Deforestation figures can be frustrating to look at, but there are a number of success stories when it comes to protecting tropical forests that we can learn from, Crystal Davis, global program director at the World Resources Institute, says in a recent Mongabay video.

“We know what works. We know how to do it,” Davis says. “We have more tools than ever to help us combat deforestation.”

One of those tools is Global Forest Watch, an online platform that uses satellite data, artificial intelligence and cloud computing to track where exactly deforestation is happening and where forests are growing back.

Part of the tool is the Forest Watcher app, which allows forest rangers like those working for Madagascar’s National Parks Association to monitor deforestation. The app has led to swifter responses to drivers of deforestation, such as fires, WRI said in a 2024 post.

“Data and transparency of data play an incredibly important role in protecting tropical forests,” Davis says.

In Peru, the Rainforest Foundation US helped train more than 30 communities in using Forest Watcher. Data visualized on Global Forest Watch showed that in the first year alone, the territories of those 30 communities had 50% fewer deforestation alerts compared to another 30 communities that didn’t use the app.

Another map shown in the Mongabay video reveals the critical role of local communities and Indigenous peoples in conservation in the Amazon, with much lower deforestation within their territories than outside.

“You can see that the areas where Indigenous peoples manage the forests are actually protected. But outside those areas, deforestation is often increasing,” Davis says, adding this is a trend in other countries as well.

Playing a critical role for Indigenous peoples is the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which protects Indigenous communities’ rights to their land and resources, and to self-determination, Davis says. It also includes provisions for the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) process, which requires the involvement of communities in consultations about projects that may affect their land and resources.

“We estimate that about 50% of the world’s land is managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities, and that actually includes around a third of the remaining intact tropical forests,” Davis says. “Those are the most pristine and undisturbed forests that hold the most carbon, the most biodiversity.”

While much of Indigenous-managed lands still aren’t legally recognized, an additional 100 million hectares (247 million acres) of such land gained legal recognition since 2015, according to NGO coalition Rights and Resources Initiative.

With better data and technology, Davis says, it will be interesting to see how financing for tropical forest conservation can be increased, especially to support the work of Indigenous peoples and local communities.

Watch the full Mongabay video here.

Banner image of Crystal Davis, global program director at the World Resources Institute. Image © Carmen Hilbert.

Bangladesh has initiated efforts to revive five species of plants currently listed as critically endangered on the country’s red list, as well as bring back two species declared locally extinct, reports Mongabay’s Abu Siddique.

The critically endangered plants include two species of orchids: bulborox or the Sikkim bulb-leaf orchid (Bulbophyllum roxburghii), and the small-bulb orchid (Bulbophyllum oblongum), both found only in parts of the country’s Sundarbans wetland.

The three other critically endangered species are the dwarf date palm (Phoenix acaulis), a small palm species currently present only in Dinajpur district’s sal (Shorea robusta) forest; chaulmoogra (Hydnocarpus kurzii), an evergreen tree found in the forests of Bandarban, Rangamati, Cox’s Bazar, Chittagong, Moulvibazar and Habiganj districts; as well as bash pata (Podocarpus neriifolius), a conifer with only 111 individuals known to exist across several districts.

To help these five species recover, the Bangladesh Forest Department in collaboration with the Bangladesh National Herbarium, National Botanical Garden and IUCN Bangladesh are working to grow their seedlings in nurseries, before moving them to suitable habitats.

“Our team is working to protect the species from extinction. Besides the conservation of the five critically endangered species, we are trying to collect two [locally] extinct plants — gola anjan [Memecylon ovatum] and fita champa [Magnolia griffithii] — from our neighboring countries as we share nearly similar ecosystems,” Syeda Rizwana Hasan, adviser to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, told Mongabay.

All five plant species identified for revival were categorized as critically endangered in Bangladesh’s first-ever plant red list published in November 2024.

