The brown clockfig, an extremely rare succulent growing in the hot, arid border region of Namibia and South Africa, was recently assessed as critically endangered by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

The western Gariep Valley is a vast landscape spanning the southern part of Tsau ǁKhaeb National Park in Namibia and the Richtersveld region of Northern Cape province in South Africa. It’s in this harsh environment, shaped by extreme heat and dryness, that the brown clockfig (Cheiridopsis brownii) grows on quartz ridges, shale, gravel, and sandy soils, and in cracks and fissures in desert mountains.

The IUCN estimates the species, with thick leaves and daisy-like yellow flowers, has a total range of 424 square kilometers (164 square miles) in the valley, but occupies only around 60 km2 (23 mi2) of this area.

Habitat loss due to overgrazing is among its major threats. Another is the demand for mineral resources such as diamonds, with mining permits being issued across the region. That’s placed more of the species’ already limited habitat under pressure in both South Africa and Namibia.

“The vast desertification of the Aniesvlakte [plain in South Africa’s Richtersveld region] as a direct result of severe overgrazing, as well as the mass desertification caused by sand moving from the coast due to unrehabilitated mines, are threatening to swallow most of the remaining population in South Africa,” Pieter van Wyk, a botanist with South African National Parks (SANParks), who carried out the most recent assessment, told Mongabay via email.

Another threat comes from new green-energy developments — massive-scale green hydrogen projects — planned over vast sections of where this species occurs, van Wyk said.

Additionally, a prolonged drought from 2012-202, combined with other factors, resulted in a decline in the species’ population of 50-90% since 1992. Climate change is expected to intensify these pressures, bringing higher temperatures and declining rainfall to the region.

By 2052, the IUCN assessment projects that another 80-100% of the population could be lost. It adds that targeted conservation activities are not currently being conducted for the plant.

Van Wyk said it’s crucial to protect all the brown clockfigs in the extremely dry, low-lying areas of the Gariep Desert adjacent to the Oranje River, since they support insects that in turn sustain the region’s highly arid- and heat-adapted spiders and reptiles.

However, the species’ population has reached levels so concerning that the Richtersveld Desert Botanical Garden, founded and curated by van Wyk, has started collecting specimens for conservation. This includes seeds that van Wyk collected in 2021 from an area where populations were designated to be destroyed for diamond mines.

Van Wyk said it “remains shocking” that a highly resilient species like the brown clockfig can easily grow in circumstances where no human can survive, yet “simply cannot survive the land use practices” wrought by humans.

Banner image: A brown clockfig in South Africa’s Gariep Valley. Image © pietermier via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

More Amazonian species, in larger numbers, are appearing for sale on the other side of the planet in Southeast Asia’s exotic pet trade, reports contributor Gloria Dickie for Mongabay.

Over the past two years, Scott Roberton, who leads the countertrafficking program for U.S.-based nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Society, has observed a rise in Latin American species, including marmosets, capuchin monkeys, tamarins, capybaras, matamata turtles, and rare Amazonian fish, crammed into small enclosures alongside domestic pets in Thai markets.

“It’s changed a lot in the past two years. The volume is greater. The diversity of species is great,” said Roberton. “Every time we come, there is a new species here.”

The supply chain can originate deep in the rainforest, often centered around hubs like Iquitos in Peru, Dickie reports. Animals poached from Colombia, Brazil, and neighboring nations are ferried along Amazonian rivers into Peru, where corruption and illegal trafficking, including fraudulent documentation, allow wild-caught specimens to be laundered as captive-bred stock that can be legally traded.

“Iquitos is a city where a lot of illegal commodities move freely within the Amazon,” said Renata Cao, Latin America project lead with the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC. “A lot of products from different countries get to Iquitos, and then in Peru it’s easier to launder.”

From South America, the animals endure stressful multi-leg flights lasting more than 25 hours to reach Asian markets. The trade is further fueled by social media platforms that connect buyers and sellers globally, according to Neil D’Cruze, a wildlife researcher.

“The market stall is really just the visible part of a much longer supply chain,” D’Cruze said. “And increasingly, that physical supply chain is intersecting with a global digital marketplace capable of connecting sellers and buyers thousands of miles apart.”

Roberto Vieto, animal welfare adviser with U.K.-based World Animal Protection, said the trade inflicts pain and suffering on the animals, with many dying during transit due to extreme stress and confinement.

“There are no direct flights, so it will be a super-long journey with several stops,” Vieto said. “That is only causing extreme stress for the animals, and the level of mortality is super high.”

