningful action.

“Earthworm is trying its best by conducting field visits to better understand the problems facing communities and workers, but it is unable to change Socfin’s policy,” Emmanuel Elong, a community member and the president of the National Synergy of Peasants and Residents of Cameroon (Synaparcam), told Mongabay in a message.

The civil society signatories of the recent statement analyzed all EF reports published over the past two years and found that almost two-thirds (59%) of the communities’ grievances were confirmed as “founded” or “partially founded.” About one-third (30%) of the allegations were labeled as “unfounded,” while the rest were “not determined.”

In seven Socfin-owned concessions in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cameroon, EF found evidence of gender-based violence by company employees. Labor violations and compromised livelihoods were found in nine plantations and land conflicts and environmental degradation in eight. Destruction of sacred sites was confirmed in four.

Community members and civil society say in their statement that, despite confirmed violations, many problems highlighted by EF against Socfin remain unresolved. They add that EF’s independence from Socfin is also questionable.   

Responding to Mongabay’s request for comment, a Socfin spokesperson told Mongabay by email that the collective statement offers a “broad brush overview” that “understates both the calibrated nature of the EF findings and the tangible progress we have already made.” 

He pointed to Socfin’s recently published sexual harassment and violence action plan which he said the company will use to address issues of gender-based violence across its operations within the next nine months.

“The issues raised in this press release are serious,” EF’s Jotica Sehgal told Mongabay by email. “The findings of our investigation clearly show that change is needed, and we agree that the company must go further and faster.”

Sehgal said EF will continue its work with Socfin and is planning a “field verification process” to follow up on action plan implementation at three sites this year.

Banner image: A young oil palm plantation in Sierra Leone next to community land. Image courtesy of Maja Hitij.

Mongabay India won an excellence in audio reporting award recently from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA). The award was for the limited series podcast Wild Frequencies.

SOPA, which promotes best practices and excellence in journalism, announced the winners of its 2025 Awards of Editorial Excellence during a ceremony in Hong Kong on June 26.

Wild Frequencies, a three-episode series that follows researchers in India studying animal sounds to better understand wildlife, is hosted by Mongabay India’s Kartik Chandramouli and Mongabay’s Shreya Dasgupta. It features sound design and original music by Abhijit Shylanath.

SOPA shared the judges’ comments on the series: “With a rich audio-scape and creative sound design, rigorous reporting and engaging storytelling, these reports from the field (and forests and wetlands) around India offer listeners a deeper understanding of how the sounds [are] made by creatures in the natural world, and what those creatures and their bioacoustics can tell us about whether an ecosystem is healthy or imperiled.”

The series also won “Best Science and Medical” podcast at the Publisher Podcast Awards in June and the “Best Produced Show” in the science category for the India Audio Summit & Awards 2025.

In 2023, Mongabay won SOPA’s Excellence in Bahasa Indonesian News Reporting Award for the story ‘The promise was a lie’: How Indonesian villagers lost their cut of the palm oil boom, which was a collaboration with The Gecko Project and BBC News.

Find the Wild Frequencies episodes here:

Episode 1: “Find Them” — introduces the science of bioacoustics and how it is useful for  identifying specific species of birds, bats and other wildlife. It can also be used to count species including dolphins, porpoises and wolves.

Episode 2: “Know Them” — explores what we can learn from elephant and cricket sounds. Calls of such species help us understand how they communicate with each other to share information, work together and even find mates.

Episode 3: “Us and Them” — explores how changes in animal sounds can be an indicator of shifts in animal behavior, especially when wildlife face altered habitats due to human activities.

Follow Mongabay India’s Everything Environment podcast on Apple and Spotify. You can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay India website.

With the recent addition of the French-language podcast, Planète Mongabay, Mongabay now offers podcasts in four languages along with English, Spanish and Indonesian.

Among Indigenous Naga tribes in India’s northeastern state of Nagaland, hunting traditions are transforming as cheap homemade guns make targeting commercially valuable large mammals easier, a recent study finds.

“Indigenous hunting preferences are rooted in cultural traditions but have evolved under the influence of economic pressures and environmental changes,” Satem Longchar, conservation ecologist and the study’s lead author, told Mongabay by phone. “The use of modern weapons like cheap homemade firearms has increased the efficiency of hunting, resulting in a decline in wildlife.”

Indian laws prohibit wildlife hunting, but they’re mostly ineffective in Nagaland, where Indigenous tribes manage around 88% of the state’s forest, the paper notes.

To better understand how and what the communities hunt and how they perceive wildlife conservation, the researchers interviewed 45 hunters across 10 villages around two areas: Khelia Community Forest in eastern Nagaland and Intangki National Park. The team also installed 156 camera traps in both forests.

