Fires raged across the Amazon rainforest, annihilating more than 4.6 million hectares of primary tropical forest—the most biodiverse and carbon-dense type of forest on Earth. That loss, which is larger than the size of Denmark, was more than twice the annual average between 2014 and 2023, according to data released last month by World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch.

It was the highest loss for the biome since annual records began in 2002. Sixty percent of that destruction was caused by fire—a record high. If all tree cover is counted, the toll climbs to nearly 6.2 million hectares. Brazil bore the brunt, losing 2.78 million hectares of primary forest. Bolivia saw a 586% increase over its 10-year average, as did Guyana.

In Brazil, deforestation has plunged under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who moved swiftly to reassert environmental governance. But nature had other plans. Blistering temperatures and the worst drought in 70 years—fueled by climate change and compounded by El Niño—turned routine agricultural burns into runaway infernos. Lula’s reforms proved no match for an accelerating climate crisis or the long tail of past mismanagement.

In Bolivia, policy choices stoked the fires. The government removed export quotas on beef and soy, cut import taxes on agrochemicals, and offered debt relief to those affected by fire—effectively incentivizing environmental destruction.

Elsewhere in the Amazon, only French Guiana and Suriname avoided a sharp uptick in primary forest loss. Collapsing governance in frontier regions opened the door to illegal logging, ranching, coca plantations, and mining. Soaring gold prices have only made matters worse.

The broader outlook is grim. Across Latin America, drought turned land-clearing fires into walls of flame. Though some leaders have tried to balance development with conservation, climate change is proving the more powerful force.

And it’s not just the climate. The Amazon is becoming increasingly flammable due to degradation. Selective logging, forest fragmentation, and livestock incursions expose once-humid interiors to drier air, wind, and sun. These disturbances strip the forest of its resilience, creating conditions for a self-reinforcing cycle of degradation and fire. Recent studies suggest that more vegetation is now lost to degradation than to outright deforestation in the Amazon.

What burns today is not only forest—it is also the hope that nature alone will heal. Without a concerted global response, the Amazon may soon pass the point of no return.

Header: Photo by Greenpeace.

At least 200 people have been confirmed dead and 500 more remain missing after flash floods devastated a Nigerian market town, media reported.

Torrential rain started early on May 29, and within just a few hours caused intense flooding in the town of Mokwa, Niger state, a major trading hub for northern farmers selling beans, onions and other crops to southern traders. The town, with a population of 400,000, is 350 kilometers (about 220 miles) west of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja.

Musa Kimboku, deputy chair of the local government, told the Associated Press that rescue operations have already stopped and those missing are presumed dead. The retrieval of bodies from beneath rubble is continuing in a bid to prevent disease outbreak, Kimboku added.

More than 3,000 people remain displaced after floodwaters and mud completely destroyed houses.

The Niger state emergency service spokesperson told AP that two bridges and two roads were washed away in the floods.

Jibril Muregi, chair of the Mokwa government, reportedly told local news website Premium Times that flood-control infrastructure was long overdue.

Al Jazeera quoted experts saying that climate change, in addition to unregulated construction and poor drainage, had made floods more frequent and severe.

“The amount of rain you expect in a year could probably come in one or two months, and people are not prepared for that kind of rainfall,” Ugonna Nkwunonwo, a flood risk analyst at the University of Nigeria, told Al Jazeera.

The report added that rapid development without adequate urban planning in the town has resulting in buildings being built in flood-prone areas, which in turn reduces the soil’s ability to absorb water.

The United Nations said in a statement published on June 2 that it’s working with the Nigerian government to provide humanitarian aid to affected residents. It cited its weather agency’s report linking the severity of flooding in Africa to climate change and increased surface and water temperatures. Just last year, flooding killed 230 people and displaced 600,000 people in Borno state in eastern Nigeria.

Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has ordered the release of 2 billion naira ($1.26 million) in funding to support the reconstruction of the destroyed homes in Mokwa. Twenty truckloads of food aid will also be sent to the town, Tinubu was quoted saying.

Banner image of Mokwa after the flooding, by the Nigerian National Emergency Management Agency via X.

In December 2024, a camera trap installed in Dehing Patkai National Park in northeast India’s Assam state captured a rare scene: a clouded leopard with a Bengal slow loris in its mouth. Both species are extremely elusive, so the photograph is rare confirmation that the medium-sized wildcat preys on the small, endangered primate, reports contributor Nabarun Guha for Mongabay India.

