BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Indigenous leaders from across the Amazon are urging South American presidents meeting in Bogota this week to turn promises to protect the region’s rainforest into concrete action, and to give Indigenous groups more say in the region’s future.

The Fifth Presidential Summit of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, officially opening Tuesday in the Colombian capital, brings together leaders alongside scientists and Indigenous representatives. The agenda includes public forums, cultural events and high-level meetings, culminating Friday with a joint declaration setting regional priorities on environmental protection and climate policy.

Indigenous leaders hope to meet with national leaders face-to-face for the first time at such a summit. Indigenous groups from all eight Amazonian nations issued a statement Monday evening, calling the rainforest a global lifeline that provides about one-fifth of the world’s freshwater and acts as one of the planet’s largest carbon sinks, absorbing vast amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. They said decades of deforestation, mining, fossil fuel drilling and large-scale farming have pushed the region toward a point of no return.

Among their demands are legal protection of Indigenous lands, recognition of their communities as official decision-makers within the treaty body, and a ban on new oil, gas and mining projects in the rainforest. They also propose a working group on a “just transition” — a shift to cleaner energy and away from coal, oil or natural gas — and an observatory to track threats against environmental defenders.

The groups noted that many commitments made in the 2023 Belem Declaration — a joint pledge by Amazon nations to cooperate on protecting the rainforest — have yet to be implemented, and cautioned against another round of “empty promises.” They stressed that violence against activists continues to rise across the Amazon, calling for regional protection measures.

The program includes an “Amazon Dialogues” forum bringing together civil society, scientists and Indigenous leaders; a panel on the rainforest’s water vapor that helps regulate South America’s climate; and a “Road to COP30” event meant to shape the Amazon’s voice at the next U.N. climate conference in Brazil in November.

“There is no solution to any of the threats the Amazon is facing without its communities,” said Raphael Hoetmer, a senior advisor at Amazon Watch, a U.S.-based nonprofit, attending the summit.

“There is an historical opportunity to create a mechanism for permanent and direct dialogue and participation with Indigenous peoples through the ATCO,” he said, referring to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, a bloc of eight Amazonian countries.

Leaders from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela are expected to attend, with hopes that it will be the first time Indigenous representatives will meet directly with heads of state during the summit.

“There will be no future without Indigenous peoples at the center of decision-making,” the groups said in the statement.

Banner image: Isla de la Fantasia Leticia, Colombia, Oct. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia, File)

By Steven Grattan, Associated Press

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

To work in Alaska as a wildlife biologist is to accept hardship as part of the job: blizzards, isolation, and a daily intimacy with life, death, and the difficult questions in between. For John Landsiedel, it was not only worth it — it was the dream. He arrived in Dillingham in 2022 to take up a post many had cycled through and left. But he intended to stay.

Landsiedel had grown up in North Dakota and studied wildlife biology at Montana State University, not far from Yellowstone’s grizzlies and geysers. His path included tracking elk and bears, managing furbearers, and earning a scholarship to become a pilot — a step that would allow him to collar caribou, investigate mortalities, and expand his reach into Alaska’s remotest corners. He was training in a Piper Cub when it went down on the runway.

Landsiedel relished the science, but his real gift was connection: with animals, and with people. He spoke of the Mulchatna caribou herd not as numbers, but as beings whose survival told a story of ecological shifts and human need. Subsistence hunting, he understood, was not sport — it was sustenance, tradition, identity. “You don’t really get a full grasp,” he once said, “of what life is like in a village without traveling to that.”

Colleagues called him enthusiastic and fearless. Family described him as a goofball with a sharp mind. He laughed often and brought people in. His office door was open to hunters, elders, and curious kids alike. He valued data, but also knowledge passed down over generations. He flew, in part, to bridge the distances between that wisdom and the state’s bureaucratic centers.

Even in his final days, Landsiedel was exactly where he wanted to be. As his friend and fellow biologist Justin Priest recalled, the last message he received from John read:

“Man, I’ve been having a blast the last couple of weeks. Flying around counting bears, catching caribou calves, finding wolverines and gyrfalcons, playing with the camera. I feel so lucky to work up here and with these animals.”