The interviews revealed that 78% of the hunters owned cheap, homemade firearms for hunting, using them along with traditional methods such as snares, traps, bows and plant poisons.

Meanwhile, the cameras photographed 31 species of wild mammals. While the hunters said they hunt all these species, they primarily target large-bodied mammals, including barking deer (Muntiacus muntjak), wild boar (Sus scrofa), Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus) and sun bears (Helarctos malayanus). These are valued both for consumption and sale.  

Some 87% of the hunters reported a decline in wild animals over the period they’ve been hunting. “With larger wildlife becoming scarce, hunters are increasingly shifting toward smaller prey and opportunistic hunting, not conforming to traditional ethics like seasonal hunting and restrictions from hunting rare species,” Longchar said.

She added that transboundary trafficking of wildlife parts from Nagaland to Southeast Asian countries, such as the targeting of bears for their bile in areas bordering Myanmar, poses a significant threat to conservation. “Wildlife hunting for trade is driven by poor economy of the state, especially in rural areas where agriculture is the primary livelihood,” she said.

Many interviewed residents acknowledged wildlife is dwindling due to forest clearance and overhunting, yet their inclination toward conservation remains low, the study found, due to reasons such as lack of time due to farming and the absence of economic incentives.

“Conservation initiatives must recognize the cultural and economic realities of Indigenous communities,” Longchar said.

Bano Haralu of the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Society India in Nagaland, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by phone that the study “reflects ground reality” in Nagaland. “We must prioritize educating Indigenous youth before cultural traditions are lost, given the ongoing infrastructural developments and habitat loss in the region.”

Longchar said that despite the “ugly reality of hunting,” her study also highlights the persistence of Nagaland’s biodiversity. “Hope the outcome of my study brings awareness, instead of discriminations towards Nagaland.”

Banner image: A hunter in Nagaland with a gun and barking deer. Image courtesy of Satem Longchar.

Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon are working to revive populations of the aguaje palm tree, commercially valued for its fruits, by shifting to more sustainable harvesting practices, Mongabay’s Aimee Gabay reported in April.

The reptilian-looking fruits of the aguaje palm tree (Mauritia flexuosa) are consumed raw or used as an ingredient in beverages, soap, oils and other products. Historically, locals harvested the fruits once they fell from the female trees, which produce the fruits. But in the 1990s, after the discovery of the fruit’s market potential, both Indigenous communities and outsiders across the Peruvian Amazon began its large-scale commercial extraction. This involved cutting down entire aguaje trees, leading to a significant reduction of female palms in the region, Gabay writes.

“Our ancestors weren’t aware that they were harming their palm trees,” Edber Tang Rios, president of the Maijuna-Kichwa Regional Conservation Area (ACR) management committee, told Gabay. “They had no knowledge. They cut it down and, little by little, it was dying out.”

A 2012 study found that between 1995 and 2000, the number of female aguaje trees in the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve dropped from 66 to 29 per hectare (27 to 12 per acre). This resulted in a 53.8% decline in harvest.

But now, the Maijuna, Kichwa and Kukama Kukamiria Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon no longer cut down entire trees. Instead, they use sustainable techniques, such as safely climbing the trees to harvest the fruits.

“To achieve this, we’ve had many workshops where other brothers who were already protecting their aguaje trees taught us how to climb them,” Rios said. “Now we are experts at climbing the aguaje tree.”

The communities also conduct forest inventories to identify how many fruits can be collected while leaving some behind for wildlife like Colombian red howler monkeys (Alouatta seniculus) and South American tapirs (Tapirus terrestris).

This way, the Nueva Vida community in Maijuna-Kichwa ACR can harvest 20 sacks a day, Rios told Gabay. The pricing can range from 15-90 Peruvian soles (about $4-24).

While the economic potential of aguaje is growing, some challenges remain, Gabay writes. For example, the fruits need to be dried and packed, then quickly transported to cities like Iquitos and Lima before they mature. But Maijuana communities live in remote areas without roads, which forces them to transport their goods via long river journeys. Just last year, the Peruvian Amazon saw low river levels due to a severe drought.

Solutions like processing plants to turn the fruit into flour can help lengthen their product’s lifespan and tap into overseas markets, Rios said.

For now, though, the aguaje market isn’t developed enough to pull the communities away from the oil, gas and mining industries that have brought development and education to their areas. Still, ensuring future harvests of aguaje is an important first step.

Read the full story by Aimee Gabay here.

Banner image of a climber harvesting aguaje fruit courtesy of the Esperanza Natural Forest Management Association.

African Parks has generated $7.35 million in carbon credit sales from Chinko National Park in the Central African Republic, Helge Mahne, global funding director for African Parks, confirmed to Mongabay in an email. An unspecified sum was also raised via sales from a similar project in Benin’s Pendjari and W national parks, although the nonprofit declined to share details about the buyer or revenue figures.

