Decades of unchecked deforestation for coffee production has devastated Vietnam’s Central Highland forests, according to a new investigation by the Berlin-headquartered watchdog group Coffee Watch.

Vietnam is currently the world’s second largest coffee producer, supplying nearly 40% of the world’s exports of Robusta coffee (Coffea canephora).

The investigation, which analyzed satellite data and government records, found that tropical forest cover in Vietnam’s Central Highlands region, which produces 95% of the country’s coffee, plummeted from 42.8% in 1990 to just 19% by 2020.

Forest loss was most rapid between 1995 and 2010, and stabilized at low levels in the 2020s, the investigation found. Much of the remaining tropical moist forest is now confined to “steeper, less accessible terrain, often at higher elevations and within formally designated protected areas,” the Coffee Watch’s report notes.

Historically, government policy and international development financing incentivized the rapid expansion of coffee in the Central Highlands, according to Coffee Watch. The ecological cost has been severe, the nonprofit adds, resulting in fragmented habitats, accelerated soil erosion and a “nutrient treadmill” where farmers must use increasing amounts of fertilizer to maintain yields in exhausted soils.

The Coffee Watch report notes that forest loss has affected water flow and recharge, soil stability and moisture, carbon storage and pests in the Central Highlands. It warns that 50% of Vietnam’s robusta belt could become unsuitable for coffee owing to the added impacts of climate extremes such as rising temperatures and erratic rainfall.

Ly Thi Minh Hai, Vietnam country director at the international environmental nonprofit RECOFTC, who wasn’t involved in the report, told Mongabay by email  that historically, “coffee expansion was indeed one of the major drivers of forest loss in parts of the Central Highlands”. She said, however, that the coffee sector is now shifting focus toward “improving the productivity, resilience, and sustainability of existing coffee-growing landscapes” rather than further expansion.

Minh Hai agreed that climate change is putting increasing pressure on coffee production in the region and that coffee farmers there need help to adapt to the pressures of climate change.

“This entails rejuvenating or replanting aging coffee plantations and introducing intercropping (such as shade trees) to avoid monoculture; adopting climate-smart and regenerative farming practices; improving water-use efficiency; and helping farmers boost yields and income from existing plantations rather than expanding into natural forests,” she said.

RECOFTC is currently working with local communities to promote agroforestry and secure forest tenure, which provides an essential foundation for preventing further encroachment, Minh Hai said.

“Vietnam’s coffee sector should not be defined by the deforestation challenges of the past,” she said. “The future of Vietnam’s coffee sector will not be measured by how much land we cultivate, but by how well we manage the landscapes we already have.”

Banner image of a coffee landscape in Gia Lai province, Central Highlands, Vietnam. Image courtesy of Stef vnmq via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

A beekeeping initiative is enabling women in India’s Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot that runs parallel to India’s west coast, to strengthen their livelihoods with more reliable honey harvests.

The 50 women are part of the Women for Bees project, launched in India in April 2025 by UNESCO in partnership with local nonprofit the Keystone Foundation. The project provides training and equipment to women from the Irula, Kurumba and Kattunayaka Indigenous communities across the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, reports Mongabay-India’s Arathi Menon.

Traditionally, many of these communities were skilled wild honey hunters, a practice that is often risky and increasingly restricted by forest protection laws. Managed beekeeping, using hive boxes, offers a safer, more predictable alternative.

The women are trained to rear the native Asian honey bee (Apis cerana indica), which is more resistant to local diseases and parasites than the commercially dominant European honey bee (Apis mellifera). A 2023 study comparing the two species suggests that, while the life cycles are generally similar, A. cerana colonies are better able to defend themselves against threats, diseases and disruptions.

The economic impact of the honey harvests from the hive boxes has been immediate, providing many participants with their first taste of financial independence. Neelavathi, an Irula woman from Tamil Nadu state, has used her earnings to support her family and purchase household goods. “Since I am the beekeeper at home, my family lets me keep the income for my own needs,” she told Mongabay-India.

Malavika Jayakrishnan, who leads the project at UNESCO, told Mongabay-India that the women have reported good honey yields with some women able to market their honey at premium prices.

The 2023 and a 2025 study has shown that pollination by Asian honey bees can improve yields of certain crops such as bitter gourd.   While the ecological impacts of the Women for Bees project are yet to be assessed, some of the participants said they have observed improved flowering and higher yields in surrounding fruit farms.

Lakshmi Babu, a Kattunayaka woman from Kerala’s Nilambur Elephant Reserve, said that the project has helped bring neighbors together to share knowledge and support one another.

“Bees have brought a lot of joy into my life,” she said. “The bees work hard and take very good care of those who care for them.”

With a 100% retention rate among participants, UNESCO project organizers hope to expand this model to other biosphere reserves.

Read the full story by Arathi Menon here.

