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

When Ridzki Sigit first joined Mongabay in 2012, the environmental journalism platform had yet to establish itself in the language of his native Indonesia. The concept was unconventional: a remote, international team with no physical office, focused solely on environmental coverage — a niche area in the Indonesian media landscape at the time. Yet Ridzki saw opportunity rather than uncertainty. Today, as Mongabay Indonesia’s program director, he leads one of the country’s most influential environmental news outlets, recognized widely beyond Indonesia’s borders.

Mongabay Indonesia was launched to improve transparency and accountability in Indonesia’s troubled forest sector. I envisioned journalism driven by local voices, communicating in Indonesian to achieve policy changes and empower communities. Within months, it became essential reading even for policymakers.

Ridzki’s path to journalism was unconventional. Initially trained in forestry and management, he began his career researching natural resources and creating documentary films with Perkumpulan Kaoem Telapak, a prominent Indonesian environmental NGO. His experience at Kaoem Telapak and its production arm, Gekko Studio, shaped his storytelling abilities and deepened his commitment to environmental issues, qualities he brought to Mongabay.

Under Ridzki’s leadership, Mongabay Indonesia has flourished. With a core team and more than 70 contributors nationwide, it has produced more than 25,000 articles, videos, and podcasts. Its investigative reporting has achieved tangible impacts, exposing corrupt land deals involving major agribusinesses in Papua and raising international awareness about threats to species such as the Javan rhino. Ridzki takes pride in Mongabay’s role in supporting Indigenous communities and protecting fragile ecosystems.

Looking ahead, Ridzki emphasizes creativity, passion and collaboration as essential for building a motivated, resilient team prepared to tackle Indonesia’s complex ecological challenges. His approach blends professional rigor with genuine personal relationships, strengthening Mongabay’s growing network of environmental journalists.

Today, Ridzki remains deeply passionate about his work. When not overseeing investigative reports, he dives to document Indonesia’s remarkable marine biodiversity, reflecting his lifelong dedication to nature. For him, Mongabay represents more than journalism — it is a mission, a legacy, and a responsibility to protect Indonesia’s irreplaceable natural heritage for future generations, including his own daughter.

Read the full interview with Ridzki Sigit here

Banner image: Ridzki Sigit in Jambi province in 2022. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Sri Lanka’s lesser-known Kumana National Park, on the country’s southeastern coast, has emerged as a leopard stronghold, according to a recent study, contributor Malaka Rodrigo reports for Mongabay.

Using camera traps and statistical models, researchers from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and the Department of Wildlife Conservation estimated there’s a leopard density of around 41 of the big cats per 100 square kilometers, or about 106 leopards per 100 square miles, in the park’s eastern region.

Previous studies have found that the better-known Yala National Park in Sri Lanka’s south, popular for its leopard sightings, has about 54 leopards per 100 km2 (140 per 100 mi2); Wilpattu National Park in the northwest has about 18 per 100 km2 (46 per 100mi2); and Horton Plains National Park has an estimated 12 leopards per 100 km2 (31 per 100 mi2).

Kumana today spans 357 km2 (138 mi2). It was first declared a sanctuary in 1938 for its birdlife, including large colonies of waterbirds. It was designated a national park in 1960, and Sri Lanka’s fifth Ramsar wetland site in 2010. Park warden Dileep Samaranayaka told Mongabay that Kumana has recently gained popularity among visitors for its leopard sightings. With concerns about potential overtourism at Yala, Kumana is emerging as an alternative destination for leopard enthusiasts.

A citizen science initiative called Kumana Leopards, which relies on visitor observations of leopards in the park, has documented 80 individual leopards there since 2019. Led by Shanaka Kalubowila and his team, the initiative offers a field guide for identifying individual leopards and aims to provide evidence-based insights into the conservation of the Sri Lankan leopard, Rodrigo writes.

Kumana’s leopards face several threats, largely from outside the park where they sometimes venture to prey on domestic buffalo calves. Buffalo herders kill the leopards in retaliation, with several leopard deaths recorded recently, Samaranayaka said.

The leopard (Panthera pardus) is categorized as a species vulnerable to extinction on the IUCN Red List, with its populations declining worldwide.

Researchers from the Wilderness and Wildlife Conservation Trust (WWCT) estimate Sri Lanka may have about 1,000 leopards.

Read the full story by Malaka Rodrigo here.

Banner image: A relaxed leopard family in Kumana. Sightings like this have boosted the popularity of this national park in eastern Sri Lanka among wildlife tourists seeking to spot encounters. Image courtesy of Shanaka Kalubowila.

A commission appointed by the late Pope Francis has released a new report highlighting the urgent need to address global debt, which has hindered sustainable development and climate action.