While it’s unknown exactly how many animals die in transit, a report from the European Union on wildlife trafficking found that 70% of wild animals die within six weeks of capture.

In Bangkok’s Chatuchak Market, overcrowded conditions, high heat, and proximity to food stalls also elevate biosecurity and zoonotic disease risks. Despite international criticism and a 2024 fire that killed more than 1,000 animals, such market operations continue.

Read the full story by Gloria Dickie here.

Banner image: A shopper walks through Chatuchak Market carrying her pet raccoon. Image by Gloria Dickie.

Fewer than half of tiger poaching and trafficking arrests in Southeast Asia result in convictions or legal penalties, providing little deterrent to an illegal black market that is driving wild tigers towards extinction, reports contributor Sean Mowbray for Mongabay.

Researchers analyzed 259 tiger seizure cases recorded between 2019 and 2024 across seven range countries: Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.

Of those 259 cases, only 110 resulted in prison sentences or fines, according to the report published by Canadian conservation think tank the GuArdean Centre for Conservation Research, wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC, and WWF International.

Another 35 cases ended in suspended sentences, while 63 arrests lacked a clear outcome and 48 had no available public data.

The report reveals that law enforcement efforts overwhelmingly target low and mid-level poachers, couriers and local traders, rather than the high-level organizers financing transnational syndicates.

“We’re talking about serious organized crime,” Heather Sohl, tiger trade lead at WWF and report co-author, told Mongabay. “These are criminal networks that are involved in other organized crime, such as human trafficking and money laundering.”

Sohl added that arrests alone are insufficient, “Investigation and case-building is needed to build support for strong prosecutions, and only by looking across the whole criminal justice response can we look to really disrupt these wildlife trafficking networks.”

Vietnam and Indonesia logged the highest conviction numbers, with 51 cases in each country carrying jail time or fines. However, Vietnam also accounted for 33 of the region’s 35 suspended sentences.

Thailand recorded 36 arrests and Malaysia 35, but these yielded just five and nine imprisonments respectively.

Cambodia and Laos documented just one successful prosecution each, while Myanmar reported none.

“It’s really difficult to develop a clear picture of what’s happening in some of the other countries because there’s just no transparency with regards to prosecutions,” report lead author Rachel Boratto, executive director of the GuArdean Centre for Conservation Research, told Mongabay. Boratto said that without follow-through, wildlife laws become “just laws on paper.”

For Vincent Nijman, a wildlife trade researcher and director of U.K.-based EcoVerde Global Consulting, who wasn’t involved in the analysis, the report gives a great overview of illegal wildlife trade, but has some limitations. “The rate of successful prosecution, while high compared to other protected wildlife, remains rather low,” he told Mongabay by email. He acknowledged that limited data is a “major barrier” to understanding the full picture.

Chas Barnes, counter-trafficking lead at wildcat conservation nonprofit Panthera, said that failing to prosecute kingpins undermines overall conservation goals. “Weak law enforcement or weak punishment undermines other important [conservation] interventions,” Barnes stated. “Targeting the low- and medium-level offenders isn’t always the way to go for the maximum disruption”. 

Read the full story by Sean Mowbray here.

Banner image: A Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica) in Indonesia. Only a few hundred of the critically endangered species remain in the wild, with numbers dwindling due to poaching and habitat destruction. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

A multi-day thunderstorm over the Mediterranean Sea struck Malta, stranding hundreds of passing migratory birds on Sept. 14, 2026. Hunters in the country then shot hundreds of those birds, including protected species, shows evidence gathered by the conservation NGO Birdlife Malta.

Malta sits on the Central European-Mediterranean flyway that millions of migratory birds use annually as they fly from their breeding grounds in Europe to overwinter in Africa. Strong weather systems can interrupt these journeys, causing a “bird fall” — a phenomenon where hundreds of birds seek shelter on land.

“This can result in unusually large concentrations of exhausted migratory birds in particular locations,” Antonia Micallef, public engagement executive at BirdLife Malta, told Mongabay by email. “This concentration makes birds much easier to detect and target [by hunters].”

Malta has the highest density of hunters in all of Europe. “Over 10,000 hunters [are] active at any one time,” Micallef said.

According to BirdLife Malta, hunters shot more than 500 European turtle doves (Streptopelia turtur), a threatened species whose numbers have plummeted, after the storm.

Malta allows a quota of 500 European turtle doves to be hunted in autumn, which runs through the end of September, but Micallef said that number was reached soon after the storm, and the season was closed on Sept. 14. “Despite the official closure, BirdLife Malta documented ongoing hunting of Turtle-doves in the hours and days that followed,” Micallef said.

