In a landmark judgment on Aug. 14, South Africa’s Constitutional Court set aside exploration rights held by oil giant Shell and Impact Africa, a South African oil and gas company. The ruling prevents the companies from exploring for fossil fuels off South Africa’s Wild Coast.

The case was brought by Wild Coast communities and environmental organizations after Shell announced plans in 2021 to conduct a 3D seismic survey off the country’s Eastern Cape province coastline. They argued that authorities had failed to meaningfully consult affected communities or consider harms to their spiritual and cultural rights and livelihoods. Authorities also failed to consider the potential harm to marine life and climate change, the plaintiffs argued.

In the judgement, Justice Jody Kollapen wrote the majority opinion and said consulting communities isn’t just a procedural requirement, but “a process which affirms human dignity by affording a seat at the table to those whose lives are impacted by decisions.”

Acknowledging the “cornerstone role that dispossession played in the apartheid regime,” the court noted that South Africa’s natural resources are highly contested and that the case is embedded in “well-documented struggles by coastal communities to protect their land, marine resources and ways of life in the face of extractive activities.”

The judges also considered last year’s International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on countries’ obligations in the context of climate change: “Decisions must be taken within a framework of heightened diligence, informed by scientific knowledge, international commitments and the foreseeable impacts of emissions on present and future generations,” Kollapen wrote.

The question of oil exploration rights in the area began in 2014, when the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy granted Impact Africa Limited the right to undertake a seismic survey to look for oil and gas reserves on the Wild Coast. Impact Africa Limited is a subsidiary of Impact Oil & Gas Limited, which in 2021 transferred a 50% stake of its exploration rights in the area to Shell.

The case has appeared before several South African courts over the past decade before reaching the Constitutional Court, the highest in the country.

Carmen Mannarino from the South African nonprofit Masifundise Development Trust, which works with communities in the area, told Mongabay that the court’s decision is a victory for fishing communities. “The court recognized that exploring for resources in light of potential future financial benefits does not compare to the constitutionally recognized rights of fishing communities,” Mannarino said.

“This is the apex court and the first time that it has dealt with issues relating to the community and environmental rights in relation to oil and gas exploitation,” Melissa Groenink, an attorney with one of the applicants, civil society organization Natural Justice, told Mongabay, adding that the ruling might influence similar cases currently in process.

Shell did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Banner image: Fisherpeople in Port St. Johns, Eastern Cape. Image courtesy of Aletta Harrison CC BY 4.0.

For wildlife moving between Lake Manyara and Tarangire, a line on a map was never enough. Elephants, wildebeest, and other animals crossed land used by pastoralists and farmers, where roads, cultivation, and settlements were expanding. Keeping such routes open meant persuading people who lived there that wildlife had a place in their future. It meant dealing with livestock killed by predators, arguments over revenue, and the tedious business of local institutions.

John Gospel Yonazi Salehe, who died on June 19th aged 71, spent much of his working life on such problems. A Tanzanian forester by training, he worked for the government, FAO, UNDP, WWF, and, eventually, the African Wildlife Foundation, where he became Tanzania country director. His career stretched for more than four decades and across forests, wildlife areas, and development projects in East Africa.

Salehe’s conservation was practical and strongly social. In the Maasai Steppe he worked to protect wildlife corridors and strengthen community-run Wildlife Management Areas. He wanted the benefits from conservation to reach households, and supported measures such as predator-proof livestock enclosures and compensation for losses to wildlife. Communities were not an audience for conservation after the important decisions had been made. They were part of how it was supposed to work.

The same thinking shaped his work on forests. In central Tanzania, where charcoal production and farming put pressure on woodland, he argued that restrictions had to be accompanied by viable livelihoods. Higher agricultural productivity, land-use planning, and secure tenure could reduce pressure on forests, he believed. Researchers who later examined one REDD project in Kondoa challenged some of its claims of success. Salehe’s underlying proposition was clear enough: conservation would endure only if it made economic and institutional sense to the people living with it.

This required patience. Wildlife Management Areas brought disagreements over money, investors, expectations, and authority. The work was administrative as much as ecological, and progress could depend on arrangements few outsiders ever saw. Salehe seems to have been unusually comfortable in that territory. His approach rested on partnerships among communities, government, businesses, NGOs, and donors. A filmmaker who interviewed him in 2014 found him “incredibly accommodating” and “quite the character.” Colleagues later recalled his integrity, humor, humility, and willingness to mentor younger conservationists.

He had begun working in conservation in the 1970s. Long after formal employment ended, he kept chairing organizations and advising others. He had joined the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group in 1994 and chaired it from 2012. He also chaired the Tanzania Association of Foresters and the Community Wildlife Management Area Consortium, and helped found Nature Tanzania. There, birds became another route into the same larger question: how to protect habitats while giving Tanzanians a reason and a means to protect them themselves.

