Earth has been steadily warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began emitting greenhouse gases at scale. And while the rate of warming has been largely constant for the past half-century, a recent study finds it has accelerated over the last decade — an alarming trend for Earth systems, biodiversity and human health.

Since the 1970s, the average global temperature has increased by roughly 0.2° Celsius (0.36° Fahrenheit) per decade. “That was pretty constant, but in recent years there have been some really record-breaking hot years globally,” study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of the ocean at Potsdam University in Germany, told Mongabay in a video call.

The last three years are the three warmest on record – as are all ten of the years since 2015. That sudden spike prompted a debate among climate scientists, Rahmstorf said. They questioned if the sudden warming was indeed an acceleration, or natural variation that could be explained by three other factors — El Niño, volcanic eruptions, or solar flares — which can all affect global temperatures.

To find out, Rahmstorf and study co-author Grant Foster, a statistician, applied statistical analysis to global temperature data to weed out the influence of those three factors.

“We filter out known natural influences in the observational data, so that the ‘noise’ is reduced, making the underlying long-term warming signal more clearly visible,” Foster said in a press release.

What remained was predominantly the human-caused warming signal. The results were dramatic: since 2015, the warming rate has nearly doubled to between 0.35 and 0.4°C (0.63 and 0.72°F) per decade.

This study didn’t investigate why warming has accelerated, but Rahmstorf said the likeliest explanation is stricter regulations on shipping emissions.

Ocean-going vessels emit pollutants that contribute to more than 260,000 premature deaths annually. However, those same emissions also help form clouds over the oceans, which reflect sunlight back out to space, providing a modest cooling effect. The new shipping regulations, in force since 2020, dramatically improved air quality, saving lives, but likely also contributed to the spike in warming observed in the study.

If this hypothesis holds, Rahmstorf said, that spike is likely temporary. “This high warming rate may not continue in the next decade, because no similar big reduction in aerosols would be expected there,” he said.

If the current pace were to continue, by the end of the century Earth would be looking at roughly 4°C (7.2°F) of additional warming, which has been projected by some climate models. That much additional heat would be catastrophic for life as we know it, with dramatic sea level rise, ocean acidification, more extreme weather events, mass extinctions, and myriad human health consequences.

Rahmstorf said the amount of long-term warming will still be determined by human activity. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”

Banner image: Glacial melt water flowing through snow in Himalayas. Photo courtesy of Sharada Prasad via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

The rising popularity of songbird singing competitions in Indonesia has led to the dramatic decline of the white-rumped shama, a bird known locally as murai batu.

Mongabay Indonesia video contributor Rizky Maulana Yanuar recently reported that keeping such birds is deeply rooted in local culture. In Javanese society, a man is considered to be successful when he has a job, a house, a vehicle, a wife and a bird, Yanuar reported.

Murai batu (Copsychus malabaricus) are highly coveted for their melodic voice and beauty. In contests, the birds are judged on the duration of their song, volume, rhythm, showmanship and physical presentation.

Winning these prestigious contests significantly increases a bird’s market value. Champion birds can sell for tens of thousands of dollars, and prizes for the owners can even include cars.

While there are plenty of facilities breeding the birds in captivity, buyers say wild-caught birds are superior. This high demand has created a financial lifeline for rural residents facing economic uncertainty. “As a farmer, harvests are very uncertain. Sometimes I have work, sometimes I don’t,” says Peni Mak Lajang, a Sumatran native who turned to poaching murai batu because of the high prices.

Peni sold his first murai batu for 800,000 rupiah ($48), back when he could capture five birds in a week. Now, he considers it a “blessing” if he can catch even one in a month.

Constant pressure to collect wild murai batu for singing contests has caused them to vanish from most forests across Java and Sumatra.

The crisis was exacerbated by a 2018 decision to remove the black and chestnut bird from Indonesia’s protected species list, following lobbying from breeder associations. Conservationists argue this makes enforcement more challenging at a time when murai batu were already facing peak pressure from poaching and habitat loss.

Captive breeding has surged to fill demand, but caged birds don’t help wild populations. Markets are full of captive-bred birds; none are released back into the wild.

Ethnobiologist Johan Iskandar from Padjadjaran University told Mongabay that poaching is deeply rooted in “social, economic, cultural, power and political aspects of society.”

“What needs protection is the people, not the birds,” he said.

Watch the full story by Rizky Maulana Yanuar here. 