The credits were produced by two REDD+ projects, one at Chinko and another that includes Pendjari and W, so named for the shape of the Niger River at the park’s northern boundary. Both projects were co-developed by the Swiss climate consultancy firm South Pole and listed on the carbon certifier Verra’s registry.

According to their submission and verification documents, both projects generate carbon credits by protecting the parks’ forests and savannah grasslands, primarily from encroachment by local farmers and herders.

“Since both are REDD+ projects, they rely on the results from the reduction of threats that could affect the integrity of the protected areas, including overgrazing and slash-and-burn agriculture in Benin, and artisanal mining, livestock overgrazing and slash-and-burn agriculture in Central African Republic,” Mahne said.

The sales will help fund the management of the three protected areas, which are home to many endangered species. Pendjari and W national parks host some of West Africa’s last remaining elephants, and Chinko includes populations of lions as well as endangered chimpanzees and African wild dogs.

The project documents say that without African Parks’ presence, they would be severely degraded by livestock.

According to South Pole’s project’s description for Chinko, “Transhumance is the main direct driver of deforestation in the region, driven by transhumant pastoralists.”

Its most recent monitoring report, issued March 2025, said the carbon savings achieved by the project between 2021 and 2024 amounted to more than a million tons of carbon dioxide — around the total annual emissions of Sierra Leone.

All three parks have been the site of violent conflicts in recent years. Pendjari and W are currently active warzones, with intense fighting between Sahelian jihadist groups and the Beninese army. Earlier this year, more than 50 soldiers were killed in an attack inside Pendjari.

Researchers claim that, in the past, African Parks rangers dissuaded herders from bringing cattle into Pendjari by shooting and killing large numbers of the animals.

In June, the Pendjari and W project was granted an exemption from the normal requirement for on-site verification by Verra. The group declined to say whether violence at the two parks would trigger any additional review.

“We cannot share the criteria used to flag certain areas for review, but an understanding of the socio-political context a project operates in is fundamental to conducting our reviews,” said Anne Thiel, a director of communications at Verra.

Banner image of a herd of cattle at a water hole in Benin by Padonou Dotou via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A recent conservation initiative is closely monitoring the return of 20 critically endangered red-crowned roofed turtles in India’s Ganga River, where the species was nearly wiped out, reports Mongabay India’s Manish Chandra Mishra.

The red-crowned roofed turtle (Batagur kachuga), found only in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, was historically widespread in Ganga and its tributaries. But a 2019 assessment found that hunting, illegal trade, habitat loss and river flow changes reduced the turtle’s population by 80% over the previous 50 years. At the time of the assessment, researchers noted the only known remaining population, about 500 adult females, was in the National Chambal Sanctuary, located on Chambal River in Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) state. Chambal is part of the Ganga River system.

In 2021 and 2023, however, residents of two villages in U.P. spotted some red-crowned roofed turtles and their nests in the Ganga outside of Chambal, indicating the turtles were capable of surviving in other parts of the river.

So, in April 2025, conservationists and government authorities moved 20 turtles from the Garheta Turtle Conservation Centre in the National Chambal Sanctuary to two different areas in the Ganga. They released 10 turtles at the Haiderpur wetland, a Ramsar wetland of importance in U.P., while the other 10 were taken to the main Ganga River in the state’s Meerut forest division. Conservationists said they hoped that by splitting the turtles into two groups they could evaluate the best rehabilitation method, Chandra reports.

The translocated turtles were carefully selected based on health, sex and body parameters. They were also tagged with transmitters to enable real-time monitoring of their movements, habitat preferences and behavior.

“This study is the first telemetry-based monitoring effort of these turtles in the Ganga River,” Pawan Shantiprakash Pareek, a researcher with the Turtle Survival Alliance Foundation India, told Mongabay India. The group coordinates the project and monitors the movement of turtles.

“The transmitter fitted on each turtle gives information to the scientists about which direction the turtle is moving in, which place it is adapting to and how it is behaving,” Pareek said. “From this data, it will be analyzed how this species is adapting itself to the circumstances after entering the Ganga and what threats it is facing.”

The turtle rehabilitation teams are also getting help from the sadhus (Hindu holy men) living on the banks of the Ganga in the turtle’s conservation efforts.

“People listen to these sadhus,” Pareek said. “If they say that the turtles are sacred, people will stop fishing and hunting. Currently, more than 20 sadhus are helping in this work. Illegal activities have reduced considerably in the areas around their ashram.”

Read the full story by Manish Chandra Mishra here.

Banner image: Red-crowned roofed turtles released into the river have been tagged with transmitters to monitor their safety and migration. Image courtesy of Turtle Survival Alliance Foundation India.