The world is eating a smaller variety of vegetables as diets become increasingly uniform, reports contributor Sharmila Vaidyanathan for Mongabay India.

In India, Indigenous crops such as the clove bean and the Yerengere white long eggplant have largely vanished from commercial markets as hybrid varieties dominate supply chains.

Prabhakar Rao, a natural farmer and founder of Hariyalee Seeds in Bengaluru, conserves hundreds of heirloom seed varieties to prevent their extinction.

“People are all eating the same few vegetables, and the loss of vegetable biodiversity has not received a lot of attention,” Rao said. “Sadly, this loss is happening under the radar.”

Recent research has confirmed this loss of vegetable diversity is global.

In a paper published in PNAS in July, researchers compiled a list of 1,482 vegetable species in a new global data set, though they note the true number of local and wild varieties is substantially higher. Many wild vegetable varieties are threatened, they write: approximately 24% of the wild relatives of 79 major vegetable species are currently at risk of extinction.

“A major consideration that prompted this article is that many of the vegetable species are not conserved in national and international gene banks,” said lead author Maarten van Zonneveld, head of the gene bank at the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru. “There are so many vegetables that need to be rescued before they completely disappear. And the end goal is not just conservation, but also ensuring that this diversity is utilised.”

Some reasons for the eroding diversity are rapid land-use change, market homogenization, and shifting agricultural priorities. These in turn undermine efforts to build climate-resilient and nutritionally secure food systems, the researchers write.

Commercial market dynamics also favor aesthetics, according to Elizabeth Yorke, a chef, food researcher, and co-founder of the food systems collective Edible Issues. “Bright red tomatoes, perfectly shaped onions and dark green leafy vegetables — we associate good quality and good flavor with a certain visual, and then one variety becomes the representative for the entire category,” Yorke said.

It’s not just the decline in vegetable diversity; in India, consumers are also eating far fewer fruits and vegetables than what’s recommended by food security standards under the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank.

Grassroots groups and international organizations are spearheading targeted interventions. In India’s Meghalaya state, the North East Society for Agroecology Support (NESFAS) has integrated underutilized wild and regional vegetables into meal programs across 26 schools. Globally, institutions like the WorldVeg Genebank maintain more than 65,000 genetic samples, while the Crop Trust has identified key “opportunity crops” for climate adaptation.

Building long-term agricultural resilience will require supporting smallholder growers and strengthening supply chains for non-standardized crops, according to Colin Khoury, global conservation lead at the Crop Trust. “It’s simply a matter of prioritizing vegetables.”

Read the full story by Sharmila Vaidyanathan here.

Banner image: Chocolate cherry tomato, an heirloom tomato variety at Prabhakar Rao’s farm. Image by Sharmila Vaidyanathan.

A fishing cat found badly injured and malnourished in northern Bangladesh has been returned to the wild following months of intensive rehabilitation.

The feline was recently released into a tea estate bordering a large freshwater wetland, after being fitted with a satellite-tracking collar.

Fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus), one of the larger species of small wildcats, may number as many as 7,500 in the wild, according to the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. They’re found mostly in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, where roughly 95% of their range falls outside protected areas. They also occur in Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Thailand; and are thought locally extinct in Indonesia and Vietnam.

The Bangladesh Forest Department rescued the male fishing cat in February 2026 and transferred it to the Jankichara Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre in the country’s northeast.

The odds that it would survive was low, according to the Creative Conservation Alliance (CCA), the conservation nonprofit that runs the center.

“His jaw was dislocated, most likely from being beaten by people, and he could not feed himself. He was badly malnourished and weighed barely five kilograms [11 pounds],” Caesar Rahman, CEO of the CCA, told Mongabay by email. “We had very little hope that he would survive.”

After weeks of assisted tube feeding and veterinary treatment, the cat’s health improved and it eventually reached 12 kg (26.5 lb).