The report was authored by the Jubilee Commission, which includes a group of 30 experts including Nobel laureate and U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, and Martín Guzmán, a former economy minister of Argentina.

The commission found that 54 developing countries spend 10% or more of their tax revenues just to pay their debt interests. Since 2014, the average interest burden for developing countries has almost doubled. “Interest payments on public debt are therefore crowding out critical investments in health, education, infrastructure, and climate resilience,” the report says.

“The most afflicted continent is Africa, but other parts of the world … are also affected by the crisis [such as] in Latin America and in Asia,” Guzmán said at a press briefing.

Instead of moving toward sustainable development, the report says, the debt situation has become a barrier and is exacerbating inequality and discontent.

Before his death in April, Pope Francis declared 2025 as a Jubilee Year, or a year of hope and forgiveness. In a message, he called on wealthy countries to forgive the debts of poorer ones, not just as a form of generosity but as a “matter of justice.” He warned of an “ecological debt” that exists, “particularly between the global North and South,” due to “imbalances” and “the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time.”

The Jubilee Report highlights how rich countries have failed to provide assistance to developing countries as they’d promised, resulting in a gap in development financing, especially for addressing climate change.

“Instead of us being able to invest into our future, into our present, climate finance is coming in the form of loans and not grants, and that means that we go into debt even more to the country that has caused the climate crisis to address the climate impacts that they brought onto our countries,” Mitzi Jonelle Tan, global coordinator of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said at the briefing.

The report identifies solutions to the crisis, including improving debt restructuring, ending bailouts to private creditors, strengthening domestic policies, enhancing transparency, and reimagining global finance to focus on sustainable development, such as loans that support long-term growth.

One example the report cites is debt-for-nature swaps, which would allow countries to redirect a portion of their debt repayments toward climate- or conservation-related projects. The commission also suggests mobilizing unused funds from existing lending facilities at international financial institutions (IFIs) to help countries particularly vulnerable to the climate crisis, such as small island states. It further suggests consolidating “scattered climate lending facilities” may also make it easier for vulnerable countries to access funding.

Banner image of drought in Brazil in 2023. Image by AP Photo/Edmar Barros.

Ghana has announced plans to expand the area in which small-scale fishers can operate, in response to persistent violations by industrial trawlers encroaching into this zone.

The country’s inshore exclusion zone, or IEZ, will now extend 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) from shore, up from 6 nmi (11 km) currently. Emelia Arthur, Ghana’s newly appointed fisheries minister, made the announcement at the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France, last week.

Small-scale or artisanal fishing is a significant part of Ghana’s economy, employing more than 200,000 people and operating some 12,000 canoes, and the IEZ is legally reserved for small-scale fisheries. However, industrial trawlers have increasingly violated this zone, often using destructive methods such as bottom trawling. These activities have severely depleted fish stocks and damaged artisanal fishing gear.

The decision to expand the IEZ aims to safeguard the livelihoods of artisanal fishing communities, said Arthur, who also announced more rigorous enforcement against encroaching vessels and those practicing illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The new rule will need parliamentary approval, but Arthur said legal reforms are underway. “We are then going to enforce that regulation so severely that semi-industrial vessels and industrial vessels are not going to be permitted to operate in this zone,” she said. 

“We have a big issue with IUU,” Isaac Okyere, a researcher from the University of Cape Coast, told Mongabay by phone. “There are instances where the vessels have two different gears: one is licensed and one is not licensed — with that they catch pelagic fish. It is a booming business.”

Okyere said the average annual catch by artisanal fishers in Ghana is 20-25 metric tons, but a study estimated that in 2017, illegal catches of juvenile pelagic fish exceeded 100,000 metric tons. Much of this is believed to have been illegally transshipped in a practice locally known as saiko, where industrial trawlers transfer fish to canoes at sea, which then gets sold unrecorded at local markets.

In March, the Ghanaian government suspended the licenses of four Chinese trawlers for violations, including transshipment and catching of juvenile fish.

Despite laws prohibiting foreign ownership of industrial trawlers, the Environmental Justice Foundation found that around 90% of Ghana’s trawl fleet is Chinese-owned, operating through Ghanaian front companies. These vessels often violate rules restricting them to fishing demersal or bottom-dwelling species outside the IEZ.

The proposed IEZ expansion is expected to be included in the revised Fisheries Act, currently under review.

Okyere told Mongabay that once passed, “this law must be rigorously enforced to prevent further encroachment.”

Ghana’s Fisheries Commission has in recent years denied license renewals for several industrial trawlers due to noncompliance. The fisheries ministry has also initiated gear reform, and issued a moratorium on the entry of new boats into the overloaded canoe fishery.

The fisheries ministry hadn’t responded to Mongabay’s questions by the time of publication. 

