A recent study in Forensic Science International suggests a link between exposure to heavy metals from mining operations and reduced cognitive performance in children in Peru. Researchers say the findings highlight the long-term impact of mining pollution on children’s neurocognitive development and demonstrate that exposure is not a one-time event.

The research focused on children living near a heavily contaminated mining district in Cerro de Pasco, in Peru’s Andes Mountains. Extensive mining for lead, zinc and silver has been ongoing there for almost 400 years, since Spanish colonial rule. Industrial mining has intensified over recent decades, exposing residents to contamination from modern mining and a host of serious health consequences, including cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

The study looked at metal concentrations in 81 exposed children and 17 unexposed children and compared their neurocognitive abilities and IQs. Exposed children had lead concentrations in their hair of 4.30 mg/kg, 43 times the recommended safe limit of 0.10 mg/kg set by the Micro Trace Laboratory in Germany. They also had elevated levels of arsenic, cadmium and manganese — all toxic heavy metals.

The researchers found cognitive performance was lower in the children who had been exposed to mining pollutants compared with those who hadn’t; the mean IQ was 12.3 points lower. Other variables, including verbal comprehension, perceptive analysis and memory, were also impaired in the children with a high body burden from mining.

“Simply put, pollution from mining increases children’s exposure to metals that are toxic to the developing brain,” Lucía Ordóñez Mayán, study co-author with the University of Santiago de Compostela’s Institute of Forensic Sciences in Spain, told Mongabay over email. “This can translate into more learning difficulties, attention and memory problems, poorer verbal comprehension, and lower school performance.”

While other factors can also influence intelligence and cognitive performance, the concern, Ordóñez Mayán explained, is that exposure to heavy metals “can affect the educational development and future opportunities of the children concerned.”

Banner image: Children in Cerro de Pasco play every day next to the giant mining pit that has taken over the town. Image courtesy of Cristina Hara.

Mangroves have become a favored solution in climate and conservation circles. They absorb carbon, blunt storm surge and support fisheries. Funding has followed. Yet outcomes often lag ambition. In parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America, research suggests that roughly 70% of restoration projects struggle to establish healthy forests. Seedlings die. Sites flood incorrectly. Community interest fades.

The problem is not enthusiasm. It is execution.

Much restoration is driven by small, community-based groups with deep local knowledge but limited access to capital, technical advice or long-term support. Catherine Lovelock, a mangrove ecologist at the University of Queensland, points out that success depends as much on social and economic conditions as on planting techniques. Mangroves, she notes, thrive only when tides inundate them for a few hours at a time. Too much water or too little can doom a site. Just as important are land tenure, livelihoods and incentives to protect restored areas once planting ends.

A growing set of nonprofits is positioning itself as an intermediary between funders and communities. One example is Seatrees, which does not run projects directly but backs local partners with funding, scientific guidance, monitoring support and communications. Over the past five years, it has supported mangrove work in places as varied as Kenya, Mexico, Indonesia and Florida, Mongabay’s Marina Martinez reports.

The approach is selective. Seatrees looks for groups that already have experience and local legitimacy but face capacity gaps. Projects must have permission to operate and clear buy-in from communities and Indigenous stakeholders. In Kenya, this has translated into partnerships that combine planting with less visible work: restoring hydrology through trench-digging, maintaining nurseries and paying community members to patrol forests.

Those payments matter. Stipends tied to seedlings are often pooled and reinvested in beekeeping, ecotourism or livestock. Those income streams persist after planting slows, reducing pressure to cut mangroves later. As Leah Hays of Seatrees puts it, communities are “getting paid to do this important work.”

Monitoring is another differentiator. Seatrees tracks seedling survival for at least two years and adjusts tactics when sites falter. In Kenya, Seatrees says, survival rates range from 50-80%, depending on conditions. The organization has also published community surveys that highlight unresolved problems, including ongoing illegal logging. Transparency, even when results are mixed, helps keep partners aligned and funders engaged.

For practitioners, the lesson is practical. Mangrove restoration is not a numbers game. Planting without hydrology, local livelihoods, monitoring and honest reporting is unlikely to endure. The work that matters most often happens after the seedlings go in — and it requires institutions willing to fund patience, not just trees.