Volunteers also reported hunters shooting at a flock of more than 150 little egrets (Egretta garzetta) with two confirmed dead, and several injured birds, including a European bee-eater (Merops apiaster), night heron and grey heron (Ardea cinerea), according to BirdLife Malta. There were also three incidents of European rollers (Coracias garrulus) being shot. On Sept. 16, two black storks (Ciconia nigra), protected in Malta and the European Union, were also shot.

“Between 14 and 21 September alone, BirdLife Malta collected 21 protected birds with confirmed shooting injuries,” Micallef said. “Repeated illegal mortality adds another pressure to migratory species already facing habitat loss, climate change and other threats along their migration routes.”

Hunting is a growing concern in the Mediterranean, where an estimated 25 million birds are poached each year for sport, taxidermy collections, social media ‘trophies’ and food, in addition to legal hunts. This is despite many of these birds being protected in the EU, and millions spent on conservation efforts.

Micallef said enforcement remains a challenge as “environmental police resources were extremely limited compared with the number of hunters active across the islands.” The Maltese government has also been lenient with poachers, conservationists say, issuing large-scale amnesties and allowing some banned hunters a chance to get their licenses.

“Protected-species legislation only works if it is effectively enforced,” Micallef said. “The continued shooting of protected birds, alongside limited enforcement capacity, undermines the protection intended by European law.”

Banner image: A European roller was killed by hunters after a mid-September storm. Image courtesy of BirdLife Malta.

Oil slicks from ships and offshore oil platforms cover nearly 1.6 million square kilometers (618,000 square miles) of the ocean surface each year, an area slightly larger than the nation of Mongolia.

The estimate comes from a recent report by Skytruth, a U.S.-based nonprofit that used satellite imagery, machine learning and vessel tracking data to trace global oil pollution in the oceans between 2023 and 2025.

According to John Amos, CEO of Skytruth, this kind of pollution was largely invisible before satellite imagery made it possible to track.

“Any vessel operator could be pretty confident that nobody was going to notice what they were doing out in the middle of the ocean,” Amos told Mongabay by phone. “So that’s changed. We can see it now.”

Much of the vessel oil slicks come from bilge waste, a mix of oil and water that collects in the bottom of a ship’s hull during operation. Tankers sometimes also wash out their cargo holds and flush crude oil residue into the sea.

“It’s nasty oily dirty gunk that you just want to get rid of,” Amos said. “And the easiest thing to do with it is just pump it out into the ocean while you’re at sea.”

According to the report, most of these discharges are illegal under MARPOL, the international treaty on pollution from ships. A MARPOL treaty adopted in 1973 allows vessels to discharge bilge water containing no more than 15 parts of oil per million parts of water.

SkyTruth used modeling to estimate ocean oil pollution between 2023 and 2025.  They found vessels were responsible for 81% of the slick area, mostly cargo ships and tankers, while oil infrastructure such as offshore oil platforms accounted for 18%.

Indonesian waters had the most verified slicks in the report, with 823, followed by Malaysia, which had 214. Both countries share the Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest waterways in the world.

“The sheer volume of large cargo ships and oil tankers transiting their waters could be largely responsible,” Amos said.

SkyTruth could only find ownership records for 9 of the 20 vessels flagged as repeat polluters.

Two of those belonged to Indonesia’s PT Waruna Nusa Sentana and another two to Nigeria’s Sea Transport Services Nigeria Ltd. Mongabay reached out to both companies for comment but did not receive a response by publication.

According to Amos, the global estimate is likely an underestimate. A ship that keeps its oily waste on board has to detour to a port with proper disposal facilities, which is expensive. A day at sea can cost a large cargo ship tens of thousands of dollars, and sometimes even more.

“So you can either do that, or you can just wait until you get out in the ocean where you think nobody’s looking, and then discharge it directly overboard,” he said.

Banner image: Oil spill in 2024 off Tibaguin Island, Philippines. Image © Noel Celis/Greenpeace.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s upcoming presidential election could reshape the Amazon’s future. Control of the country, which contains about 60% of the rainforest, could pass to Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Experts warn a Bolsonaro victory could reverse deforestation-control policies restored by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60%. Lula reinstated an anti-deforestation plan in 2023, reducing deforestation by 45%. Flávio Bolsonaro pledges to end illegal deforestation by 2029 but has not detailed how. Concerns remain about potential weakening of environmental protections.

By Gabriela Sá Pessoa, Associated Press

Banner image: A forest burns in the Amazon, in the municipality of Manaquiri in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023. Image courtesy of Edmar Barros, Associated Press.