To ensure a smooth transition back into the wild, conservationists kept the cat in a soft-release enclosure at the Ooterbhag and Indanugger Tea Estate for more than eight weeks. After the release, they’ll track its movements by satellite.

“In most of the cases we come across, [rescued animals] do not receive proper rehabilitation, so they die in care, or they are released without a protocol and their fate is never known,” Rahman said.

Muntasir Akash, assistant professor of zoology at the University of Dhaka, who wasn’t involved with the effort, told Mongabay, “Every life matters. But from a rewilding perspective, it is not rewilding per se. It is a conflict translocation.”

Akash said that while the rehab helped the cat regain physical fitness, it did little to develop the spatial memory required for a free-ranging lifestyle. “But overall, it is another milestone in spatial ecology studies in Bangladesh,” he added.

Mongabay previously reported on a study that found 31% of media reports about fishing cats between 2005 and 2021 were about the cats dying. Nearly half of those deaths involved a “kill-on-sight” reaction from local fish and duck farmers.

Rahman said he’s optimistic the CCA’s approach to rehab and partnering with tea plantations can serve as a blueprint for future conservation efforts. “There are at least 135 tea estates in the northeastern part of Bangladesh,” he said. “It is still early days, but this could become a useful model for conservation in a densely populated region.”

Banner image: The fishing cat with the satellite collar. Image courtesy of Moktadir Rahman/CCA.

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), which was created to fund long-term conservation of tropical forests, recently received a $500-million pledge, over 10 years, from the Netherlands, a significant boost for forest conservation.

The Netherlands announced the pledge in an Oct 26 press release and estimated that the TFFF has the potential to protect 800 to 900 million hectares (2.0 to 2.2 billion acres) of tropical forest, an area roughly 200 times the size of the Netherlands.

The long-term goal is to create a $125 billion endowment fund for the TFFF. Current pledges add up to roughly $7.8 billion.

The TFFF was launched by Brazil at the 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference in November 2025. It’s a partnership between tropical countries that need funding to protect their forests, investors and donor countries that want to address climate change and biodiversity loss through mitigating deforestation. The collaboration includes the private sector, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, the World Bank, scientists, economists, finance experts, and civil society partners.

The TFFF is modeled like a sovereign wealth fund in which governments and private investors contribute to an investment fund and those investment gains, or profits, are then distributed to tropical countries to keep their forests standing. The hope is that predictable revenue from the TFFF will incentivize permanent conservation of forests over unsustainable development including logging, mining and ranching.

Forest conservation is monitored using satellite imaging and scientific monitoring protocols to provide transparency and ensure forests are being protected.

However, the TFFF has received criticism. “In my view, as an economist, I would say that TFFF has severe flaws,” Bard Harstad, an environmental economist at Stanford University in the U.S. told Mongabay in an email. He expressed skepticism about the long-term economic solvency of the TFFF, saying the finance model is based on the fund generating enough profit to satisfy both investors and compensate tropical forest countries.

He’s concerned that funds may not materialize as promised, misleading participating countries. “Then, after they are disappointed, the willingness to allocate funds to tropical forest conservation can be harmed for decades.”

The recent $500 million pledge came the day after Brazil’s runoff election in which incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has pledged to end deforestation by 2030, beat challenger Flávio Bolsonaro, a climate change denier who pledged to not demarcate any Indigenous land in Brazil.

Harstad noted concerns that governments can reverse their pledge to conserve TFFF-funded forests, “if someone like Bolsonaro should return to power in the future.”

Harstad recommends instead solutions like sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs), which have been used in Uruguay to lower bond interest rates, and attract investments, when deforestation rates are low.

Still, the recent TFFF investment has been praised by conservationists including Merijn van Leeuwen, director of Nature Conservation with WWF-Netherlands, who said it is a “major breakthrough for the protection of tropical forests worldwide.”