Read the full article here.

Banner image: A local woman caring for mangrove saplings at Seatrees and COBEC’s nursery in Mida Creek, Kenya. Image courtesy of Seatrees.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Corralling a wild rhinoceros into a small chute to give it eyedrops might seem like a crazy plan. But if it’s crazy and it works, then it’s not crazy.

Animal behaviorists partnering with the Palm Beach Zoo & Conservation Society in Florida traveled to Africa in August to help an endangered white rhino with a life-threatening, parasitic eye infection.

Daniel Terblanche, a security manager with Imvelo Safari Lodges, said no one in Zimbabwe would have come up with the plan.

“Believe me, we didn’t think of it; it was a completely ridiculous idea to us,” Terblanche said. “But without trying all of the things that we could to rectify that situation, we would have been in trouble, I think.”

Outside of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, the Community Rhino Conservation Initiative, with support from Imvelo Safari Lodges, engages local communities to reintroduce southern white rhinos to communal lands for the first time in the nation’s history.

Palm Beach Zoo CEO and President Margo McKnight was visiting the area last year when Imvelo Safari Lodges managing director Mark Butcher told her a health scare with a male rhino named Thuza could jeopardize the future of the program.

“This rhino had bleeding eyes. He was rubbing his eyes,” Butcher said. “And I was looking at a potential where this guy was gonna lose his eyesight. And this is in a pilot project that’s got fantastic vision for a future for conservation throughout Africa.”

Thad and Angi Lacinak, founders of Precision Behavior, traveled to Zimbabwe to work with the anti-poacher scouts. They developed a plan based on lessons learned at Palm Beach Zoo, where animals are taught to voluntarily participate in their own care.

“With this few animals in this location in Africa, it was essential that we save all of them,” Angi Lacinak said. “So when they called and said, Thuza is going to lose his eye, a blind rhino is a dead rhino. So no matter what it took, we were going to go over there and try.”

The idea was to coax Thuza into a tight space with his favorite foods and then to desensitize him to humans touching and squirting water on the face.

“Within about a week, we were actually putting the eye drops strategically in his eyes while he held for it,” Lacinak said. “And by the end of two weeks, we had transferred that skill set to not only Daniel, who was in charge of leading their guards, but to the guards.”

The conservation status of southern white rhinos is listed as near threatened, with about 16,000 animals living in the wild. Poaching and habitat loss remain significant sources of danger. So while Thuza and other rhinos continue to face challenges in the wild, at least the animal’s eyes have been protected.

“They’re consistently getting the medications into his eyes every day,” Lacinak said. “And the rhinos are just thriving now and they feel really, really confident that this solved their problem.”

By Cody Jackson and David Fischer, Associated Press 

Banner image by Rhett Butler/Mongabay

Deforestation and land use change can accelerate the spread of zoonotic diseases — infectious illnesses that can spread from animals to humans — including malaria and COVID-19. While habitat restoration is crucial for addressing biodiversity loss and climate change, new research suggests counterintuitively that it can also temporarily increase the risk of certain zoonotic diseases in some areas.

Human encroachment into wild spaces for development and agriculture increases contact with disease-spreading wildlife. In Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, for example, researchers found mosquitoes were more likely to feast on humans when their natural hosts became scarce as a result of deforestation.

Despite a global push to restore degraded ecosystems, scientists have known little about how restoration affects zoonotic disease risk. To fill that gap, Adam Fell with the University of Stirling in Scotland, and lead author of a new study, conducted a large meta-analysis of scientific literature, case studies and policy reports.

“We only found something like 39 [relevant] studies, out of thousands that we looked through,” Fell told Mongabay in a video call.

The results were very context-dependent, he said. In some cases, reforestation actually increased the spread of zoonotic diseases in the short term. One explanation offered by researchers is that rodents — a common vector for infectious disease — are among the first colonizers in a disturbed landscape, and with them can come an uptick in zoonotic diseases like hantavirus.

In the long term, Fell added, ecosystems tend to find balance as larger animals, like ungulates and bobcats, return to outcompete and/or prey on rodents. That stabilization is hard to track, though, as such equilibrium can take years or decades, but most studies have limited funding and longevity, only documenting short-term outcomes.

