Climate activists worldwide are facing increased persecution and criminalization by governments, with some of the most severe measures coming from Europe, according to a United Nations human rights expert.

Governments including those of the U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Spain have introduced measures that criminalize protests and redefine terrorism and organized crime laws to persecute activists, Mary Lawlor, the U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, told the U.N. General Assembly on Oct. 16.

Referring to the EU, Lawlor said “you parade yourself like the best in the world with the EU guidelines on human rights defenders. And we see a shocking lack of implementation of the guidelines in all EU member states and abroad.”

Lawlor presented the results of her report showing that attacks on citizens defending human rights related to climate change are surging. According to the report, nonviolent protesters worldwide have been charged with crimes such as unlawful assembly, common nuisance, qualified disobedience, financing terrorism, and promoting enmity.

“It is creating a vicious cycle: leaving the climate crisis unaddressed, human rights at risk, and human rights defenders deterred from speaking out and taking action,” Lawlor said.

In Germany, for example, Letzte Generation (now Neue Generation) activists face heavier charges than typical for “forming or participating in a criminal association,” the report notes. Their crime: nonviolent acts of civil disobedience like planting trees on golf courses and spray-painting private jets. The group’s website was shut down with a notice labeling it a criminal organization, and its members were sentenced to several years in prison.

The U.K. introduced legislation “specifically to criminalize the peaceful tactics used by climate defenders” under the 2023 Public Order Act, Lawlor said. Locking yourself to an object now carries a six-month prison sentence. Protests disrupting “national infrastructure” such as oil and gas facilities or airports can be punished with a year in prison and “unlimited” fines.

Meanwhile, France’s interior minister accused the environmental activist movement Les Soulèvements de la Terre of “ecoterrorism” in 2022, and then attempted to dissolve the group, which was later overturned by a higher court.

Similar measures occurred in Spain, where environmental groups Extinction Rebellion and Futuro Vegetal were designated as terrorist organizations. Spanish police have also carried out undercover operations targeting at least 12 environmental organizations.

After Lawlor’s presentation, member states questioned her about how to increase protections of these groups.

“You [member states] know what to do and you just don’t do it. I hear a lot of crocodile tears in this room, and I see a lot of serious hand-wringing,” she answered.

“Ensure implementation of protection of human rights defenders and make sure that those who are attacking them face accountability,” she added. “It’s as simple as that. It just needs political will and a determination. I can’t see that determination.”

Banner image: U.N. special rapporteurs Mary Lawlor, left, and Clément Voule in 2023. Image courtesy of U.N. Photo/Evan Schneider.

Brazil’s environment agency, IBAMA, has approved an environmental license for state-owned oil company Petrobras to drill for oil near the mouth of the Amazon River.

The license, issued Oct. 20, allows the company start drilling the offshore Morpho well in oil block FZA-M-059, about 500 kilometers (311 miles) from the river’s mouth, and 2.8 km (1.7 mi) below the seafloor. Environmental groups have vehemently condemned the decision, saying they will pursue legal action.

“[President] Lula has just buried his claim of being a climate leader at the bottom of the ocean at the mouth of the Amazon River,” Suely Araújo, public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory, a Brazilian watchdog organization, said in a statement. “The government will be duly sued for this in the coming days.” (Araújo previously served as IBAMA head during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first term in office.)

According to Petrobras, the drilling will be exploratory to evaluate whether the oil reserves there are economically viable. “We expect to obtain excellent results from this exploration and to confirm the existence of oil in the Brazilian portion of this new global energy frontier,” Petrobras president Magda Chambriard said in a statement, adding that the license’s approval reflects the nation’s commitment to development.

The oil company said the drilling will start immediately and is expected to last for five months, meaning it will overlap with the COP30 climate summit, the first to be hosted by Brazil, in the Amazon Rainforest.

“Drilling for oil while hosting a climate summit hosts a bitter irony,” Bruna Campos, senior offshore oil and gas campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law, said in a statement shared with Mongabay. “Oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon threatens the Atlantic Ocean, which sustains marine biodiversity and millions of livelihoods.”

A recent satellite study found that offshore oil platforms are among the top ocean polluters, but often fly under the radar as spills and other impacts can be hard to detect.

An oil spill is a concern at the FZA-M-059 block, given that ocean currents there are extremely complex and a potential leak could impact eight countries, Philip Fearnside, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), previously wrote in a commentary.

An earlier evaluation by IBAMA warned that oil exploration in the region could damage the Amazon Reef, a 9,500-square-kilometer (3,700-square-mile) system of corals, sponges and algae discovered less than a decade ago, and other high-biodiversity areas.

“The Amazon is very close to the point of no return, which will be irreversibly reached if global warming hits 2°C [3.6°F] and deforestation surpasses 20%,” Carlos Nobre, co-chair of the Scientific Panel for the Amazon and a researcher on the Amazon tipping point, said in a statement. “There is no justification for any new oil exploration.”