Banner image of beekeepers at work in Nilambur, Kerala. In April 2025, UNESCO’s Women for Bees project debuted in India at the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, engaging 50 Indigenous women from Sigur, Pillur, Kuzhiyoor, Wayanad and Nilambur to learn beekeeping as a livelihood. Image by Shawn J. Stephen/Keystone Foundation.

Tree rings from the Amazon show that the world’s largest rainforest has developed wetter wet seasons and drier dry seasons over the past four decades. The findings point to intense seasonal swings that can cause significant harm to biodiversity and suggest that widespread drying out across the entire Amazon basin is unlikely. 

Researchers collected tree cores from two species of floodplain trees; one species only grows in the wet season and another that only grows in dry conditions. They analyzed oxygen isotopes and the chronology of chemical marks left along the annual growth rings from each tree. They found that wet-season rainfall increased by 15-22% since 1980, while dry-season rainfall declined by 5.8-13.5%.

“For a long time, there has been talk that it will dry up, and climate models created in the 1990s and early 2000s did indeed show that the Amazon was following that path,” study lead author Bruno Cintra, a biologist at the University of Birmingham, said, reported Mongabay contributor Luís Patriani. “But when we observe how the climate has developed over the last 40 or 50 years, what we see is that there is no clear pattern indicating that the biome as a whole is drying up.”

The biome isn’t drying up entirely, because changes in weather patterns are not impacting all regions across the massive forest in the same way. The northern portion of the rainforest is receiving more rain during the wet season, while the southern Amazon region is facing longer and drier dry seasons.

Not all of the southern drying can be attributed to climate change, however. The southern Amazon is also home to the “arc of deforestation,” an area where agriculture and development are quickly pushing north into the forest. Deforestation and forest fragmentation has been most intense in the southern region; it’s also where the most dry season fires have damaged the rainforest, co-author Jochen Schöngart, a researcher at INPA in Manaus, said. 

The magnitude of precipitation change and climate variability in recent decades is unlike anything recorded over the last two centuries.

“What we have been observing in the last 40 years is unprecedented,” Schöngart said.

“The four most intense floods in the history of the central Amazon — in 2021, followed by 2012, 2009 and 2022 — occurred during the last 16 years,” he added. “In parallel, the three most intense hydrological droughts in the region took place in 2024, 2023 and 2010, respectively.”

Read the full story by Luís Patriani here.

Banner image: Researcher Nelson Jaén analyzes growth rings from a mahogany tree (Swietenia spp.). Image courtesy of Peter Groenendijk.

Pangolin scales and other body parts trafficked internationally appear to come from the same areas that supply the animals for local wild meat markets, a new study has found. It created a DNA database and location-prediction model for three threatened species: the white-bellied (Phataginus tricuspis), Sunda (Manis javanica) and Chinese (Manis pentadactyla) pangolins.

Pangolins are the world’s most trafficked wild mammals; estimates suggest more than 1 million animals have been captured from the wild over the past decade. The new database contains DNA information from 711 samples collected from museum specimens and seized pangolin parts.

“Our dense sampling of the white-bellied pangolin … revealed that both forms of trade (domestic and international) draw from the same source regions,” the study’s authors wrote. “This overlap is also found, albeit less pronounced, in the two Asian species and suggests a shared supply chain and common actors at the point of pangolin harvest, and possibly beyond.”

In Cameroon, DNA samples from the endangered white-bellied pangolin showed that international seizures in China and Europe overlapped with the same sourcing locations for the two largest domestic wild meat markets in Cameroon: the capital Yaoundé, and the port city of Douala.

The study identified the Ebo Wildlife Reserve in western Cameroon as a main sourcing site for both domestic markets, as well as international traffickers. Other key sourcing areas include the forests near the southern city of Ebolowa, near the border with Equatorial Guinea, and near the town of Eseka, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest of Yaoundé.

“For certain regions and species, local bushmeat markets sourced pangolins from the same areas as international trafficking syndicates, suggesting that these markets are interconnected,” lead author Sean Heighton, from the University of Caen Normandy in France and a member of the Pangolin Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, told Mongabay by email.

For the Sunda and Chinese pangolins, both critically endangered, there were fewer samples available, but researchers could still trace their approximate source locations.

Seizures of Chinese pangolins carried out in Yunnan province, southern China, for example, were traced back to Myanmar’s Sino-Himalayan region, while others came from northeastern India, Taiwan and Guangdong, another southern Chinese province. The study found that Sunda pangolins were largely sourced from southwestern Borneo.

“We can only hope that similar work can be done in the future for the other five or six species of pangolin,” Vincent Nijman, head of the Oxford Wildlife Trade Research Group at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K., who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by email.

However, Nijman said the study may be limited in its enforcement value because prosecutions are typically brought where shipments are seized, not where pangolins were poached. The source location information also can’t be used for reintroductions, since pangolins are rarely trafficked alive, Nijman said.

Banner image: White-bellied pangolins captured in southeastern Nigeria and destined for trade. Image courtesy of Alex Moore.

