Happy-upbeat Environmental News

As more people are born onto this great green planet, the demand for food grows. Feeding the nearly 8 billion of us here today is a challenge, not only because…

Three people known for their work with sloths, fishing cats and giant armadillos were announced this week as winners of the 2022 Future for Nature (FFN) Award, given annually to…

BIKITA, Zimbabwe — Nothing seems to happen at the right time for Maria Mazambara, a communal subsistence farmer in Bikita, one of Zimbabwe's southernmost rural districts. “The seed we get…

Out in the azure waters and colorful corals of the Maldives, a resplendent, rainbow-hued fish has become the first to be named and described by a Maldivian researcher. New to…

COLOMBO — Lake Diyawanna in Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, Sri Lanka’s administrative capital, sits at the heart of an urban wetland that’s a haven for birds and an attraction for nature…

BESITANG, Indonesia — Suwardi, a 51-year-old from Indonesia’s North Sumatra province, used to work as a laborer for a landlord who managed oil palm and rubber plantations in his home…

“When we caught it, we all just looked at it and said, ‘You look ridiculous. Look how big your nose leaf is,’” Jon Flanders, director of endangered species interventions at…

Restoration initiatives are slowly making a mark on the Atlantic Forest, a Brazilian biome that has been reduced to about a quarter of its original area. Brazil has made global commitments to restore tens of millions of hectares of forest by 2030, but the much smaller programs underway in the Atlantic Forest show country is still unable to monitor restoration efforts effectively.

PALAWAN, Philippines — On a fine day at the onset of the dry season, Sublito Tiblak wakes up very early to the sounds of birds. They’re perched on trees surrounding…

A photo of an odd-looking amphibian drew attention on Twitter last week, where it was described as a “smooth lil fella”, compared to a melted tootsie roll candy, and likened…

Every morning, Anna Baltodano and Michael Chizkov look out from their terrace in search of sloths. Notoriously slow-moving and with fur the color of tree branches, the animals blend into…

MIGORI COUNTY, Kenya — On a hot, sunny afternoon, Susan Aluoch is among a group of volunteers preparing a tree nursery in preparation for the upcoming long rains. Aluoch is a…

In 2007, scientists at the Conservation Land Trust, now known as the Rewilding Foundation, released a giant anteater couple into the wild as part of a new reintroduction program. While…

AQABA, Jordan – Dozens of tiny, dazzlingly colorful fish swim around a maze of layer upon layer of corals. When divers approach, they hide near a dome-shaped colony. In the…

Today we look at two Indigenous conservation initiatives in the United States. Listen here: The importance of Indigenous stewardship and traditional ecological knowledge is increasingly recognized as vital to the…

Botanist Álvaro Pérez didn’t expect to discover a new species of magnolia while hiking through Ecuador’s Canandé Reserve. He said it was the enormous, unique fruit that tipped him off.…

After reaching a historic low, the population of monarch butterflies overwintering in California has increased a hundredfold, according to the annual Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count. More than 247,000 butterflies were…

Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This month we’re meeting an African viverrid: the African civet. The African…

For the uninitiated, the first mouthful of the Hawaiian red algae known as limu kohu (Asparagopsis taxiformis) may be an unpleasant one: intensely iodine-rich and bitter, with all the marine…

"Ecuador is proud to announce the creation of the Hermandad Marine Reserve in the coming days," the country's president declares in an opinion piece shared with Mongabay. His country had…

POILÃO ISLAND, Guinea-Bissau — On a moonlit night in September, hundreds of sea turtles have crawled out of the sea to nest on Poilão Island. A team of turtle monitors…

Bangladesh’s population of one of the world’s largest tortoise species received a boost last month when researchers and villagers released 10 captive-bred juveniles into the evergreen forests of the Chattogram…

When researchers found a begonia plant twice as tall as a person, they knew they had something extraordinary. Of the more than 2,000 known begonia species, most are the size…

JAKARTA — Scientists have described 14 species of shrews new to science from the Indonesian biodiversity haven of Sulawesi Island. The species-level description of the shrews from the genus Crocidura…

The tooth-billed bowerbird gave itself away with a not-quite-right call. Suspicious, I’d panned my binoculars toward the sound and there he was, the mimic, high in the canopy of a…

With humans sending probes to Mars and the sun, one might think we’ve already explored the full extent of our own planet. But scientists say we’ve only begun to find…

For about a decade, ichthyologist Cüneyt Kaya had made it a quest to search for the critically endangered Batman River loach (Paraschistura chrysicristinae), a tiny, orange-and-brown-striped freshwater fish once found…

Local stories in Michoacán tell how, when the Spanish invaded what would later be known as Mexico in the 1500s, they found Indigenous communities tapping pine trees and using the…

The abundance of aquatic and semi-aquatic animals in the Taiamã Ecological Station in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands has enabled jaguars here to thrive in surprising ways, a new study shows.

Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This month we’re meeting the cat with the most extensive range…