Salehe believed, Nature Tanzania recalled, that conservation belonged to the people. The phrase could sound grander than the man’s working methods. Those were meetings, land-use plans, budgets, negotiations, and years spent keeping alliances together. In the landscapes where he worked, that was often what conservation required.

Header image: Courtesy of AWF

Widespread flooding in northeastern India that affected more than 500,000 people and claimed at least 99 lives between June and August 2026 was primarily driven by human factors like rapid urbanization, deforestation, and destruction of wetlands, new research says. It also points to structural failures rather than climate change.

The findings were published by World Weather Attribution (WWA), a global network of researchers who analyze the influence of climate change in extreme weather events.

Floods hit India’s Assam state nearly every monsoon as the Brahmaputra River and its tributaries overflow, often submerging the surrounding landscapes.

“We decided to focus on the upper Assam, both because of the significant socio-economic and environmental damage reported in the region, and the sheer collective damage of catastrophic floods in the region year on year,” research co-author Arpita Mondal, from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), said at a press briefing.

The scientists analyzed historical weather records and climate models to determine the likelihood of the extreme rainfall that occurred over a three-day period (June 26-29), as well over a 30-day period (June 20 to July 19).

They found the heavy rainfall observed in 2026 wasn’t exceptional, recurring every one to two years.

The team also found no clear link to human-induced rise in global temperatures.

“When we combine the observational results with the climate models, we again found no detectable climate change signal in either type of events,” co-author Mariam Zachariah, from Imperial College London, said at the briefing.

Instead, the study found the main drivers of this year’s catastrophic floods were land-use changes, sedimentation, and structural vulnerability.

The Brahmaputra River itself carries large amounts of sediments every monsoon that raises its riverbed, reducing channel capacity, meaning water flows out. This season’s flooding was, however, worsened by unplanned urbanization and deforestation that has degraded wetlands and disrupted natural drainage.

Sneha Ganguly, study co-author from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said at the briefing that evidence from a review of 35 studies suggested “unplanned urbanization, deforestation, poor drainage, inadequate structural flood management measures, and other anthropogenic changes now outweigh natural rainfall variability in explaining flood frequency.”

The report also highlights historical roots of vulnerability: Colonial land appropriation for tea plantations forced Indigenous communities onto marginal, highly flood-prone riverbanks and sandbars (char areas), creating systemic patterns of exposure that persist today.

While Assam has built extensive concrete embankments, the report warns that heavy reliance on rigid infrastructure can actually worsen flooding by trapping silt and increasing the risk of breaches.

“Future adaptation will therefore need to focus less on controlling rivers and maybe more on working with them to combine targeted engineering with floodplain restoration, wetland conservation, reducing development in floodplains, improved drainage, and community preparedness,” Ganguly said.

Banner image: A villager rows a makeshift banana raft to cross floodwaters near his submerged house in Alengmora village in Jorhat, India, on Aug. 10. Image by AP Photo/Parikhit Saikia.

Recovery projects for 100 critically endangered and extinct-in-the-wild species across the world are set to receive new funding under a conservation initiative announced Aug. 4.

Re:wild and the Bezos Earth Fund, both U.S.-based environmental organizations, created the Phoenix Species Project and committed $100 million each, for a total of $200 million, to the project.

The project’s steering committee said each species will likely receive between $500,000 and $1 million for the duration of the five-year project.

Among the 100 species are Mexico’s Charco Azul pupfish (Cyprinodon veronicae), which went extinct in the wild in 1997 after its habitat dried up completely due to a devastating drought. Another is Madagascar’s golden-crowned sifaka (Propithecus tattersalli), a critically endangered lemur whose population has declined by roughly 80% amid rampant deforestation. With new funding, local NGOs will work to reconnect the fragmented forests that the lemurs need to survive.

“We’ve protected the golden-crowned sifaka for years on a budget that would never match what this species deserves, but letting it go extinct was never an option,” Tiana Andriamanana, executive director of Association Fanamby, the Malagasy NGO leading conservation efforts for the lemur, said in a statement.

All 100 species, located across 30 countries, have already been chosen, but funding amounts for each have not yet been finalized. They will be determined on a rolling basis as proposals are submitted, the Phoenix Species Project’s steering committee told Mongabay by email.

The sifaka and the pupfish are two of seven species that have already received funds. The other five are the bowmouth guitarfish; a South African plant called the fuzzy belly button; the Galápagos petrel; the Australian night parrot; and the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander.

Every species plays an important role in its wider ecological community, Leah Gerber, a conservation scientist at Arizona State University in the U.S., told Mongabay by email.

“Recovering a species can have benefits that extend well beyond that species,” Gerber wrote. “But those benefits are highly context dependent; recovering one species does not always lead to ecosystem restoration.”

The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, has evaluated the extinction risk for fewer than 5% of all species known to science. Of the 176,000 species that have been assessed so far, more than 31,000 are considered extinct in the wild, critically endangered, or endangered.

“The Phoenix Species Project represents an extraordinary investment in preventing extinction, and I’m especially encouraged to see attention across a broad range of species rather than only the most charismatic ones,” Gerber said.

