Congo Basin countries have announced the launch of a payments for environmental services, or PES, initiative at the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, intended to encourage practices favorable to forest protection and restoration.

The financial mechanism, announced Nov. 18 and supported by the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), transfers direct payments via a mobile app to communities and individuals, particularly farmers. The payments compensate participants for engaging in sustainable practices that protect and restore the environment. Eligibility to participate is based on verified completion of six types of activities: agroforestry, reforestation, deforestation-free agriculture, forest regeneration, sustainable forest management, and conservation.

“Hundreds of farmers are already under contract and the first direct mobile payments based on performance were successfully made this month, confirming the efficiency and fairness of the system,” Kirsten Schuijt, director-general of WWF International, which is helping implement the system, said in a press release.

This program builds on a decade of experience and on the success of pilot projects in the region. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of the Congo, agroforestry, deforestation-free agriculture and natural regeneration contracts “cover nearly 3,000 hectares [7,400 acres], representing nearly 10,000 direct and indirect beneficiaries,” the press release notes. In Gabon, “15 villages have been identified to sign community conservation contracts the beginning of next year, covering a total area of nearly 50,000 hectares,” or about 123,600 acres.

To build on that success, CAFI announced $100 million of additional funding, on top of the $25 million already committed to the program.

Roger Pholo Mvumbi is the national executive secretary of ASSA, a civil society platform in the DRC that brings together farmers and organizations working to combat food insecurity and malnutrition. He told Mongabay that, “The deployment of Payments for Environmental Services is a fine initiative, on the sole condition that the real producer is formally identified. Therefore, in-depth work is needed to identify them.”

The forests of the Congo Basin face mounting pressure from agricultural expansion,  population growth, fuelwood harvesting, logging and mining activities. The region lost more than 35 million hectares (86 million acres) of forest cover between 1990 and 2020. That’s an area larger than the entire Republic of Congo. Studies show that hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest are being cleared each year. “The payment system can precisely offer communities alternative incomes by remunerating them for practices that preserve the forest rather than destroy it,” Pholo said.

Banner image: A mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx) in Gabon, one of the Congo Basin countries. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Researchers in Canada have documented a wild gray wolf hauling a crab trap out of the water to eat the bait inside, according to a recent study. Researchers suggest it may be the first recorded example of possible tool use by a wolf (Canis lupus).

The finding emerged from a program maintained by Indigenous Haíɫzaqv guardians to trap and remove invasive European green crabs (Carcinus maenas) from coastal British Columbia province. When several traps were found damaged, the guardians and collaborating scientists first suspected bears or wolves could be the culprit. However, some of the traps remained fully submerged, even at low tide, so they suspected otters or seals instead.

To put an end to the mystery, they set up a camera trap aimed at a crab trap where there had been previous damage.

“We figured maybe we’ll see a seal nearby,” Kyle Artelle, study first author from the State University of New York in the U.S., told Mongabay in a video call. “And so that might give us the first hint that it’s a seal and then maybe we could follow up with GoPros in the trap itself.”

However, the video instead captured a wolf swimming to shore with the trap’s rope in her mouth. She then put the rope down and pulled in more of it until the entire trap was on shore. Then she opened the trap and took out the herring bait inside. These actions suggest the wolf understood there was food inside a hidden, submerged container. The only visible clue was a buoy at the surface, the researchers say.

Robert Shumaker, an evolutionary biologist at Indianapolis Zoo in the U.S., who wasn’t part of the study, told National Geographic that while “[j]ust pulling on something that someone else arranged is not tool use,” the behavior offers insight into how wolves think.

Artelle said that whether it constitutes tool use is a matter of semantics. He said the wolf may have learned the behavior from people. The local Haíɫzaqv guardians check the traps almost daily, pulling them to shore, and this wolf, or another, may have been watching from the treeline, he added.

Dúqváísla William Housty, a member of the Haíɫzaqv Nation who works on the project, agreed.

“The wolves over time have watched our guardians set those traps,” Housty said in a video.

Wolves and First Nations people have coexisted in this area for at least 10,000 years, Artelle said.

Housty added that part of the Haíɫzaqv origin story says the first ancestors were “able to go back and forth between a human and a wolf form. Wolves are us, they think just the way we do.”

As for the video, Artelle said it offers a new understanding of wolf cognition and shows that to outsmart wolves, people need to build better crab traps.

Banner image: A wolf in British Columbia. Image courtesy of Kyle Artelle.

Indigenous women of childbearing age from Nicaragua’s Waspam municipality have been exposed to toxic levels of mercury, according to a new report by the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN).

