LONDON (AP) — Firefighters are tackling multiple fires in central England on a day that the U.K. recorded its hottest day of the year as an intense stretch of hot weather continued to grip Europe. Thursday’s fire outbreak across the West Midlands, which saw several houses burned to the ground, have been “one of the most significant” incidents the region’s fire service has ever dealt with, chief fire officer Simon Tuhill said. A child and three firefighters were taken to hospital following the wildfire in Stourbridge. The fires, the cause of which remains to be determined and which could take days to put out, came on a day the mercury struck 38.1 degrees Celsius (100.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in west London.

By Pan Pylas and Angela Charlton,  Associated Press

Banner image: A dog runs over dried grass in front of Tower Bridge during the fifth heatwave of the year in London, Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026. Image courtesy of Kirsty Wigglesworth via Associated Press

Companies can, in theory, appear to cut the carbon footprint of their supply chains in half simply by changing how they calculate emissions, according to a new paper. Researchers found that differences in accepted accounting methods can change how companies crunch their climate numbers and make it difficult to distinguish real emissions cuts from differences in calculations.

“It is actually possible … in the current framework that a company can either look like a climate pioneer or a climate laggard just depending on which numbers they pick,” lead author Ramana Gudipudi, a guest lecturer at the European School of Management and Technology in Germany, told Mongabay by phone. “If I am a company, all I need to do is to hire a good mathematician and say like, ‘Hey, this is how much I want to show my progress.’”

The analysis, published as a peer-reviewed perspective in the journal Nature Sustainability, looked at 401 European companies and found that 62.5% of their year-to-year variation in supply chain emissions could not be explained by changes to the business, industry, or emission intensity. By contrast, accounting for the companies’ direct emissions only varied by a bit more than 5%.

Gudipudi said companies often publicize a final number, without sharing how they arrived at that figure. The lack of transparency, paired with an array of possible baselines and calculations, means that real action on reducing emissions is obscured.

“We really don’t know whether there is any genuine decarbonization or not,” he said. “There are companies that are doing good. I am not saying that they are not. But at the moment, we don’t know.”

To demonstrate how inconsistent carbon reporting can be, the researchers ran an experiment using a hypothetical food and beverage company. They gave this company a fixed shopping list for the same amounts of chicken, milk, eggs, and wheat.

They then calculated the carbon footprint of that same shopping list using four different, but frequently used, scientific databases.

While database A reported a footprint of 1.7 million metric tons, database D reported 3.5 million metric tons — even though there were no material differences between the two supply chains.

In theory, a company could also use one database one year, and another the next.  That would allow them to report a more than 50% reduction, and the public would have no idea the change came from the database used and not actual emissions released.

If accounting is not better controlled, real action can get drowned out by accounting noise, Gudipudi said.

To curb this ambiguity, the paper’s authors propose a new framework that sets universal rules so that every company within an industry measures its footprint the same way and applies a mathematical tool to determine whether emissions are dropping because of real-world action or just clever accounting.

Banner image: Industrial complex surrounded by urban forest in Duisburg, Germany. Image courtesy of Jakub Żerdzicki via Pexels.

Researchers have found the first genetic evidence of bat-borne viruses within commercially sold bat guano fertilizer in Thailand.

However, the viral strains the team detected are not known to infect humans. Moreover, since the researchers only identified fragments of viral RNA and did not isolate live, intact viruses, they could not confirm if the genetic material poses an active threat to human health, according to a recent study, reports Mongabay’s Carolyn Cowan.

But the findings suggest that viral genetic material from bat populations can persist far beyond caves and survive within publicly available retail products, the study says.

“The most surprising thing was that these viruses don’t just stay in the caves,” senior author Thachawech Kimprasit, a medical microbiologist at Mahidol University in Bangkok, told Mongabay. “Their material can be found in commercial end products.”

The discovery raises concerns over a general lack of biosecurity protocols to protect harvesters, agricultural workers, and retail handlers, Thachawech added.

Bat guano or droppings are harvested from caves and widely used as agricultural fertilizer around the world. Researchers screened 41 samples of commercially available bat guano fertilizer commonly sold in Thai markets. They found two samples that tested positive for Alphacoronaviruses, a genus of coronaviruses, and one sample that tested positive for Betacoronaviruses, the genus that includes the Sarbecovirus subgenus, from which the pathogen responsible for COVID-19 originates.