“That’s how I’ll remember John,” Priest wrote, “a larger-than-life biologist in love with his work and life.”

He died off duty, but never far from purpose.

Banner image of John Landsiedel from his social media.

Despite years of research into their complex behavior and intelligence, orangutans remain critically endangered on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, where they’re endemic.

Mongabay has extensively covered the threats they face from habitat degradation and what studies say about how human activities affect them.

This World Orangutan Day, on Aug. 19, we take a look at how this intelligent great ape is faring in a world quickly changing due to human activity.

Most endangered

In June, Mongabay founder Rhett Butler wrote about the new report “Primates in Peril: The World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates.” The list, which includes the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis), aims to highlight the primate species most in need of conservation intervention.

Before the Tapanuli orangutan was formally described in 2017, there were only two distinct species of orangutans: the Sumatran (Pongo abelii) and Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus).

The report says that “high levels of habitat conversion and fragmentation, along with illegal hunting and poaching” caused an “extensive population decline” in Tapanuli orangutans over the last 150 years, leaving just 700 or so individuals in Indonesia’s Batang Toru Forest.

Habitat loss

Mongabay’s Hans Nicholas Jong reported in March of possible mining expansion in Batang Toru, the only known habitat of Tapanuli orangutans. Almost 200,000 people signed a petition opposing the planned development of hundreds of hectares of this forest habitat.

In January, Jong wrote that illegal deforestation for oil plantations is rising to record levels in Sumatra, according to U.S.-based NGO Rainforest Action Network. Of concern is Rawa Singkil Wildlife Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to Sumatran orangutans.

In Borneo, an Indonesian company has continued planting acacia, used to produce pulp and paper, despite a 2024 government order to stop logging and start restoring the damaged peatlands, part of Bornean orangutan habitat. Jong reported that any habitat loss could push the already critically endangered Bornean orangutans to extinction.

In April, Jong reported that Indonesian company PT Equator Sumber Rezeki is planning to expand its palm oil plantation in western Borneo. A quarter of the concession overlaps with orangutan habitat.

Behavior and adaptation

Despite such concerning news, local groups are finding ways to help orangutans, including building canopy bridges to avoid traffic accidents.

Mongabay also recently reported on a study that looked into sleep deprivation among orangutans, which can potentially weaken their immune system and affect their mental performance.

Another study examined ape resilience and how they adjust to human-caused disruptions and threats, such as mining, agriculture, urbanization and logging. Mongabay’s Charles Mpaka reported in March that while the apes are able to survive in the short term, adaptation such as changing nesting patterns can cause long-term dangers for orangutans when they put them in conflict with humans.

Banner image of an adult and baby orangutan at Betung Kerihun National Park in Indonesian Borneo, by Sabar Minsyah via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

A deadly heat wave in July that left people and wildlife struggling in Norway, Sweden and Finland was made at least 10 times more likely because of human-induced climate change, a rapid analysis has found.

Scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA), a global research network analyzing extreme weather events, said in their latest analysis that the heat wave that started July 9 and lasted two weeks was unusual for its intensity and prolonged duration.

In Norway, two local monitoring stations broke records for temperatures above 30° Celsius (86° Fahrenheit) 13 days in a row, while Finland experienced its longest streak of 30°C temperatures. The heat triggered multiple forest fires, 200 of which occurred in northern Sweden, said Erik Kjellström, report co-author from the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), during a press briefing. Dozens of people drowned in the region — 31 in Sweden and 28 in Finland — as people went swimming to cool off.

The extreme temperatures coincided with the Nordic summer holidays, when health facilities and other institutions have reduced staffing, resulting in strained services.

By combining observed weather data with climate models, the researchers found that maximum day and night temperatures recorded during the two-week period would have been much rarer in a pre-industrial climate when the world was cooler by 1.3°C (2.3°F), before the influence of human-induced climate change. “We conclude that climate change made the extreme heat about 2°C (3.6°F) hotter,” the authors note.

Kjellström said that in Sweden, heat waves refer to temperatures of 25°C  (77°F) in the daytime for several days in a row. “So that may not sound much in another perspective for Southern Europe or Africa or whatever, but in northern Sweden, that’s definitely very high temperatures,” he said, adding that nighttime temperatures also didn’t go down below 20°C (68°F).