Banner image: Researchers have built the first model to map supply and demand in Indonesia’s songbird trade, showing that species traits, not just species identity, drive market dynamics. Image courtesy of Ganjar Cahyadi.

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) recently released a draft report for its fourth recertification of krill fishing in Antarctica by Aker QRILL Company. The certification would allow Aker to put an MSC label on its products that tells consumers the krill came from a sustainable well-managed fishery. However, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), a U.S.-based advocacy group, issued a formal objection to that determination, citing concerns about overfishing of a critical resource in a sensitive ecosystem.

“Everything that lives in Antarctica either eats krill or eats something that eats krill,” Holly Parker Curry, ASOC’s marine protected areas campaign director, told Mongabay in a video call.

It’s the base of the food chain but krill biomass has declined by 70-80% in parts of the Southern Ocean since the 1970s. That’s roughly when people started harvesting the tiny crustaceans for aquaculture fish food and dietary supplements for people. Climate change and shrunken sea ice are also contributing the dramatic drop in krill populations; krill depend on sea ice for part of their life cycle.

In its said, “Antarctic krill is one of the best managed species in the world … [and] the total catch is limited to below 1% of the total biomass.”

Curry said that assessment is strictly accurate, but the devil is in the details.

“It’s not just about how much is caught, that’s important too, but it’s really where it’s caught,” Curry said. “A lot of the fishing for krill in the Southern Ocean, it all happens essentially in the Antarctic Peninsula, and in the past two years, it’s become increasingly localized.”

That localization began when a lapsed conservation measure meant fishing boats were no longer required to spread out across the region. Instead, they concentrated largely near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, which has the greatest concentration of krill in the region. That makes it the best place to harvest a lot of krill quickly — for both boats and wildlife.

The peninsula is a critical feeding ground for hundreds of species, including humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), Arctic terns (Sterna paradisaea) and emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri).

“So, if you’re a breeding penguin and you live in this area and a huge amount of krill is being taken from that specific location, you’re being forced to travel further and further just to survive,” Curry said. It’s an additional burden for wildlife already struggling in one of the fastest-warming areas on Earth.

In an email to Mongabay an MSC spokesperson said, “The Marine Stewardship Council recognizes the sensitivity of the Antarctic ecosystem and the role of Antarctic krill as a keystone species within it.”

MSC added that the initial assessment was done by expert assessors with the Conformity Assessment Bodies. With ASOC’s formal objection, the certification will be examined again by independent adjudicators who will consider if the fishery is meeting MSC’s sustainability standards.

Banner image: A colony of gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) near the Antarctic Peninsula. Image courtesy of Rob Oo via Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0).

The flowering times for many plant species have shifted due to climate change, with most of the change occurring in temperate zones. Researchers assumed the tropics, which are largely the same temperature year-round, would be insulated from such climate change-driven changes to flowering times. However, a new study challenges that assumption.

Researchers examined more than 200 years of flowering plant data from herbarium collections of tropical plants across Africa, Asia and South America. They identified 33 plant species with distinct annual flowering times, and recorded data from 8,000 individual plant specimens collected between 1794 and 2024. They found that the flowering times shifted by an average of two days per decade; approximately one-third of the species flowered earlier and two-thirds shifted later.

However, there were some anomalies. Brazilian amaranth trees (Peltogyne recifensis), for example, now flower 80 days later than they did in the 1950s. By 1995, the Ghanaian rattlepod shrub (Crotalaria mortonii) flowered 17 days earlier than it did in the 1950s.

Study lead author Skylar Graves, from the University of Colorado Boulder in the U.S., said the findings show that herbarium specimens can be used to examine the climate impacts on plants over time.

“Herbarium specimens are functionally a global and multigenerational dataset of plants,” she told Mongabay by email. “These specimens can be used for countless purposes, and with enough collections taken … you can use them to compare anything you want at any scale.”

The shifts observed in tropical plant flowering times is comparable to those for temperate and boreal plants, the researchers note. Such disruptions can threaten the finely tuned pollinator-plant relationship and the feeding behavior of fruit-eating species, including primates that evolved in sync with the fruiting and flowering times of their food plants.

Emma Bush from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, in the U.K., who wasn’t involved in the study, told The Guardian, “When plants, insects and other animals are out of sync they could all lose out — and the risk is that we lose biodiversity that benefits people, too.”