The researchers identified the croslet horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus coelophyllus), a cave-dwelling insectivorous species common across mainland Southeast Asia, as the most likely natural host of the detected Betacoronavirus.

“Biosecurity management of bat guano fertilizers might require heat treatment or chemical treatment to remove the virus raw genetic material,” Thachawech said. “We should also focus on maintaining safe ecological boundaries between bats and people.”

Thura Soe Min Htike, a conservation officer at the Nature Conservation Society–Myanmar, who wasn’t involved in the study, said the solution to predicting and preventing zoonotic diseases is not to target bats, but rather to manage human activities.

The mammals provide vital ecological benefits like insect control and crop pollination that have been shown to enhance yields of regional crops like durian, rice and cacao. “The real issue is not the bats themselves, but human disruption of their habitats, which increases the risk of disease transmission,” Thura Soe Min Htike said.

According to Thachawech, the best way to minimize the risk of disease transmission is to follow the “One Health” approach, which recognizes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health.

“People’s health and environmental health is the same health,” he said. When it comes to bats and their caves, this means minimizing disturbance: “There’s no need to disturb bat roosts.”

Read the full story by Carolyn Cowan here.

Banner image: Bats in a cave roost in Thailand. Image by Jayakarthi Natarajan via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Since June, Myanmar’s military government has increased its efforts to restart a massive, controversial hydropower project backed by China that has remained suspended for 15 years.

The Myitsone Dam project, launched in 2009 and estimated to cost $3.6 billion then, was to be built along the Mali River, the N’mai River, and their confluence at Myitsone, where the Ayeyarwady River begins. Planned in Kachin state in an earthquake-prone area in northern Myanmar, the project is owned by Upstream Ayeyarwady Confluence Basin Hydropower Company, which is jointly owned by China’s Power Investment Corporation, Myanmar’s Ministry of Electric Power and Asia World Company. The dam was designed to be 1,310 meters (4,298 feet) long and 139.6 meters (458 feet) high.

In 2011, then-President Thein Sein suspended the project after widespread public opposition due to its environmental and social impacts.

However, at a June 30 press conference in Naypyidaw, the junta’s spokesperson, Khaing Khaing Soe, stated that the Myitsone project would be resumed to generate electricity for Myanmar.

The chief minister of Kachin state, Khet Htein Nan, also promoted the project during a public meeting in the state on June 23, offering incentives about electricity and adding that the dam will be built to withstand earthquakes and there will be no need to worry about flooding. He further said that if construction begins this year, the project could be completed within 8.5 years.

These statements follow junta leader-turned-President Min Aung Hlaing’s visit to China in early June.

The head of the junta’s Myitsone Project Implementation Committee said on his social media account that between January and the end of July 2026, authorities had held 38 meetings with local communities regarding the project.

Jacob, a spokesperson for the Kachin Human Rights Watch who uses only one name, told Mongabay by phone that these meetings do not reflect the genuine will of the people, but instead are intended to coerce public endorsement, constituting a violation of citizens’ basic rights.

“The Myitsone area and the Ayeyarwady River are part of the heritage of not only the local communities but also the entire people of Myanmar,” he said. “By proceeding with this project, the military is destroying our natural heritage. At the same time, it is violating the property rights of the people.”

In December, the Myanmar military issued a statement warning legal action against individuals and organizations opposing its projects.

Kenneth Ray Olson, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, U.S., who has researched the Irrawady River Delta, told Mongabay by email that the construction of Myitsone dams could reduce the amount of water flowing downstream during floods and stop nutrient-rich mud and sand from reaching the delta, affecting farming and the health of the river.

Until now, the terms of the project agreement have not been disclosed to the public.

Mongabay contacted the junta’s spokesperson and the head of the Myitsone Project Implementation Committee in Kachin state but hadn’t heard back by the time of publishing.

Banner image: Activists in Myanmar protest against the Myitsone Dam project in this 2019 file photo. Image by AP Photo/Thein Zaw.

Three more African countries have joined calls for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining until the environmental, social and economic impacts of such mining are better understood. This brings the number of African countries supporting a moratorium to six.

Mauritius, Mozambique and the Republic of the Congo announced support for the precautionary pause during the annual meeting of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica, in July, joining Malawi, Kenya and Madagascar.

The government of Mauritius said in its statement during the ISA meeting that “the sustainable development of Mauritius is inextricably dependent on a healthy and resilient ocean.”