Of Bangladesh’s known 3,813 plant species, the conservation status of only around 1,000 species has been assessed, red list project coordinator A.B.M. Sarowar Alam told Mongabay.

“[I]f we can finish the rest of the species, we will be able to do the Red List indexing properly, which will help to protect all the species from risk of extinction,” Alam added.

Read the full story by Abu Siddique here.

Banner image: Bulborox orchid (Bulbophyllum roxburghii), critically endangered in Bangladesh. Image by Plant.Hunter via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

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

As governments and corporations scramble to meet climate pledges, the search for reliable and scalable carbon removal strategies has turned increasingly toward forests. But while tree planting captures the public imagination, a new study suggests a simpler, less costly strategy may deliver better results: Protecting young secondary forests already on the landscape.

In the study, researchers led by Nathaniel Robinson from the environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy mapped aboveground carbon accumulation across more than 100,000 forest plots worldwide, spanning a century of regrowth. The work confirms that forests don’t store carbon at a constant rate — carbon removal rates vary wildly by forest age, region and ecological conditions. In fact, the study finds a 200-fold difference between the slowest- and fastest-growing sites.

The sweet spot? Forests aged 20 to 40 years. At this stage, many exhibit peak carbon uptake — far exceeding the removals achieved in the first few decades of new regeneration. Tropical forests, in particular, perform best, reaching maximum sequestration levels around 23 years of age. Mediterranean and savanna ecosystems, by contrast, peak later and less dramatically.

This temporal dynamic has practical implications. If natural regeneration began in 2025 across 800 million hectares (1.98 billion acres) of degraded land — an area larger than Australia — the study estimates that 20.3 billion metric tons of carbon could be sequestered by 2050. Delaying that timeline by just five years could slash the benefit by nearly a quarter. Yet existing young forests could outperform freshly planted ones by as much as 820% on a per-hectare basis in some regions.

That efficiency comes with urgency. Secondary forests are disproportionately at risk of clearance. In Latin America, they are 10 times more likely to be lost than old-growth. In Brazil’s Amazon, half are destroyed within eight years. Yet current carbon market mechanisms provide little to no credit for preserving them, focusing instead on planting or managing older stands.

The study’s 1-kilometer resolution maps of carbon growth curves — tied to environmental variables such as soil, climate and topography — offer policymakers and project developers sharper tools.

In the race to close the emissions gap, protecting a forest already hard at work may be faster and cheaper than waiting for a sapling to grow.

Banner image: Patchwork of cassava fields, regenerating secondary forest, and natural forest in the Amazon. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

A United Nations expert is calling for an urgent shift away from fossil fuels by the global economy, including a ban on advertisements or promotions, and the criminalization of misinformation from the industry.

Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, who presented her 23-page report at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, reminded states of their human rights obligations, and businesses of their responsibility to phase out fossil fuel within the current decade.

“The interlinked, intergenerational, severe and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle, coupled with six decades of climate obstruction, compel urgent defossilization of our whole economies, for a just transition that is effective, human rights-based and transformative,” Morgera wrote in the report. She added there’s “no scientific doubt” that fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change, and the main driver of planetary crises including biodiversity loss and mass human rights violations.

Morgera said at the Human Rights Council’s 59th session that current efforts to mitigate climate change “fall significantly short” of greenhouse gas reductions needed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.

But she added that “securing a liveable and sustainable future for humanity is still possible” through effective climate action within the decade.

This includes countering the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to “keep the public uninformed about the severity of climate change and about the role of fossil fuels in causing it,” Morgera wrote in the report.

She added the formation of public opinion and democratic debate should be protected from “undue commercial influence,” and urged states to ensure the availability of science-based information, ban fossil fuel advertisements and promotions, prohibit lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, criminalize misinformation and misrepresentation such as greenwashing, and criminalize attacks against environmental human rights defenders, including judicial harassment.

Morgera said phasing out fossil fuel production and use should be interpreted as part of states’ duty to fulfill the right to life. To prioritize the phaseout, she recommended that states prohibit new licenses and revoke exist ones for fossil fuel operations.