Every monsoon season, in the misty hills of Darjeeling, in West Bengal, eastern India, the elusive Himalayan salamander emerges from beneath the forest floor.

The ancient amphibians (Tylototriton himalayanus) engage in a delicate dance, a mating ritual that lasts up to 90 minutes before they attach their eggs to semi-submerged vegetation, such as denseflower knotweed (Persicaria glabra). The survival of the next generation of salamanders is, however, increasingly at risk as their critical wetland habitats disappear, report contributors Subhrajit Sen and Soham Das for Mongabay.

According to Koushik Deuti of the Zoological Survey of India, the salamander’s future is tethered to small, shrinking water bodies, known locally as pokhris.

“Most of these small wetland areas have been converted due to excessive housing and tourism in the Darjeeling hills, and these wetlands have been drained and there is no water,” Deuti tells Mongabay. “So, this conservation of the Himalayan salamander is directly related to the conservation of these small wetlands.”

Beyond physical habitat loss, remaining ponds are contaminated by wastewater and detergents. Infrastructure also poses a direct physical threat: New roads frequently divide migration paths and salamanders are crushed by vehicles as they attempt to reach breeding sites. Nirmal Tamang, a resident of Namthing Pokhri, says locals have requested culverts to allow safe passage for the amphibians but none have been built so far.

India’s first salamander sanctuary, established in 1985, serves as a cautionary tale. Once a thriving habitat, officials built tourist infrastructure in the area which made it impossible for the salamanders to continue living there.

“Mistakenly, at that time they have cemented all this area,” Devesh Pandey, a divisional forest officer in Kurseong, Darjeeling, tells Mongabay. “Whenever there is a cementing effect, the hibernated salamander can’t come out … so all the salamander population has gone extinct from that area.”

Current assessments by Barkha Subba, a scientist with WWF-India, reveal a significant protection gap: Just 10% of salamander territory falls within officially protected areas. The remaining 90% sits on private land and tea estates, where conservation often competes with human plans and the development of new tourism infrastructure.

In response, the West Bengal Forest Department has started to restore habitat by clearing invasive weeds, digging new ponds and removing waste. There are also plans to formally protect three additional sites, Pokhritar, Namthing Pokhri  and Panch Pokhri, as dedicated salamander sanctuaries this year.

Watch the full video by Subhrajit Sen and Soham Das here.

Banner image of a salamander in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India. Image courtesy of Subhrajit Sen/Mongabay.

On July 15, gunfire erupted between armed groups near an Ebola Treatment Center (ETC) in Nyankunde (or Nyakunde), located 45 kilometers (28 miles) southwest of Bunia in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Following the fighting, medical personnel from the World Health Organization (WHO), Africa CDC and the NGO Samaritan’s Purse evacuated from Nyankunde, further slowing the Ebola response there. 

“There was an attack yesterday and there are frequent attacks, actually since the end of 2025. The armed conflict has intensified,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, during a press briefing the day after the attack.

Since May 2026, the DRC has been enduring its 17th Ebola outbreak. Although the Bundibugyo strain is not considered the deadliest Ebola variant, cases continue to rise rapidly. In just two months, the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) recorded 2,124 cases and 828 deaths, making it the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak on record.

The current outbreak is in a mining town populated by migrant workers that travel across the region, increasing spread of the disease. The area is also the site of ongoing armed conflict, which makes it difficult for aid workers to safely respond.

“Due to this chronic conflict and other factors, the community mistrust is also serious. I have been to Beni during the 2018-2020 outbreak. I have traveled there many times. But compared to this one, I think Beni is nothing. North Kivu was nothing,” Ghebreyesus said. “The difficult environment that makes the response really complicated.”

Dr. Desire Duabo, head of the Nyankunde health zone, told Mongabay that the exchange of gunfire began after the commander of the Patriotic and Integrationist Front of Congo (FPIC) militia and his bodyguards were killed by gunmen, who have not been identified, not far from the treatment center. Active since 2019, the FPIC is one of the many armed groups operating in the region.

“The situation has been extremely tense over the past two days. We are under a lot of stress. The patients have remained at the Ebola Treatment Center and are being cared for by our local staff,” Duabo, who remained on site, told Mongabay by phone. 

Describing the situation as unprecedented, he added: “All Ebola response activities [in the area] have been brought to a standstill. Contact tracing for confirmed cases has stopped, alerts can no longer be investigated, and we are no longer able to conduct safe and dignified burials. The situation needs to change.” It is unclear when or if humanitarian workers will return to the area.

Mongabay contacted WHO for further comment but didn’t receive a response by the time of publication. Despite the challenges, the agency’s head remained optimistic about eventually bringing the outbreak under control. “Even without approved vaccines and treatments, 377 people have recovered, showing that with early diagnosis and safe care, this disease can be survived and stopped,” Ghebreyesus said.

Banner image: Health workers transporting an Ebola patient to a treatment center. Image by Moses Sawasawa/Associated Press.