“In fact, only one or two people in my patrol party have reported seeing clouded leopards. So, the fact that a single camera trap image captures both these animals is extremely significant,” Ranjith Ram, divisional forest officer of the Digboi Forest Division that manages the national park, told Guha.

The camera traps in Dehing Patkai were set up by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in partnership with the forest department, and the photographic record was detailed in a recent paper.

Mainland clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa), named for the cloud-like, dusky-gray blotches on their body, are classified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Found in the tropical forests of mainland South, Southeast and East Asia, including the Himalayan foothills in India, these predators are thought to prey upon a wide range of species, from ungulates and primates, to porcupines, pangolins, birds, rodents and even domestic animals. But what the cats eat in their Indian habitats isn’t very well known, the researchers say. “This photographic record helps fill that gap,” they write.

Paper co-author Bilal Habib, a scientist at WII, said previous analysis of clouded leopard droppings in Thailand showed the wildcats there prey on the greater slow loris (Nycticebus coucang). The photograph from Dehing Patkai, captured just a kilometer (0.6 miles) from a tea estate and 2.5 km (1.6 mi) from the closest human habitation, offers the first photographic evidence of clouded leopards preying on a Bengal slow loris.

Classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List, the Bengal slow loris weighs about 850-2,100 grams (1.9-4.6 pounds) and is a nocturnal animal that spends much of its life in trees. The clouded leopard is also both nocturnal and arboreal, and so “it is likely that clouded leopards in this area may target this species as relatively easy to hunt prey,” the authors write.

The cameras set up in Dehing Patkai National Park are part of a study to assess the clouded leopard population across its range in India. The wild cats are threatened by poaching and the illegal wildlife trade.

Read the full story by Nabarun Guha here.

Banner image: Clouded leopard carrying a Bengal slow loris. Image courtesy of Digboi Forest Division.

Increased carbon dioxide emissions since industrialization have accelerated climate change, and its widespread negative impacts have been reported worldwide. But the rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are also making some parts of our planet greener in what’s called the CO2 fertilization effect. Some politicians claim this effect means more atmospheric CO2 is doing more good than harm.

In an October episode of Mongabay’s weekly podcast Newscast, co-host Rachel Donald spoke with remote-sensing scientist Arden Burrell, who explained what the CO2 fertilization effect really means for the world, especially for drylands like deserts, savannas and dry subtropical forests that account for 40% of the world’s land surface.

Despite being water-limited landscapes, drylands play an important role in human society because they contribute to more than half of global food production, Burrell said.

Burrell, who co-authored the first-ever observation-based study on dryland desertification, told Donald in the podcast that photosynthesis, the process key to plants’ growth, works by taking in CO2 and water. “If there’s more CO2 in the air, the plants can use less water for the same amount of growth,” he said. “And so, drylands have been experiencing this really kind of interesting phenomenon where over the last 30 years, they have been getting hotter, but they’ve also been getting greener,” he added.

But while it’s considered a “positive effect,” there are places facing desertification where “the temperature and rainfall trends are so severe that even the increased CO2 fertilization effect is not offsetting the decrease in rainfall,” Burrell said.

Burrell’s study found that drylands could become greener by 10-15% by 2050. But it “doesn’t necessarily translate to 10-20% growth in plants,” he said.

Neither does it mean that we’ll start seeing forests springing up on drylands, Donald added.

“What we’re really likely to see and what we’re likely to have been seeing is in some places the plants will just be a bit more productive, they’ll just grow a bit more,” Burrell said.

Moreover, the study only looked at projections of up to 2050. “It’s just after 2050, where things start to diverge drastically, and you start to see the truly horrific differences of not managing CO2,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important to act now, to be … reducing emissions now, because we’ve already locked ourselves in for at least another decade of warming if we stop right now.”

Burrell said in the long run, the CO2 fertilization effect only “buys us a little bit more time” as the plants grow and sequester a small amount of carbon. “It is a net benefit for the planet, but not enough to offset the actual damage we’re doing to the planet by increasing, by releasing large amounts of CO2 continuously.”

Listen to the full episode here.