Morgera wrote of the need to “tackle historical responsibilities and current injustices” to prevent mass human rights violations due to climate change. Remedies to address the harms of fossil fuel activities should be given to, and developed with, affected communities, she said.

The Guardian reported that while the report lays the human rights case for decisive political action for a world in which the basic rights of people are prioritized above profits by a few, it “will probably be dismissed by some as radical and untenable.”

But Morgera told The Guardian that the seemingly radical transition to renewable energy “is now cheaper and safer for our economics and a healthier option for our societies.”

Banner image of a flare stack by Yerevan Malarerva via Pexels.

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

In a corner of the rainforest where Colombia meets Peru and Brazil, the hum of chainsaws and gunfire never quite dies. Yet, in the shadows of this long emergency, a subtler resistance endures. Its frontline is marked not by barricades or armed patrols, but by walking sticks carved from peach palm, and a deep, unshakable intimacy with the land, reports Mongabay Latam’s Daniela Quintero Díaz.

Luis Alfredo Acosta has walked this path for 35 years. A member of the Nasa people and national coordinator of the Indigenous guard under the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), Acosta speaks with clarity shaped by decades of witnessing promises deferred and communities displaced. “Although these appear to be isolated things … it really is an integral resistance,” he says. “Because at its core, all of this only works if there is land.”

In Colombia’s Amazon region, “resistance” is neither metaphor nor battle cry.

It is physical — guarding against armed groups, illegal loggers, and narcotraffickers.

It is intellectual — preserving ancestral knowledge and mapping sacred sites.

It is spiritual — sustained through rituals and the use of yagé.

And it is cultural — enacted in daily life through small farms, seed banks and forest patrols.

That these efforts persist amid violence is remarkable. Of the 1,411 human rights defenders killed in Colombia over the past decade, at least 70 were Indigenous guards. In many areas, the state has withdrawn: 11 protected zones in the Amazon are now inaccessible to park rangers due to armed conflict. Yet forests within Indigenous territories remain largely intact, with 98% cover — a fact both defiant and tragic.

The guards, often unpaid, rely on collective will more than resources. In Putumayo, the Siona community has removed mines and monitored vast forest tracts. In Guainía, fishers have transformed kitchens into labs, contributing to national fishery policies. In Amazonas, communities reforest thousands of hectares using knowledge handed down through generations.

The state’s support has been halting. President Gustavo Petro’s National Development Plan pledged to strengthen Indigenous guardianship, but funding has been piecemeal. For guards like Olegario Sánchez of the Tikuna, even basics like radios or canoes are scarce. “If we leave the territory,” a Siona guard warned, “we get closer to dying. If a root dies, its essence dies. And the principle of a community dies.”

In the Amazon, the forest still stands. But its fate — and that of its guardians — hangs in the balance.

Read the full story by Daniela Quintero Díaz here.

Banner image: A community member catching fish in the Fluvial Star of Inírida, where the Guaviare, Atabapo and Inírida rivers meet. Image courtesy of Camilo Díaz for WWF Colombia.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Authorities in Greece imposed mandatory work breaks on Monday in parts of the country where temperatures are expected to exceed 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), with the heat wave forecast to last through Thursday.

The labor ministry ordered the work stoppage, in effect from midday to 5:00 p.m. (0900–1400 GMT), for outdoor manual labor and food delivery services, primarily in central Greece and on several islands. Employers were also asked to offer remote work options.

No emergency measures were implemented in Athens, and the current hot spell — following sweltering temperatures across Europe — is not considered unusual.

Greek authorities say they are taking long-term steps to address the effects of climate change, including the deployment this summer of a record number of firefighters.

Banner image: Tourist with umbrellas wait outside the Acropolis of Athens, on Monday, July 7, 2025 while authorities in Greece have imposed mandatory work stoppages in parts of the country where temperatures are expected to exceed 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)