Banner image: The NS-42 drilling rig, already at the Morpho well, is set to begin drilling immediately. Image courtesy of Petrobras.

In Sri Lankan waters, there’s a growing problem of ghost nets that are entangling sea turtles, fish, dolphins and seabirds, reports contributor Malaka Rodrigo for Mongabay.

“Ghost nets” are fishing gear that have either been abandoned, lost or discarded into the sea. As these drift with the ocean currents, they continue to trap marine animals — or “ghost fish.”

“These lost fishing gear kill scores of marine species and remains a specific problem for marine turtles,” said Thushan Kapurusinghe, project lead of the Turtle Conservation Project of Sri Lanka.

Charith Dilshan, project manager of the Galbokka Sea Turtle Conservation & Research Center in Kosgoda, southern Sri Lanka, told Rodrigo they find at least 30 turtles entangled in ghost nets along their stretch of beach each year.

Turtles aside, ghost nets have also been observed entangling fish, dolphins and seabirds in Sri Lankan waters. In fact, ghost fishing can trigger chain reactions, Rodrigo writes. Small fish caught in the drifting gear can attract larger predators such as turtles and dolphins, which then become entangled themselves. “That’s why we call them ‘floating cemeteries,’” Kapurusinghe said.

Dilshan said some ghost nets found in Sri Lankan waters were likely lost or discarded elsewhere. Research suggests the problem of ghost nets can indeed be a transboundary one, with fishing gear abandoned or lost in one country’s waters drifting into those of another’s.

A 2019 study, which focused on the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, for example, documented 752 ghost nets that had entangled 131 turtles over a 51-month period. The researchers estimated that the same ghost nets could have ensnared between 3,400 and 12,200 turtles across the Indian Ocean before they were detected in the Maldives.

However, Sri Lanka also contributes significantly to the problem, Rodrigo writes.

A pilot study published in 2023, for instance, surveyed 325 vessels and estimated they’d lost nearly 22,600 kilograms (about 50,000 pounds) of plastic fishing gear to the sea. The actual figure is likely to be much higher since there are more than 50,000 registered fishing vessels across the country, said Gayathri Lokuge of the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), who co-authored the study.

Lokuge and her colleagues identified gill nets as the most frequently lost gear, followed by lines and hooks. Interviews with fishers revealed that poor weather and ocean conditions are the leading causes for losing or discarding fishing gear. Poor port waste management and limited recycling infrastructure add to the problem, Lokuge said.

Rodrigo writes that ghost nets washed ashore are now a common sight across Sri Lanka’s beaches. A survey of 22 beaches found that fishing gear made up 20% of marine debris.

Read the full story by Malaka Rodrigo here.

Banner image: Two olive ridley turtles caught in discarded fishing nets. Image courtesy of Galbokka Sea Turtle Conservation & Research Center.

The last known photo of the slender-billed curlew, a grayish-brown migratory waterbird, was taken in February 1995 at Merja Zerga, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

There will likely never be another one.

The species, Numenius tenuirostris, has officially been declared extinct by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

“The extinction of the Slender-billed Curlew is a tragic and sobering moment for migratory bird conservation,” Amy Fraenkel, executive secretary of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), said in a statement. “It underscores the urgency of implementing effective conservation measures to ensure the survival of migratory species.”

Details of the exact breeding and wintering sites of the slender-billed curlew have been hazy at best, although it’s known to have bred in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe, and migrated to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

In June 1995, the slender-billed curlew was included among 255 priority species of waterbirds listed in the then-new Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA), according to the CMS press release.

The latest IUCN assessment of the species notes that historically the slender-billed curlew was likely locally common, but there were signs of decline as early 1912. By the 1940s, researchers were warning the bird might already be close to extinct.

In a study published November 2024, researchers concluded the bird most likely went extinct sometime in the mid-1990s, after that last verified sighting in Morocco. At the time, Graeme Buchanan, the study’s lead author and conservation scientist with U.K-based NGO Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), told Mongabay the study was born out of the need for a formal, quantitative assessment of the species’ status, so conservation support wasn’t withdrawn too soon or too late.

The latest IUCN assessment now confirms the species’ extinction. “This is the first-ever recorded global bird extinction from mainland Europe, North Africa, and West Asia,” Esther Kettel, an ecologist at Nottingham Trent University, U.K., writes in The Conversation.

Geoff Hilton, conservation scientist at U.K.-based charity Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, previously told Mongabay that news of the bird’s extinction was “a source of deep sadness.”

“We arguably spent too much time watching the bird’s decline and not enough actually trying to fix things,” he said. “Although that’s easy to say: it’s not clear what really we could have done that would have made a difference.”

Migratory shorebirds like the slender-billed curlew have been declining worldwide, Birdlife International warned last year. “The Eurasian curlew (Numenius arquata), a relative of the slender-bill, is of particular conservation concern and is thought to be the UK’s most rapidly declining species,” Kettel writes.