In Norway, too, “it’s rare to have high temperatures lasting this long,” Amalie Skålevåg, co-author and climate researcher from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, said in a statement.

Wildlife was affected, with reindeer deaths reported, WWA noted. Some reindeers were observed having difficulty grazing, while others were spotted in town, escaping the heat and insects and looking for water.

The Indigenous Sámi people, known for reindeer herding, view these disruptions as a “human rights issue” and have called for adaptation efforts rooted in their traditional knowledge, the report added.

Maja Vahlberg, co-author from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, pointed out that infrastructure in cold-climate countries isn’t built to withstand deadly heat. For example, care facilities and homes in Nordic countries are well-insulated but poorly ventilated, which “meant indoor heat often exceeded safe limits,” Vahlberg said. The aging population in these facilities is especially vulnerable indoors in such overheated buildings.

Banner image of a reindeer calf in 2009 at a Gabna Sámi village in Sweden, by Silje Bergum Kinsten/norden.org via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5 DK).

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Spain is deploying 500 more soldiers to help battle wildfires that have ravaged parched woodlands during a prolonged heat wave, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said. Authorities are struggling to contain forest blazes, especially in the northwestern Galicia region. Firefighters are facing 12 major wildfires near the city of Ourense. The fires in Spain this year have burned an area roughly as big as metropolitan London. Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, making the region more vulnerable to wildfires.

By Barry Hatton, Associated Press 

Banner image: Firefighters battle a wildfire in Veiga das Meas, northwestern Spain, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Lalo R. Villar)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has recently proposed listing the Borneo earless monitor, an elusive lizard endemic to the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Borneo earless monitors (Lanthanotus borneensis) are illegally trafficked for the international pet trade. Finalizing the threatened listing would prohibit the import, export and sale of wild-sourced Borneo earless monitors in the U.S., while still allowing trade in captive-bred individuals.

“It is a good start in providing better international protection for this globally threatened species,” Vincent Nijman from Oxford Brookes University, U.K., who has studied the trafficking of these lizards, told Mongabay by email. “To me the threats faced by the species, its rarity, the limited amount of knowledge we have about its biology, and applying precautionary principle, would justify it to be listed as ‘endangered.’”

The Borneo earless monitor is a carnivorous, semiaquatic, nocturnal lizard that spends much of its time buried underground in the rainforest floor of Borneo. Although first described in 1878, sightings have been so rare and so little is known about it that scientists have dubbed it the “Holy Grail of herpetology.”

The species is globally endangered, with decreasing populations, and is protected across the three countries that share the island of Borneo: Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. It’s also listed on Appendix II of CITES, the international wildlife trade agreement, meaning its international trade is regulated.

Yet, a 2014 report by wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC, co-authored by Nijman, found that despite these protections, many individuals smuggled out of Borneo were listed for sale online. Even today, the U.S., EU and Japan are the top destinations for trafficked reptiles from Southeast Asia, including the earless monitor, Nijman said.

Nijman and other conservationists say they worry the proposed threatened status listing in the U.S. won’t adequately protect the species. Since trade in captive-bred earless monitors is still permitted, they say individuals collected from the wild will continue to be passed off as captive-bred with fraudulent paperwork, as observed with other reptiles from Indonesia.

They add that since the Borneo earless monitor is protected across its range, every individual seen in zoos or kept as a pet must be considered trafficked or a direct descendant of a trafficked individual. In addition to trade, the species is also threatened by climate change and rapidly loss of rainforests in Borneo due to logging, wildfires and conversion to agricultural plantations; nearly half of the island’s primary rainforest was lost between 1973 and 2015.

“Continuing to allow imports of earless monitor lizards from Indonesia almost certainly guarantees that the species will be collected from the wild and trafficked out of the country,” said Dianne DuBois, a staff scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, a U.S.-based NGO. “Anything short of a strict ban on trade allows that market to continue and pushes the lizard closer to extinction.”

Banner image: Borneo earless monitor. Image by Vojtěch Víta via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).