The researchers took hair samples from 50 women between 18 and 44 years old. The women live in the Indigenous communities of Li Auhbra and Li Lamn, located along the Wangki River, on the northern Caribbean coast. The area is home to many Indigenous communities and small-scale gold mining operations, which commonly use mercury to amalgamate gold.

While no amount of mercury exposure is considered safe, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has set a threshold of 1 part per million (ppm). Beyond that limit, negative impacts can be detected in the fetuses of pregnant women. Of the 50 participants, 80% had mercury levels above 1 ppm, and 98% had levels above the more health-protective proposed level of 0.58 ppm.

Mercury exposure can impact a developing fetus months after the mother’s exposure and cause lifelong health problems, including neurological impairment, IQ loss, and kidney and cardiovascular damage, the report said.

The report links mercury pollution in these women to small-scale gold mining. While most of the women of Li Auhbra and Li Lamni depend on agriculture, fishing and hunting for self-subsistence, some participants said they work as gold washers, a process that involves using mercury to extract gold from the surrounding ore. Researchers said participants who don’t engage directly in mining may be exposed through family members who do work with mercury or they may live close to polluted areas. Though the biggest source of exposure is likely food: mercury pollution commonly ends up in rivers, contaminating the fish local people depend on.

“In combination with the dietary surveys we conducted, it is clear that these women are being exposed to mercury via their diet,” Lee Bell, IPEN’s technical and policy adviser, told Mongabay over email. “This means that the food chain is being impacted across the river system, and in turn, many other populations reliant on river fish in this region will likely also be impacted.”

The Minamata Convention on Mercury, a global treaty to protect public health and the environment, has “shortcomings that limit its effectiveness,” say the authors of the report. For example, the convention regards small-scale mining as an allowed use of mercury, meaning the trade in mercury for that use is also allowed. The report authors said amendments to the treaty, which has been in place since August 2017, are needed to dramatically reduce the global mercury supply.

“National and international measures (such as the Minamata Convention on Mercury) to control mercury contamination from gold mining in Nicaragua are not effective in their current form and need to be strengthened,” Bell told Mongabay.

Banner image: Hair sampling team near a sampling location on the Madre de Dios River. Image courtesy of IPEN.

Burning fossil fuels and forests releases the well-known greenhouse gases that drive anthropogenic climate change. That burning also produces soot, a fine black particle that harms health and accelerates warming. A new photo series highlights the often overlooked consequence of burning.

Award-winning photojournalist Victor Moriyama, in partnership with the Clean Air Fund and Climate Visuals, traveled across Brazil, from the Amazon Rainforest in the north to rural communities in the southeast, to photograph soot and its human impacts during 2025, following some of the nation’s driest years on record.  

Soot, also called black carbon, can stay suspended in the air for weeks or months before settling. When it lands, the particles darken the ground, or ice, increasing the absorption of heat from the sun, intensifying warming.

For people living near burning landscapes, soot becomes unavoidable. It’s inhaled into lungs, causing illness and death. The effects are devastating: globally, soot contributes to at least 8.1 million premature deaths every year, roughly 700,000 of them children under 5.

Despite its demonstrated damage to human health and contributions to climate change, soot has been largely overlooked. Just 1% of international development funding between 2019 and 2023 went toward clean air projects, including work targeting soot, according to the Clean Air Fund’s latest report.

Mongabay spoke to Moriyama about his months-long experience photographing fire, soot and smoke. Below are some of his photos and thoughts.

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  A child protects his eyes from smoke in the rural area of Senador Guiommard in Acre, Brazil.
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  Amazon rainforest burned to make way for cattle grazing in Acre's rural district of Manoel Urbano.
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  Residents fight a fire that is reaching their homes on the outskirts of Rio Branco, Acre.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Amazon fires, right in the middle of the flames,” Moriyama told Mongabay by phone. “You see thousand-year-old trees, and it’s awful because you smell all these wonderful aromas, those trees have such unique scents. And then it mixes with sound of macaws screaming in pain. The birds are extremely distressed; it’s not their normal call; it’s a song of suffocation.”

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  Birds fly above burning waste at a municipal landfill in Minas Gerais state, Brazil.
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  An informal recycling worker at a municipal landfill in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
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  Burning waste at the Teófilo Otoni municipal landfill in Minas Gerais, Brazil.

“Our mentor Davi Kopenawa [a Yanomami shaman and Indigenous leader] once told me … that he has dreamt several times of the world ending in a ball of fire. And when I’m there, capturing the wildfires in the Amazon that are killing the heart of our planet, I can only think of what he said,” Moriyama said.