Banner image of artisanal fishing boats in Ghana by MPIMPIMHENE Nana Gyetuah Eric via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africa was under a declared state of national disaster on Thursday as the death toll from floods caused by severe rains in the Eastern Cape region rose to 92.

The Eastern Cape government honoured the victims of last week’s floods with a provincial Day of Mourning and a memorial service at King Sabatha Dalindyebo Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) College in Mthatha, one of the few schools whose infrastructure remained intact.

Speaking at the public memorial service, Zolile Williams, a member of the executive council, said the people of the coastal province have not been the same since the disaster hit, and many are now faced with the challenging task of rebuilding.

“Since June 9, this province has been hit hard by unprecedented, catastrophic and unimaginable disasters, where in the whole of the province, about 92 people have perished,” said Williams.

“Since that day, the Eastern Cape has not been the same. It is the first time we have experienced so many dead bodies, some of whom have not yet been found.”

An extreme weather front brought heavy rain, strong winds and snow to parts of the province caused flooding in one of South Africa’s poorest provinces last week, leaving dozens dead and roads, houses, schools and other infrastructure damaged.

At least two school children who were washed away in a bus are among the unverified number of missing persons according to local media reports, while thousands have since been displaced.

Authorities have appealed for residents to report missing people so rescuers could better understand how many people they were still looking for.

Religious leaders from different Christian religions were among the hundreds of mourners who attended the memorial ceremony, lighting candles as a symbolic expression of remembering the 92 people who died in the floods.

In a government notice on Wednesday, Elias Sithole, director of the National Disaster Management Centre, said severe weather had caused property damage. and the disruption of vital services in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, the Western Cape, and the Free State, which prompted South Africa to declare a national state of disaster.

The declaration allows the government to release funding for relief and rehabilitation and will remain in place until it lapses or until the conditions can no longer be categorised as such and is revoked by the head of the centre.

President Cyril Ramaphosa recently visited the town of Mthatha, in Eastern Cape province, where the floods hit hardest.

Many of the Eastern Cape flood victims lived on floodplains close to rivers. Government officials said poor neighbourhoods with informal dwellings were most severely impacted. Authorities have been criticized for the rescue response but also for the state of the infrastructure in the area.

Reporting by Michelle Gumede, Associated Press

Banner image: Rescue workers transport a person in a body bag after floods swept through the area in Mthatha, South Africa, Thursday, June 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, File)

New York City is the most densely populated city in the U.S., but along Broadway, a thoroughfare on the northern half of Manhattan’s west side, a series of small parks, known as malls, are providing a green corridor of trees, shrubs and flowers for birds and insects.

The Broadway Malls are a series of small parks each measuring roughly 73 by 6 meters (240 by 20 feet). They serve as a median in the middle of the road and together comprise more than 4 hectares (10 acres) of green space, running 8 kilometers (5 miles) long.

The malls were established in the 1850s, around the same time as Central Park.

“The idea was to imitate the boulevards of Europe, namely France, create that grandiosity of a very wide avenue with a pedestrian path in the middle,” Ian Olson, director of horticulture with the nonprofit Broadway Mall Association (BMA), told Mongabay in a video call.

By the 1960s, the malls were neglected “tubs of dirt,” Olson said. In the ’80s, the BMA began to revitalize the spaces, largely with nonnative plants like English ivy. “Things that look nice on a median but don’t have a lot of ecological value,” Olson said.

Now, Olson and his team are removing the nonnative species and replacing them with native plants including golden rod, columbine, aster and sedge.

They’ve so far given the native plant facelift to six of the 83 malls and they’re seeing results. Jay Holmes, a naturalist with the American Museum of Natural History, created an iNaturalist project for the mall between 150th and 151st streets. So far, citizen scientists have recorded more than 100 species of plants and animals there, including several species of bees, moths and butterflies.

Holmes told Mongabay by email that he observed a parasitic bee that lays its eggs in the nests of other bees. “You might consider that a problem, but I was super excited, it is an ecosystem! To have predators, you need to have prey. The plants attracted the plant dependent insects, and the predators were coming in!”

Birds are also making use of the string of parks. New York City is on the Atlantic Flyway and a crucial stopover for roughly 25 million migrating birds annually. The tiny pockets of green space with trees for rest and insects to eat “may help fill critical habitat gaps, offering refuge for migratory birds passing through the city,” Dustin Partridge, director of conservation and science with the nonprofit NYC Bird Alliance, told Mongabay in an email.

Bird Alliance surveys have documented 17 species using the malls, including Baltimore orioles (Icterus galbula) and blackpoll warblers (Setophaga striata).

“If birds are finding these habitats useful, as our early data suggests, we hope our findings will help support further restoration of the Malls and inspire similar efforts in New York City and beyond,” Partridge said.

Banner image of a Broadway Mall courtesy of the BMA.