The European Union’s landmark anti-deforestation law could fail to deliver on its environmental promises if enforcement authorities disproportionately focus on small importers while missing less obvious violations from major commodity firms, according to a new analysis by U.K.-based investigative nonprofit, Earthsight.

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which comes into force Dec. 30, 2025, aims to prevent new tropical deforestation from Europe’s supply chains for soy, beef, palm oil and other commodities. To do so, it will require geolocalized data from indirect and direct suppliers that prove their products didn’t contribute to deforestation since December 2020.

The largest importers “will submit due diligence statements accurately and on time. They will have due diligence systems in place. They will have correctly identified risks. They will have traceability systems of some kind in operation,” the report’s authors write.

“The problems with these importers will lie deeper. Their mitigation measures will be weak. Their traceability systems will have fundamental flaws, but these will be well hidden,” they added.

In February, Cargill, one of the largest exporters of soy from Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest and Cerrado savanna, took advantage of the EUDR to weaken already existing anti-deforestation agreements. The agribusiness pushed up its deforestation cutoff date from 2008, the year established by the soy moratorium, to 2020, the cutoff date set by the EUDR. That would allow the company 14 more years of deforestation without consequence.

“There is good reason to be mistrustful of such firms,” Earthsight’s analysis writes. “Unfortunately, there are reasons to fear they will nevertheless get an easy ride when EU Member States start enforcing the new law.”

In the Ivory Coast, Earthsight’s data show, the top 10 importers buy up 83% of the local cocoa. In Brazil, the largest 10 multinational import companies ship out 64% of the nation’s soy exports.

Small companies will have an additional six months to comply with the law after it comes into effect, but producing accurate paperwork may be more challenging. They often lack the financial and technical resources necessary to quickly set up comprehensive due diligence systems with all the data points required by the law, experts say.

According to a report by Profundo, the relative cost for EUDR compliance is three times higher for small and medium-sized importers than large importers.

Europe’s enforcers will need to focus more on the quality of the largest importers’ reports, Earthsight said, rather than simply check bureaucratic boxes. “Going after such small firms will be much easier … and [authorities] will be tempted to focus most of their energy on this,” the group writes. “For the law to achieve its aims, it is essential that [they] avoid falling into this trap.”

Banner image: On the left, rainforest deforestation for an oil palm plantation in Sabah, Malaysia. On the right, soy fields next to Gran Chaco forest in Bolivia. Images by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Sightings of a young harpy eagle in southern Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle in 2023 have now been verified, marking the first time in more than a decade that South America’s largest bird of prey has been spotted in the country, contributor Astrid Arellano reported for Mongabay Latam.

Photos and video of the bird were taken by a farmer in the state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, challenging the assumption that the species had gone extinct from Mexico. The images were later verified and the discovery publicly announced at the Chiapas Bird Festival in April 2025.

“What’s interesting about this sighting is that we’re not just talking about one eagle, but three: that young eagle and its parents, which indicates the presence of a breeding territory in the country,” Alan Monroy-Ojeda, a tropical ecologist who coordinated the verification of the images with the Mexican conservation organization Dimensión Natural, told Arellano.

Harpy eagles (Harpia harpyja) can grow to 1 meter tall (3.3 feet), with a wingspan of 2 m (6.5 ft). They have huge talons and are powerful enough capture prey that weigh as much as them. They raise just one chick at a time until their offspring is fully independent, which can take up to two and a half years.

The presence of the juvenile bird, estimated to be between 28 and 38 months old, suggests it had recently left its nest and was still within close range of its birthplace.

“At that age, they usually don’t move more than 10 kilometers [6 miles] from the nest,” Monroy-Ojeda told Mongabay. “Eagles are very faithful to their nesting sites and can use the same nest for many years.”

The Lacandon Jungle where the harpy eagle was spotted has lost more than two-thirds of its native tree cover to agriculture, cattle ranching and other human activities. “For the last 20 years, the Lacandon Jungle has been suffering severely,” Silvano López Gómez, a member of the local community monitoring group Siyaj Chan, told Mongabay. López photographed a harpy eagle in the region in 2011, the last time the species was definitively spotted in Mexico before this latest discovery.

The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, lists the harpy eagle as vulnerable to extinction. In many parts of its historical range, particularly in Central and North America, the eagle survives in fragmented islands of habitat. Its remaining stronghold is largely confined to the Amazon Rainforest.

Local conservationists say they’re hopeful the resurgence of the harpy eagle in Chiapas will help fuel local conservation efforts. “It helps us regain our motivation,” said Francisco Centeno, another member of Siyaj Chan.

This is a summary of “Águila harpía: reaparece la majestuosa ave rapaz que se creía extinta en México” by Astrid Arellano for Mongabay, originally published in Spanish on May 17, 2025. 

Banner image: A harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja). Image by Brian Gratwicke via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). 

For the last several decades, global biodiversity has been in crisis. Yet, as we celebrate International Day for Biodiversity on May 22, which commemorates the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty, we offer some recent Mongabay stories highlighting lessons from undoing past harms and conserving biodiversity for our planet’s future.