“[T]he Slender-billed Curlew’s extinction serves as a poignant reminder that conservation frameworks must be implemented swiftly, backed by adequate science, resources and sustained political will,” Jacques Trouvilliez, the AEWA executive secretary, said in the press release.

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

“I knew I was disposable.”

That realization, from earlier in his career, helps guide Willie Shubert today in building a kind and capable global newsroom.

Shubert oversees Mongabay’s English-language newsroom — its largest — and shapes the organization’s global editorial strategy. His work ranges from deciding which forest to investigate next to building the conceptual framework for Mongabay’s model of impact. “This work enables Mongabay to scale up the volume and size of grants that fund our journalism,” he explains in an interview.

His days are spent shifting constantly between tasks: assessing security risks for reporters in remote regions, drafting proposals, and refining the workflows that keep a globally distributed newsroom aligned. “My day-to-day life is quite diverse,” he says.

Shubert’s path began at National Geographic, where he helped produce more than 30 international editions of the magazine. It was, he recalls, “a crash course in how to do high-quality journalism with a lot of resources.” Acting as a “living English dictionary” for translators taught him precision, while launching the magazine’s early social media channels showed him how legacy institutions could reach new audiences. But he soon realized he wanted to be closer to the work itself. “I wasn’t in a position to practice journalism,” he says. “Competition was fierce, and I knew I was disposable.”

He found that opportunity at Internews’s Earth Journalism Network, where he helped build a global community of environmental reporters — many in the Global South — capable of explaining complex science in accessible ways. He also helped create data-driven outlets such as InfoAmazonia and launched a grants program that helped local journalists tell stories once overlooked by international media. “The best opportunity for a journalist isn’t a workshop or a fellowship,” he says. “It’s a job.”

That conviction ultimately led him to Mongabay, whose model — paying journalists to produce independent environmental reporting — matched his vision for durable impact. For Shubert, that impact is seen not in clicks but in “forests still standing.” He cites investigations that halted plantation expansion in Suriname and blocked a carbon deal in Malaysian Borneo that would have displaced Indigenous communities.

Such outcomes, he says, depend on persistence and trust.

“You have to trust people,” he says. “No one can do it alone.” For Shubert, journalism is slow, patient work — connecting evidence with empathy so that people can make better decisions for the environment and humanity, one story at a time.

Read the full interview with Willie Shubert here.

Banner image: Willie Shubert with lemurs at a rehabilitation center in Madagascar. Visitors aren’t permitted to touch the lemurs, but the lemurs do as they please. Image by Rhett Ayers Butler/Mongabay.

A South African court has nullified the environmental authorization for state-owned electricity utility Eskom’s proposed 3,000-megawatt gas-fired power plant. The court cited multiple reasons for its decision, including the failure to adequately consult local residents and consider the full impacts of the power plant’s entire life cycle on climate change.

“This ruling shows that environmental authorities must protect people and future generations, not fossil fuel interests,” Yegeshni Moodley of local NGO Groundwork, one of the applicant civil society organizations, told Mongabay. 

Eskom aimed to build the natural gas power plant in the state-owned Richards Bay Industrial Development Zone (RBIDZ) in the country’s KwaZulu-Natal province. Groundwork and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance challenged the project at the Pretoria High Court in 2022, arguing, among other points, that the project’s greenhouse gas emissions were inconsistent with South Africa’s commitment to decarbonization. However, the judge ruled in Eskom’s favor. Both nonprofits then challenged the High Court ruling at the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA).

The SCA agreed with them, finding that the environmental impact assessment had failed to consider renewable energy alternatives and cumulative impacts associated with gas extraction and transportation, besides inadequate community consultation.

The ruling passed in September also found that the environment minister, Dion George, had acted unlawfully in granting approval for the project, as his decision failed to comply with key principles of the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA). The court further noted that the country’s obligations under the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change are legally relevant commitments that should inform environmental decision-making.

Moodley said the case reflects growing judicial recognition of the urgency of climate change and the tangible harms experienced by communities.

Many African countries are pursuing natural gas as an energy source. Gas is also a cornerstone of the South African government’s plan to transition away from coal, as it’s seen as a “cleaner” fuel. However, research suggests while natural gas production emits less CO2 than coal, its emissions of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas, can be considerable, negating the CO2 benefits. 

Moodley said that Groundwork and other NGOs have challenged all 12 gas power plant projects currently proposed in South Africa, including five within the RBIDZ. Mongabay contacted the industrial zone’s operator for comment about what the court ruling means for those projects, but hadn’t received a response by the time this article was published.

Eskom told Mongabay in a written response that the ruling was a setback, but said that gas remains central to its energy strategy. “The judgment does not affect the planning and implementation of Eskom and government planning for new energy infrastructure,” a spokesperson said, adding that Eskom is still studying the judgment.

Mongabay also contacted South Africa’s energy department and environment department, but neither responded to our requests for comment.

Banner image: An Eskom power station in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province. Image courtesy of Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp (CCBY-ND4.0).