Conversely, researchers found that restoring wetlands immediately reduced zoonotic disease transmission. Fell suspects this is likely because animals like birds and fish can return to a wetland more quickly than large animals can return to a forest. “Fish maybe then are eating the mosquito nymphs and larvae in the water,” Fell said.

“This work is vitally important in demonstrating how biodiversity fosters healthy landscapes for humans,” study co-author Luci Kirkpatrick of Bangor University, said in a press release.

A major limitation to the current study is geographic. Most studies have been conducted in wealthy countries, while the overlap between land degradation, population exposure and zoonotic disease is most common in developing countries. So, Fell’s team created the Living Evidence Atlas, which compiles existing data and provides a platform for new research as it emerges.

“It’s a first stepping stone for future research,” Fell said.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts urgently called for implementation of a “One Health” approach to prevent future pandemics — simultaneously addressing human, animal and ecosystem health worldwide, protecting humanity and nature and incorporating disease risk into decision-making. But the global community has made few strides in that direction.

Banner image: Tree planting in Australia. Image by John Englart via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Kenya has launched its first national carbon registry, a centralized system to track carbon credit projects, prevent double counting and strengthen transparency in climate markets. The platform positions Kenya to attract global climate financing as demand grows for credible carbon offsets under the Paris Climate agreement. Officials say the registry will ensure emissions reductions are verified and that communities benefit from carbon trading. Backed by international partners including Germany, the system is meant to boost investor confidence and align carbon projects with national climate targets. Africa holds vast carbon sinks but gets only a small share of global carbon market investment.

By Allan Olingo, Associated Press

Banner image: Fisherman Guni Mazeras, 62, casts a net backdropped by mangrove trees in Vanga, Kwale County, Kenya on Monday, June 13, 2022. Locals living in once-heavily forested regions across Africa are starting to find their land in high demand as governments and companies seek to improve their climate credentials through carbon credit schemes, where tree-planting offsets carbon dioxide emissions. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

Costa Rica’s highest court has ruled that government agencies and the national electricity utility failed to adequately protect wildlife from electrocution caused by power lines. The case centers on the Nosara region in northwestern Costa Rica, but conservationists say the landmark ruling could strengthen wildlife protections across the country.

The lawsuit was filed with the Constitutional Court by the law firm Alta Legal on behalf of a coalition of NGOs that argued that local electricity infrastructure was not adequately secured, as required by law.

“Bare electrical wiring is a widespread problem in Costa Rica especially affecting rural areas,” Francisco Sánchez Murillo, a Costa Rican veterinarian who provided information for the case, told Mongabay in an email. He cited exposed wires, poor infrastructure maintenance and inadequate insulation for cables and transformers as key hazards.

“In Nosara, the issue has been especially visible due to the constant wildlife electrocutions in the area,” Murillo said.

Such electrocutions primarily harm tree-dwelling species like sloths and monkeys, and the recent court case largely focused on howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata). According to Elena Kukovica with the International Animal Rescue Center, one of the NGOs involved in the lawsuit, howler monkey mothers are frequently electrocuted on power lines.

“That means you get a child that’s with her that becomes orphaned or dies as well,” Kukovica told Mongabay in a video call. She added that male troop leaders are also frequently killed. “And what happens is in the hierarchy of howler monkeys, the next leading male, then, to basically secure his position, he would kill all the offspring of the previous howler monkey lead male. So, then you get a lot of other monkeys dead.”

Beyond animal welfare concerns, howler monkeys serve a vital ecological role as seed dispersers in the area. Their loss therefore “also creates a big consequence for the flora and fauna in that particular region,” Kukovica said.

The Constitutional Court confirmed that bare wiring was being improperly used in the Nosara area and ordered ICE, the national electricity provider, and the Ministry of Environment and Energy to correct the problem within six months. Failure to do so, according to Kukovica, can include “fines or even prison time for them.”

This case focused on the Nosara region because that’s where documentation of the problem existed, but conservationists say the ruling could have a broader national impact.

“We hope it will serve as a platform for other regions facing similar issues,” Murillo said.

Banner image: A howler monkey crossing power lines in Costa Rica. Image by Rhett A. Butler/ Mongabay.