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  Burning in a rural area near Via Chico Mendes, one of the main expressways in Acre, Brazil.
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  A truck drives past a fire on the Presidente Dutra Highway in São Paulo, Brazil.
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  Residents of rural Manoel Urbano fight a forest fire in Acre state, Brazil.

“Smoke gets into your eyes, and it burns. People try and fight the fires, but you can’t stand it for long. They are often on the frontlines without an adequate mask, and it’s intolerable. It gets into your eyes; it gets into your lungs. The body reacts horribly to smoke. It’s a horrific thing,” Moriyama said. “But it is normalized because every year in the dry season there are fires. So, everyone is sort of used to it. All the cities of the Amazon have fires, the riverine communities too.”

All images courtesy of Victor Moriyama/Climate Visuals.

Banner image: A forest fire in Acre, the westernmost state of the Brazilian Amazon.

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — Turkey will host next year’s annual United Nations climate talks, as Australia late Wednesday bowed out of the race to host the conference after a protracted standoff.

As Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spoke at the U.N. conference, this year being hosted by Brazil, Australia’s Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen announced on the sidelines that his country had officially pulled out.

While Turkey won the bid to host the climate conference in the resort city of Antalya, Bowen is expected to act as president of next year’s negotiations, part of a compromise he said had been worked out with Turkey.

“Obviously, it would be great if Australia could have it all,” Bowen said. “But we can’t have it all.”

As president of the negotiations, Bowen said he would have all the powers to “handle the negotiations, to appoint co-facilitators, to prepare draft text, and to issue the cover decision.”

Environmental group Greenpeace called the arrangement “highly unusual.”

“Whatever the forum, whoever the president, the urgency and focus cannot change, and phasing out fossil fuels and ending deforestation must be at the core of the COP31 agenda,” said David Ritter, who leads Greenpeace Australia Pacific.

Ethiopia was announced as host for COP32 earlier this week. Other nations, including India, have already bid to host the talks the year after that.

By Anton L. Delgado, Seth Borenstein and Melina Walling, Associated Press

Banner image: The next U.N. climate conference, COP 31, is set to be held in the city of Antalya, Turkey. Image by REHBER0770 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Queens of some ant species have evolved an unusually hostile mode for colony takeover: they infiltrate colonies of other ant species and manipulate the worker ants into killing their own queen — their mother — then accepting the intruding queen as their new leader, according to a recent study.

In the world of ants, where battles over territory and resources are common, this is a rare example of matricide, or “the killing of a mother by her own genetic offspring,” researchers say.

The researchers observed such matricide-inducing behavior in two parasitic ant species: Lasius orientalis and Lasius umbratus.

Ants rely mainly on chemical signals to communicate and tell friends and foes apart. The parasitic queens of L. orientalis and L. umbratus use that to their advantage.

“Ants live in the world of odors,” Keizo Takasuka, study co-author from Kyushu University, Japan, said in a statement. “Before infiltrating the nest, the parasitic queen stealthily acquires the colony’s odor on her body from workers walking outside so that she is not recognized as the enemy.”

Once inside the colony, the parasitic queen covertly approaches the resident queen and sprays her with abdominal fluid that the researchers suspect is formic acid.

“When they get attacked, ants often spray the intruder with formic acid as a way of alerting other ants in the colony,” Daniel Kronauer, a researcher of insect societies at Rockefeller University, U.S., who wasn’t involved in the study, told Live Science. “So, it makes a lot of sense that this would be repurposed by the parasite queen.”

After spraying the host queen, the parasitic queen quickly retreats, letting the worker ants attack their acid-covered queen. “She knows the odor of formic acid is very dangerous, because if host workers perceive the odor they would immediately attack her as well,” Takasuka said.

Once the host queen is dead, the parasitic queen begins laying her own eggs, and the existing workers care for them, saving her the trouble of starting her own colony from scratch.

By doing so, the parasite queen “can use all the resources that are already in place and get her own colony up and running much faster,” Rachelle Adams, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University, U.S., who wasn’t involved in the study, told The New York Times.

Scientists have previously observed parasitic queens killing a host queen by throttling or beheading her. But this study is the first to document a new kind of host manipulation, in which offspring are induced to kill “an otherwise indispensable mother,” the researchers write.

The research team now plans to study if such matricidal behavior extends to insects other than ants.

Matricidal manipulation by the Lasius orientalis queen. Video by Takasuka et al., 2025 (CC BY 4.0).

Banner image: Parasitic ant queen Lasius orientalis, left, approaches the queen of L. flavus to spray her with a fluid. Image by Takasuka et al., 2025 (CC BY 4.0).