What do forest restoration efforts ‘restore’?

Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler recently wrote about a review that warns how biodiversity is often an “afterthought” in forest restoration.

The study authors say that “biodiversity will remain a vague buzzword rather than an actual outcome” unless restoration projects intentionally prioritize and measure it.

Typically, tree-planting initiatives that plant a few different tree species dominate the agenda of forest restoration initiatives, the authors say. But while these offer carbon sequestration and benefits in the way of timber and food production, they often fail to focus on the recovery of a range of species or restoring ecological functions.

There are other methods that help achieve both reforestation and improved biodiversity, the authors add. This includes natural regeneration, where native vegetation in forests is encouraged to grow back by various interventions including reducing competition, especially from invasive plants.

The benefits of diverse forests

Long-running reforestation experiments show that planting a variety of tree species can improve climate resilience, Sean Mowbray reported for Mongabay in April.

One study from China that monitored various forest plots over six years found that forests with more diverse plant species had greater “temperature buffering” effect. For example, experimental forest plots with 24 species reduced temperatures by 4.4° Celsius (7.92° Fahrenheit) during peak summer heat compared to monocultures.

A 16-year study from Panama found that forests with greater tree diversity were more stable, storing more carbon than less diverse forests. The stability persisted during extreme weather events such as periods of drought and intense storms, lead author of both studies, Florian Schnabel, told Mongabay.

Genetically biodiverse populations are important too

Earlier this year, researchers found that genetic diversity has been declining worldwide.

Study lead author Catherine Grueber, from the IUCN’s Conservation Genetics Specialist Group, told Mongabay that any threat that reduces animal or plant populations also results in shrinking gene pools. This is a problem since genetic diversity ensure that species can be more resilient in the face of disease, hunting, climate change and habitat loss.

However, genetic loss can be slowed or reversed “by improving habitat quality, by restoring habitat, by establishing new populations, or by moving individuals among populations, among many others,” Grueber said.

The study identified several such successes, including with the golden bandicoot (Isoodon auratus) in Western Australia, black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) in the U.S., and Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) in Scandinavia.

Banner image of a diverse planted forest in Panama. Image courtesy of Florian Schnabel.

Plans to build a railway that would slice South America from east to west, crossing part of the Amazon Rainforest, are advancing with Chinese funding, according to a recent announcement by the Brazilian government.

Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, along with ministers and Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping, met in Beijing on May 13 to discuss the proposed rail link connecting South America’s Atlantic and Pacific ports.

“The plan is, in fact, to rip Brazil from east to west,” said Simone Tebet, Brazil’s planning minister. “When we talk about cutting across Brazil, we’re talking about at least 3,000 kilometers [1,864 miles].”

The proposed railway, known as the Bioceanic Corridor, would connect Brazil’s Ilhéus Port on the Atlantic Coast to Peru’s new Pacific-facing Chancay Port. The latter opened in November 2024, following $3.4 billion in investments, largely from the Chinese shipping company COSCO, which owns 60% of Chancay port.

The Brazilian government said the project would allow exported commodities to be rerouted from Brazil’s agricultural strongholds to China via the Pacific Ocean. This would cut shipping times by up to 10 days compared with the current route across the Atlantic Ocean and around the southern tip of the African continent.

“Of what we export to the Chinese, 60% is iron ore and soy, which need to be transported by rail. It is much more efficient, not only from an economic standpoint, but also from an environmental one,” said Leonardo Ribeiro, the secretary of railway transport.

The proposed path would pass through the Matopiba region, an expanding frontier for soy and cattle that accounted for 75% of deforestation in the biodiverse Cerrado savanna in 2024. The railway would continue westward through the Amazonian states of Rondônia and Acre.

The government recently changed a previously proposed route passing through Indigenous territories reaching the westernmost municipality of Cruzeiro do Sul in Acre. The latest route follows existing highways in southern Acre, avoiding Indigenous territories and more intact forests.

“Railways cause less impacts than highways. And from the little we know so far, it will not go through any Indigenous territories,” Ivaneide Bandeira, coordinator of the Kanindé Association, a nonprofit organization in Rondônia state, told Mongabay in an audio message. But construction and resulting agricultural expansion may cause negative impacts, she added.

Dilma Rousseff, former Brazilian president now leading the BRICS Bank from Shanghai, told national media in Brazil that Chinese leader Xi has greenlighted the plan, but it still requires approval from the state-owned China State Railway Group.

Brazil’s planning minister Tebet has requested a response in the next 30 days, aiming to sign a formal agreement at the BRICS summit July 6-7 in Rio de Janeiro, national news outlet Gazeta do Povo reported.

Banner image: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Beijing in May. Image courtesy of Ricardo Stuckert/Brazil government.

On a remote Panamanian island, researchers have observed for the very first time young male capuchin monkeys stealing howler monkey babies, according to a new study.