Banner image of a dryland forest at the southern tip of Madagascar by Rod Waddington via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The Philippine eagle is considered one of the world’s rarest birds of prey, with roughly 400 breeding pairs left in the wild. Amid ongoing threats from logging and hunting, Indigenous forest rangers are helping conservationists protect the species’ nests and habitat, Mongabay contributor Bong S. Sarmiento reported last year.

Datu Julito Ahao of the Obu Manuvu Indigenous group, has been hailed as an “unsung hero” in the conservation of the Philippine eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi). Ahao told Mongabay it was “love at first sight” when, in his 20s, he first saw the raptor in Mount Apo Natural Park in the Philippines’ southern island group of Mindanao.

Ahao works closely with the Philippine Eagle Foundation (PEF), sharing his sightings of eaglets and nests with the group.

Now officially retired, Ahao used to walk into the forest three times a month to monitor Philippine eagles and possible threats, work he continues today though less regularly. It takes him two hours to walk from his house to an observation deck inside the jungle. “I feel sick if I don’t scour the jungles to monitor the eagles. Sometimes I go hungry in the forest as I have no money to buy food to bring,” he told Sarmiento.

Fellow tribal members have called Ahao matanglawin, which means “having an eye of an eagle.” A sharp pair of eyes is a key asset for finding the birds across a typical breeding pair’s range of about 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres). The birds can grow to roughly 1 meter (3 feet) tall, with a wingspan of 2 m (nearly 7 ft).

Ahao said his concern for the eagle is rooted in ancestral beliefs and a local legend about a Philippine eagle that caught a hunter. Trapped in the nest with the eagle’s offspring, the hunter was flown back to his community once the eaglet grew strong enough to carry him. To honor the eaglet that saved the hunter, Ahao said his community must “take care of the eagle.”

Heeding that reminder from his ancestors, Ahao started leading a group of forest guards called Bantay Bukid in 2014.

The group worked voluntarily until 2017, when environmental groups lobbied for them to be paid 3,500 pesos ($61) a month from the municipal government. As of last year, there were 28 Bantay Bukid members from Ahao’s village.

For several years, Ahao and the group have worked with government agencies and the PEF to report and halt logging activities in sensitive eagle habitat. Bantay Bukid continues to be on alert against hunting; at least 11 eagles were wounded by hunters in the past five years.

Now in his senior years, Ahao is no longer officially part of Bantay Bukid, but he still helps monitor the raptors. “Until I have the strength,” he says, “I will be protecting the eagles.”

Read Bong S. Sarmiento’s full report here.

Banner image of a Philippine eagle by Aimee Valencia via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

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

A new report, “Primates in Peril: The World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates,” catalogs the species closest to the brink. Compiled by more than 100 scientists and conservationists, it’s a stark warning: without urgent action, some of our closest relatives may soon be gone.

The list spans four continents, taking in the Cross River gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli) in West Africa — fewer than 250 individuals remain — to the elusive Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis) in Sumatra, first described in 2017 and already reduced to just 800 individuals.

In Madagascar, home to some of the planet’s rarest biodiversity, the red ruffed lemur (Varecia rubra) and Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur (Microcebus berthae), the smallest primate in the world, are confined to shrinking scraps of forest.

In Asia, the primates of the Mentawai Islands in Indonesia, are vanishing under the twin pressures of logging and hunting.

In South America, urban expansion and agriculture are pushing the pied tamarin (Saguinus bicolor) and Peruvian yellow-tailed woolly monkey (Lagothrix flavicauda) toward extinction.

This is not a new story. Since 2000, the IUCN’s Primate Specialist Group has tracked the most threatened primates. Of the 721 recognized species and subspecies, nearly two-thirds are now endangered. Entire genera are in jeopardy: every species of gibbon, all 17 red colobus monkeys, and 95% of Madagascar’s lemurs.

Behind the names and statistics lie familiar culprits: deforestation, illegal trade, climate change. Conservationists have developed detailed action plans, grounded in science and fieldwork. But plans alone do not preserve species.

“There is no mystery here,” said Russell Mittermeier, chief conservation officer at Re:wild who also heads the Primate Specialist Group. “We know what to do. What we lack is political will, funding, and time.”

The loss of these primates would not only mean fewer species in the forest — it would mean emptier forests. These animals are seed dispersers, cultural icons, and evolutionary kin. Their disappearance would haunt the landscapes they once shaped.

Read Malavika Vyawahare’s story on the report here.

Banner image: A Bornean orangutan. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.