Banner image: Baby mountain gorillas playing in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Uganda. Image by Charles J. Sharp via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

An ambitious effort to eradicate invasive spotted bass from South Africa’s Breekkrans River has unfolded about two hours north of Cape Town. Removing the bass has helped give the critically endangered doring fiery redfin (Pseudobarbus doring) a fighting chance against extinction.

“Spotted bass were introduced into the river system in the late 1930s,” Martine Jordaan, a faunal ecologist at Cape Nature, a provincial conservation authority, told Mongabay in a video call. “The main reason was to have a species that was good for angling. What makes bass a good angling fish makes it a bad invader. It really goes after the small fish, and most of our native fish are 12 centimeters [4.7 inches] and smaller.”

Jordaan said that after the bass species had been introduced, it spread as far as the habitat allowed, only stopping when encountering natural barriers such as waterfalls. “Often you find that native fish populations [are restricted to] streams where bass cannot invade,” Jordaan said.

That was the case with the doring fiery redfin. “The Breekkrans River has the largest remaining population of doring fiery redfin with probably a few hundred adults,” Jeremy Shelton, a freshwater conservation ecologist working at the Freshwater Research Centre (FRC), told Mongabay by email. “The species also exists in another river, but in very low numbers.”

Prior to the spotted bass eradication, the doring fiery redfin were confined to a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) stretch of the Breekkrans River that remained bass-free.

The Breekkrans River Restoration Project is run by the FRC in collaboration with Cape Nature and the Fynbos Fish Trust. Since 2023 the project has targeted the invasive bass each Southern Hemisphere summer, including building a downstream fish barrier to prevent the bass from reentering the stretch of river.

“Using nets, spear guns and electrofishers to eradicate invasive spotted bass from 8 km [5 mi] of the upper Breekkrans River, the project extended the habitat of the Critically Endangered Doring Redfin from 2 km to 10 km,” or 1.2 to 6 mi, Shelton said.

“All native fish showed recovery,” Jordaan added. “All species experience increased range, and this was a direct result of removing that predatory impact of the of the spotted bass.”

Shelton said the project’s success “demonstrates that invasive bass can be completely and permanently eradicated from entire stretches of river using mechanical methods, allowing threatened native fish populations to recover and thrive.”

“This is a major breakthrough for freshwater conservation in South Africa, opening the door to restoring other invaded rivers,” he added.

Banner image: Doring fiery redfin in the Breekkrans River, where a river restoration project increased the range of the species from 2 to 10 km. Image courtesy of Jeremy Shelton/Freshwater Research Centre.

In his second term as the U.S. president, Donald Trump has taken actions to remove protections from at least 34.8 million hectares (86 million acres) of public lands, according to the advocacy group Center for American Progress.

The nonprofit Conservation Lands Foundation (CLF) recently catalogued 12 such policy actions in its newly released Public Lands Attack Tracker.

The tracker examines the myriad ways public lands have been reduced and weakened, from encouraging extractive industries to sidelining public participation, over the last nearly two years.

These actions by the Trump administration include expanding oil and gas drilling “to encourage energy exploration and production on Federal lands and waters” and repealing the public lands rule, which requires that conservation be considered equally important as extractive industries. The administration has also moved to rescind the roadless rule that currently bans road construction across millions of acres of national forest land and weakened provisions of the Endangered Species Act, which grants protection to species in decline.

On its Public Lands Attack Tracker website, the CLF argues that the combined effects of such actions could be greater than the sum of their individual impacts. “This Attack Tracker connects the dots,” the website notes. It lays out eight impacts of the “attacks on public land” including stripping “protections to allow destructive uses” and eliminating “tribal engagement” which “results in lasting damage.”

One of the most high-profile reductions in public land protection can be found in Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. In July 2026, Trump issued two proclamations shrinking the size of each of the monuments by roughly 90%. The move paves the way for the monument areas to “be put to a higher-priority use” noting that the region “contains several resources … which include critical minerals such as silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.”