Since 2017, researchers have used camera traps to study Panamanian white-faced capuchins (Cebus imitator) on Jicarón Island in Coiba National Park, where the monkeys use stone tools to crack open hard foods like coconuts and crabs.

In January 2022, Zoë Goldsborough, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and study lead author, saw footage of a young male capuchin monkey carrying a baby howler monkey (Alouatta palliata coibensis) on its back.

Goldsborough reviewed all the camera footage from around that period and found the same individual, named Joker by researchers, carrying four different howler monkey infants. After no new footage appeared for some time, the researchers decided “it was one individual trying something new,” Brendan Barrett, study co-author and Goldsborough’s adviser, said in a statement. This isn’t uncommon among capuchins, which are “deeply curious animals,” he added.

But after five months, the researchers spotted four more capuchins with howler monkey babies in their camera footage. In all, they observed five capuchins, all young males from the same group, carrying 11 different howler babies for up to nine days. The infants were all less than 4 weeks old.

Initially, the researchers suspected adoption. However, anecdotes of interspecies adoptions mostly involve adult females of one species adopting abandoned babies of another species.

Since only male capuchins were seen carrying howler babies, the researchers speculate the capuchins were stealing them. In some videos, they could hear or see the howler monkey parents calling to their babies from nearby trees.

Male white-faced capuchins are known to care for capuchin babies that aren’t biologically theirs. But in the capuchin-howler dynamic, cameras captured at least four dead howlers on the capuchins’ backs, and the researchers suspect no baby survived, likely because the young males couldn’t provide them with milk.

Why the capuchins take the babies isn’t clear yet, but the authors suggest they might “carry howler infants solely for carrying’s sake” — a behavior one male capuchin likely picked up from another.

Sarah Brosnan, a primatologist at Georgia State University, U.S., who wasn’t involved in the study, told the Smithsonian the male capuchins’ behavior is akin to using a “toy.” “These are juveniles,” Brosnan said. “I don’t think that they are grabbing [howlers] because they’re kidnapping, I think they’re grabbing it because it’s an interesting and engaging toy. It makes noise, it moves.”

The authors write their observations suggest necessity isn’t always the driver of new behaviors, “especially on islands, where both need and free time are often abundant.”

However, if the infant-stealing tradition persists, it could be problematic for Jicarón’s howler monkeys, which are an endangered subspecies, the authors add.

Banner image: A subadult male capuchin with a howler monkey infant. Image courtesy of Brendan Barrett/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

India’s environment ministry has announced new rules to improve waste management in the construction and demolition industry. The 2025 rules, set to take effect starting April 1, 2026, will place greater responsibility on waste producers and introduce mandatory recycling targets, reports contributor Akshay Deshmane for Mongabay India.

As India rapidly builds infrastructure, the waste from the country’s construction and demolition industry is expected to reach 165 million metric tons annually by 2030, according to India’s Central Pollution Control Board. To curb that waste, the government has introduced a suite of rules to encourage developers to reuse and recycle construction waste.

The new rules require that producers — people responsible for construction or reconstruction projects with a built-up area of 20,000 square meters (about 215,000 square feet) or more — must prepare a waste management plan that assesses the amount of waste expected from all aspects of their project and submit it to the local authority for approval.

The rules also define extended producer responsibilities (EPR), requiring producers to collect and segregate waste, store it safely, and ensure recycling or proper handover to authorized agencies or recyclers. Producers must reach EPR recycling targets of 25% in 2025-26 and 100% by 2028-29.

Additionally, the new rules require that processed construction and demolition debris must be reused in certain construction activities; 5% in the next two years and 25% by 2030-31.

“The mandated minimum targets for using recycled C&D [construction and demolition] waste in construction and infrastructure projects are especially promising. They can help create a reliable market, which may drive down costs over time and incentivize innovation in material recycling and reuse,” Sree Kumar Kumaraswamy, program director of Clean Air Action at WRI India, told Mongabay India.

According to the new rules, producers must also ensure their waste doesn’t generate air pollution, littering, and public nuisance, Deshmane reports. A centralized online portal is expected to monitor the implementation of the new rules.

Stalin D., director at Mumbai-based NGO Vanashakti, told Mongabay India the rules could “certainly help in curbing the menace of illegal dumping in public and natural spaces. Ecologically important areas, especially wetlands, have borne the brunt of such dumping.”

Additionally, the new rules allow construction and demolition waste producers to meet their targets by purchasing EPR certificates from registered recyclers, Deshmane reports.

“The requirement to buy EPR certificates in advance is a good step — it ensures that the cost of proper disposal is paid upfront,” Stalin said.

Bharati Chaturvedi of the Chintan Foundation pointed out the rules are still unclear about specifying who the EPR responsibilities fall on. “In e-waste and plastics, brand owners are clearly accountable. But in this case, who is responsible — the house owner, the contractor, or a government body like PWD [Public Works Department]? We still don’t have a clear definition, and that’s a concern.”

Read the full story by Akshay Deshmane here.

Banner image of under-construction residential buildings in Kolkata. Image by Biswarup Ganguly via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).