Banner image: A golden-crowned sifaka in Madagascar. Image courtesy of Association Fanamby.

Women preparing meals for more than 1,000 students at Tiyani Secondary School in South Africa’s Limpopo province no longer rely only on firewood. Instead, much of the cooking is powered by biogas generated from cattle dung collected from Tiyani village. This community-led project could reduce pressure on forests while cutting greenhouse gas emissions, experts say.

The pilot project was established in 2022 with support from the University of Venda.

Every weekday, four community volunteers from Tiyani use an ox-drawn cart to collect cattle dung from nearby households. The manure is then mixed with water and fed into a biogas converter digester, an airtight, oxygen-free container where microbes convert it into methane-rich biogas. The gas is then piped directly to the school kitchen, where it powers the cooking of breakfast and lunch for the school’s 1,054 learners. When there isn’t enough cow dung, the school still supplements with firewood.

“We never imagined that something we regarded as waste could become a source of energy,” Fosta Chavalala, the community project manager of the biogas project, told Mongabay in an interview. “In future, we hope to expand the project” to rely more on gas than firewood.

In a March 2025 article published in the industry magazine ReSource, David Tinarwo, head of the Biogas Research team at the University of Venda, said the project was designed to reduce dependence on firewood while making productive use of livestock waste.

“The demand for firewood was placing pressure on local trees, and the way trees were being cut was not sustainable,” he told Mongabay in an interview. “We wanted to develop a solution that would reduce dependence on firewood while making use of livestock waste that was readily available in the community.”

Bornface Siliya Kenan Zulu, a Zambia-based engineer specializing in renewable and low-carbon energy systems, told Mongabay by email that community-scale biogas projects can significantly reduce methane emissions by capturing gas that would otherwise escape from decomposing manure while providing cleaner cooking fuel.

However, Zulu said their long-term success depends on a reliable supply of livestock manure, regular maintenance of digesters and strong community ownership. “Without a consistent supply of feedstock and local capacity to maintain the system, gas production can decline and communities may lose confidence in the technology,” he said.

While it’s had a promising start, the Tiyani project faces challenges. Volunteers spend hours collecting manure because some cattle owners live too far away or are unwilling to participate, Chavalala said. The school also has only one three-plate gas stove, limiting how much of the available biogas can be used, and additional cooking equipment and better transport would increase the system’s impact, he added.

The digester occupies a 4-by-12-meter (13-by-39-foot) site and is maintained jointly by community volunteers and the school, with funding from the University of Venda.

Banner image: Volunteers work in a vegetable field belonging to Tiyani Secondary School where the manure is thrown after gas is extracted. Image by Bernard Chiguvare.

A growing human population, expanding croplands, and drier conditions driven by climate change within protected areas could significantly intensify human-elephant conflict in Southern Africa, a recent study finds.

Southern Africa is home to almost 300,000 African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana), with many populations rebounding after decades of poaching. The region is also seeing rapidly expanding farms and human populations, leading to instances of crop raiding by elephants.

To understand what drives the problem in the region, they used data on crop raiding recorded within 38 community-managed communal conservancies in Namibia from 2004 to 2020, and used statistical methods and machine-learning models to assess the drivers across the broader region, including northern Botswana, Angola, and Zambia.

Their analysis showed that human population growth and expansion of farms, settlements and other built-up areas led to higher rates of crop raiding.

Conflict was also higher during the wet season, from November to April. Moreover, drier conditions within protected areas were associated with higher human-elephant conflict in nearby conservancies during the wet season, suggesting that poorer habitat conditions within the protected areas may be pushing the animals out, increasing the potential for conflict, the authors say.

The researchers also found that projected changes in land use, human population, and climate change would expand the area at risk of crop raiding in Southern Africa by 2085.

Evan Patrick, the study’s lead author, told Mongabay by email that local land use and development patterns are the clearest signals driving increases in conflict. “That means the projected increases in conflict are not fully inevitable, but that local planning can move human land use expansion away from conflict hotspots.”

Patrick added the study’s findings “can help guide proactive land use decision-making and mitigation efforts, as these are often cheaper and preferable to payment programs that cover some of the losses” from human-elephant conflict.

Solving conflict should be informed by science, Patrick said, adding that local conservation leaders and partners are the people best positioned to find solutions to problems like crop raiding.  “While we are interested in expanding our analysis, we want to make sure any work is grounded with partners to ensure that the work can guide and be guided by local knowledge and needs,” he said.

Elephant ecologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University in the U.S., who wasn’t part of the study, told Mongabay by email that the study highlights how the dual pressures of human population growth and climate change will rachet up pressure on remaining wildlands in sub-Saharan Africa. “This type of work is really valuable to identify areas where problems are occurring and likely to expand. This provides the foundation for proactive mitigation, such as government schemes to incentivize agricultural zones of non-palatable crops in conflict risk areas,” Wittemyer said.

Banner image: African savanna elephants in Namibia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.