Mauritius officials stressed that decisions regarding deep-seabed mining must be made based on “best available scientific evidence and by the precautionary approach, as enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.”

Malawi was the first African country to support a precautionary pause in May 2026. Kenya and Madagascar followed in June.

“The basis for all of these countries, while taking into account their individual contexts, is the lack of sufficient science and the governance gaps that persist,” David Willima from the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), a group of more than 140 NGOs and organizations, told Mongabay via email.

The six African nations are among 46 countries globally that support a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-seabed mining.

The ocean floor in the deep sea has small, hard rocks called polymetallic nodules that contain minerals like nickel, cobalt and manganese. Countries and companies want to mine these minerals for renewable energy and defense technologies.

The push for a moratorium or precautionary pause emerged in 2019 from gaps in scientific knowledge about the larger environmental impacts of mining for the nodules in international waters.

Joel Matonga, senior legal officer at the Malawian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Mongabay in a phone interview that Malawi decided to be the first African country to announce its stand as, like other developing nations, it is bearing the brunt of a warming ocean and a changing climate.

“We have had an increase in cyclones originating from the Madagascan area, the worst one being Cyclone Freddy in 2023 which caused devastating effects that led to a lot of fatalities and the displacement of people,” Matonga said.

During the two-week ISA meeting, Kenya, which is pro-moratorium, was allocated a seat for the first time on the 36-member ISA Council where rules governing the exploitation of deep-seabed mining are negotiated.

Willima of the DSCC said that with 10 seats on the ISA Council, Africa has a strong voice in shaping the rules, including developing environmental safeguards and benefit-sharing.

“The challenge will be turning that numerical strength into a common negotiating position despite divisions between mining interests and the growing precautionary-pause camp,” he said.

Banner image: Manganese nodules on the seafloor in the Clarion-Clipperton zone that’s been considered for deep-sea mining. Image by ROV KIEL 6000, GEOMAR – Geomar Bilddatenbank via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

In a village in central Nepal, growing conflict between farmers and rhesus macaques has prompted researchers to test artificial intelligence-based systems that can swiftly detect and deter the monkeys, reports contributor Praveen Kumar Yadav for Mongabay.

A 2026 study that followed rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) in one central Nepal region, found that nearly half of their diet consists of cultivated crops. In villages like Birta Deurali, also in central Nepal, farmers take turns guarding fields every two hours, Yadav reported.

To alleviate this burden, researchers in the country are developing AI-driven solutions.

Progress Jung Thapa, a researcher at Madan Bhandari University of Science and Technology, has developed a system built on cameras and lightweight computing devices trained on more than 4,000 annotated images. It detects monkeys and interprets their behavior, such as whether the monkeys are moving, feeding, or being vigilant, with an 88% accuracy across 28 field trials.

“If a monkey is still watching, the farmer has time,” Thapa said. “If it is already feeding, the response has to be immediate. A machine can detect. But a human decides.” Once a threat is identified, the system sends an alert straight to the farmer’s phone.

Meanwhile, Santosh Giri, an assistant professor at Tribhuvan University, is developing a prototype that pairs AI detection with an ultrasonic deterrent to repel monkeys. The deterrent system is, however, yet to be tested in working farm environments.

Both Thapa and Giri acknowledged that translating these technologies to field conditions is challenging. Poor visibility from rain or dense foliage, for example, reduces accuracy of detections.

Furthermore, even if farmers receive phone alerts, labor shortages make it hard for farmers to respond to them, according to zoologist Laxman Khanal.

Experts also warned of the macaques’ adaptability. “Monkeys are highly adaptive,” said Naresh Subedi, a wildlife researcher. “If deterrents do not represent real risk, they may eventually stop responding.”

The conflict with rhesus macaques has long been recognized at the policy level, but progress to address it effectively remains slow. A 2026 review of Nepal’s relief policies for wildlife-induced damage found that compensation for crop damage has struggled to keep pace with the scale of conflict, forcing farmers to bear losses alone.

While Nepal’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forests and Environment formed a 15-member technical task force in May 2026 to evaluate relief systems, the group has yet to release its report.

Read the full story by Praveen Kumar Yadav here.

Banner image: Monkeys displaying aggressive behaviors detected by the detection system designed by Progress Jung Thapa and his team. Image courtesy of Progress Jung Thapa.