Banner image: A flowering forest in Brazil. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Archived camera-trapping images have revealed a new stronghold for Asian tapirs in Khlong Seang–Khao Sok Forest Complex, in southern Thailand.

Mongabay’s Carolyn Cowan reports that a recent study found camera-trap “bycatch” data — images of species that researchers hadn’t intended to photograph — can be used to monitor Asian tapirs (Tapirus indicus). The camera traps were originally set up in Khlong Seang–Khao Sok between 2016 and 2017 to monitor Asian black bears (Ursus thibetanus), and sun bears (Helarctos malayanus).

Tapirs weren’t a target because, historically, they’ve mostly been surveyed visually, with researchers walking a path through the forest and recording any tapirs they spot along the way.

Modeling based on images from the Thai forest complex suggests it could hold up to 436 tapirs, significantly more than the previous estimate of fewer than 250 individuals for all of Thailand and Myanmar combined.

But researchers urge caution in interpreting this number, as tapirs may be unevenly distributed across the forest complex, suggesting a smaller actual number.

Globally, the species is endangered, with fewer than 2,500 mature individuals remaining, according to a 2014 assessment.

Adult Asian tapirs can weigh up to 350 kilograms (772 pounds), making them the largest of the four tapir species and the only one found outside of Latin America.

In addition to being nocturnal and shy, said ecologist Naparat Suttidate from Walailak University in Thailand, Asian tapirs “are [a] large, slow-reproducing species requiring large areas of specific habitat [and] play a vital role as seed dispersers, helping to maintain biodiversity in plant communities.”

Unlike populations in Sumatra, tapir numbers in the Thai forest complex increased at higher elevations, possibly due to seasonal variations there, whereas conditions in the Sumatran forest are more consistent year-round.

Males were twice as likely to be photographed, suggesting females may have much larger home ranges than males.

The population of the species has dropped by roughly half over the last several decades due to habitat loss and fragmentation, and snaring. “The few populations which remain in Peninsular Thailand persist within protected areas and their numbers continue to dwindle,” Suttidate told Mongabay.

He added that understanding tapirs has broader benefits. “Fascination with these creatures and concern for their future sparks interest, funding and action that benefits tropical forest conservation as a whole.”

Read the full story by Carolyn Cowan here.

Banner image: An adult Asian tapir (Tapirus indicus). Image courtesy of Ali Eminov via Flickr.

Environmental journalism has long struggled with a practical problem: how to make distant ecological change feel relevant to people whose daily lives are shaped by more immediate concerns. Scientific reports document trends in temperature, biodiversity and land use with increasing precision, yet such findings often fail to travel far beyond specialist audiences. Video, once expensive and difficult to distribute, is now ubiquitous. Today the constraint is attention. Content that reaches large audiences usually foregrounds human experience rather than abstract risk.

One response has been to anchor environmental reporting in lived realities. Instead of beginning with emissions curves or species counts, journalists start with households, workers or communities navigating change. This approach repositions the science so climate change becomes visible as relocation, lost income, altered routines and disrupted schooling. The method carries risks, including the temptation to substitute anecdote for evidence. Used carefully, however, it can broaden understanding without sacrificing accuracy.

Lucía Torres, who leads video production at Mongabay, has built much of her work around this premise. In reporting on a Mexican coastal town forced to move inland after years of storms and encroaching seas, she focused on residents’ relationships with place and each other. The aim was to document gradual disruption rather than stage dramatic suffering. Time spent off camera proved as important as filming itself. Conversations, shared meals and repeated visits helped establish trust, yielding testimony that felt less performative and more reflective of ordinary life under strain.

Her broader advice to younger journalists is pragmatic. Technical skill matters, but persistence and adaptability matter more. Formats change quickly, especially on social platforms where algorithms reward novelty and brevity. Torres encourages experimentation, even when results are uneven. Failed attempts can clarify what resonates and what does not. She also stresses collaboration with local reporters and crews, arguing that proximity improves both accuracy and legitimacy.

For audiences inundated with information, the lesson may be straightforward. Environmental change is easiest to grasp when it is neither sensationalized nor reduced to numbers alone. Stories that connect global processes to specific places and people do not guarantee engagement, but they offer a plausible route. In an era of shrinking attention spans, that may be as much as journalism can reasonably promise.

Read the full interview with Lucía Torres here.

Banner image: Torres, center, interviewing architect Marina Tabassum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2025. Image courtesy of Wasif Kabir.