The two national monuments are home to several Native American tribes including, the Navajo Nation for which Davina Smith-Idjesa is a representative. She is also co-chair for the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.

“It’s still mind-boggling that we went from 1.36 million acres [550,000 hectares] to now just a little over 121,000 acres [49,000 hectares],” Smith-Idjesa told Mongabay in a video call. That cut was just for Bears Ears. Trump cut Grand Staircase-Escalante from more than 728,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) to 73,450 hectares (181,500 acres.)

Smith-Idjesa said that the proclamations, which are being challenged in court, could potentially cut native peoples off from the “living cultural landscape,” including water, land, plants and animals that are crucial for their physical and spiritual sustenance.

“Much of what we call public lands today, particularly across the West is a part of the ancestral homelands of Indigenous Peoples,” she said. Adding that changes to public and tribal lands can have profound impacts on Indigenous communities. “That’s why tribal nations need to be part of these conversations and not simply consulted after decisions have already been made.”

Banner image: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Image courtesy of the city of Panguitch, UT, U.S.

KAKINADA, India (AP) — A powerful cyclone battered India ’s Andhra Pradesh state on Wednesday, killing at least three people and damaging homes and farmland after authorities evacuated tens of thousands of people, officials said.

Cyclone Arnab made landfall early Wednesday as a very severe cyclonic storm before weakening to a severe cyclonic storm as it moved inland, the India Meteorological Department said.

Two women were electrocuted in separate incidents in the port city of Visakhapatnam, while another person was killed when a tree fell in East Godavari district, officials said.

State disaster management officials said late Wednesday morning that wind speeds reached 135 kph (84 mph).

Officials said the cyclone was expected to weaken further as it moved inland, with wind speeds likely to ease later in the day.

The state’s chief minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, said that 14 coastal districts of the state were badly affected. He said winds and heavy rains caused widespread damage to houses, road networks, electrical poles and power supply infrastructure. He requested urgent assistance from the central government.

The cyclone damaged 79,000 acres of crops and dozens of homes. The worst hit area was the state’s fertile Konaseema district. Banana and coconut plantations suffered extensively and a large number of trees and electricity poles were uprooted, disrupting electricity across the district, officials said.

The meteorological service said the landfall process was complete and heavy rainfall as well as strong winds would continue under the cyclone’s influence in coastal areas of Andhra Pradesh and parts of southern Odisha state. The rainfall flooded several low-lying areas in Visakhapatnam.

Cyclone Arnab weakened to a “severe” cyclonic storm Wednesday, the department said in an update.

Authorities began evacuating people from low-lying and flood-prone areas ahead of the cyclone’s landfall. They also canceled some train services as heavy rain and gusty winds started lashing parts of the coast. At least 180,000 people were evacuated in Andhra Pradesh, according to an official statement.

The state’s disaster management authority said more than 12 million people live along the cyclone’s expected path.

Authorities set up over 2,000 cyclone shelters across 20 districts, while emergency alerts were being sent to the mobile phones of millions of residents, Prakhar Jain, head of the state’s disaster management authority, said, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

More than 30,000 fishing boats were secured along the coast, while nearly 1,100 medical teams were deployed across affected areas to provide emergency assistance, he added.

In neighboring Odisha, officials planned to evacuate about 48,000 people from areas likely to be affected by the storm.

In neighboring Nepal, the disaster agency warned of heavy rain, lightning and thunderstorms across much of the country. It advised tourists to avoid high-altitude and Himalayan areas and warned of possible road and air travel disruptions.

Nepal continues to recover from devastating flash floods in August that killed more than 1,400 people and left thousands more missing. More flooding was reported earlier this month in northern Nepal.

Farooq reported from Hyderabad, India. Binaj Gurubacharya in Kathmandu, Nepal, contributed to this report.

By Mahesh Kumar and Omer Farooq, Associated Press

 Banner image: Kakinada, India, Oct. 28, 2026. Image courtesy of Mahesh Kumar A., Associated Press