A mighty blaze in Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park is menacing the home of the world’s rarest lemur species. Disastrous dry conditions have turned the biodiversity haven into a tinderbox.

The park, one of the country’s leading tourist destinations, is a 10-hour drive from Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, and is also home to the prestigious Centre ValBio research center (CVB).

Patricia Wright, a leading authority on lemurs who helped establish the park, described a nightmarish scene, with “the sun beating down and the wind whipping the flames into a frenzy.” Wright is at the forefront of firefighting efforts along with hundreds of residents.

There’s no official estimate yet about the fire damage, but more than 260 hectares (642 acres) are likely impacted, Wright, executive director of CVB, told Mongabay via email. The fires erupted near the park’s western boundary and spread within its limits.

The national park was created in 1991, encompassing 43,550 hectares (107,614 acres) of rainforests that line Madagascar’s eastern coast. The presence here of the greater bamboo lemur (Hapalemur simus) and the golden bamboo lemur (Hapalemur aureus) recorded in the 1980s lent urgency to efforts to preserve the area.

“It is an important habitat for lemurs, reptiles, geckos, amphibians, insects, and mammals such as bats and tenrecs,” a shrew-like animal, Rhodin Rafidimanandray, a tourist guide, told L’Express de Madagascar. “Bird species that cannot fly high are surely burned. Not to mention the flora that has simply disappeared with the fire.”

While CVB and residents play a role in the protection of the park, it’s officially managed by Madagascar National Parks (MNP), a quasigovernmental agency that also oversees most of Madagascar’s protected areas.

Ranomafana’s appeal for researchers and tourists has afforded it some protection against deforestation. But many of Madagascar’s protected areas face high rates of forest loss because of expanding slash-and-burn agriculture along with a lack of funding to safeguard green cover. A changing climate is making conservation even more challenging.

Human activities, not natural causes, likely caused the current fire, Ollier Andrianambinina, an MNP spokesperson, told Mongabay. Two major fires broke out in the park in late December. One is now contained, but the other persists, fueled by dry vegetation and strong winds, according to Andrianambinina.

Madagascar’s rainy season runs between November and April, but “it has not rained in December or January,” Wright said. “Everything in the rainforest is wilted and dry.”

Park authorities, the gendarmerie (a militarized arm of the police), the military, CVB and the nonprofit Pivot Works are fighting the fire alongside residents. On Jan. 8, more than 1,500 community members were involved in the operation. “Everyone worked beating the fires with shovels and branches and making firebreaks,” Wright said.

Community members provided food and water for firefighters, using funds from MNP and CVB. The research station has deployed two drones to track the fire’s spread.

Banner image: A community member participates in firefighting efforts in Ranomafana National Park. Image courtesy of Fabrice Odon Rasolomampionona/Centre ValBio.

Bonobo populations in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Salonga National Park remained steady between 2002 and 2018, but there are worrying signals of decline, a recent study has found.

For decades, Salonga has been known to host the largest known population of bonobos (Pan paniscus), an endangered great ape found only in the DRC. However, researchers didn’t have a reliable estimate for bonobo numbers in the massive park, which spans more than 33,000 square kilometers (12,700 square miles) and includes a 9,000-km2 (3,500-mi2) corridor of human settlements.

Over the years, researchers have used different methods to count bonobos in Salonga. But those surveys have been “too small and patchy,” and over short time periods, according to the new study’s authors. So they reanalyzed 13 surveys conducted between 2002 and 2018, reconciling the different methods to understand bonobo numbers and distribution across the entire park and across multiple years, Mattia Bessone, the study’s lead author from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany, told Mongabay by email.

The reanalysis showed the park has been home to between 8,000 and 18,300 adult bonobos since 2002. This estimate conforms to extrapolations made in 2008, Bessone said.

The study also found that bonobos were present more often near ranger patrol posts. Bessone said the reasons for this aren’t clear, but the presence of rangers could serve as a deterrent to hunting of bonobos, which are a protected species. “We have not investigated if the same applies to non-protected species (we suspect that it does not), but the effect on bonobos is remarkable and support strategies including law enforcement as a conservation tool,” Bessone said.

Bonobo presence was generally lower closer to villages, the study found, except for some located in the park’s south. There, people “have a taboo against killing bonobos,” Bessone said.

“It is commendable that the authors have brought these findings together in such a comprehensive manner,” Erin Wessling, a great ape researcher at Harvard University, U.S., who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by email.

However, the study hints at some troubling signs. While bonobo populations and distribution haven’t changed much in Salonga since 2002, there was a slight decline over the years.

“Although not [statistically] significant, these results suggest that bonobos are far from being safe even in Salonga and encourage further effort to protect the species within the Park,” Bessone said.

The authors haven’t probed the reasons for the decline, but Bessone said poaching in some remote parts of the park, like in the southwest, where park rangers are rarely present even today, could be a factor. Climate change could also be affecting the bonobos’ food availability, he added.

The potential decline in bonobo populations in Salonga, which is well-studied, “serves as a stark reminder that less monitored and less protected areas might very likely be experiencing more severe declines,” Wessling said.

Banner image of bonobos, courtesy of Christian Ziegler/Max Planck Institute.

Wildfires in Southern California, U.S., have killed at least five people, forced some 130,000 to evacuate, and damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 buildings.  Numerous fires are raging around Los Angeles county, a region famous for its beaches and Hollywood celebrities. Nearly 30,000 acres (12,140 hectares) have burned in a quickly accelerating fire as of the morning of Jan. 9.

“In five minutes, it burned probably a quarter of a mile across Eaton Canyon,” local resident Muffie Alejandro told The New York Times.

Experts say the fires intensified due to the Santa Ana winds, also known as the “devil winds,” common at this time of year. The current event has seen wind speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour), significantly fueling the fires’ spread. In response, the U.S. Storm Prediction Center, in collaboration with the National Weather Service, has issued a warning for extremely critical fire weather conditions.

The combination of powerful winds and vegetation dried out by moderate drought and record-high summer temperatures created ideal conditions for wildfire. California’s rainy season typically runs from October to April, but the region hasn’t seen significant rain since May 2024, when 0.15 inches (3.8 millimeters) fell in Los Angeles. Anything over .10 inches (2.54 millimeters) is technically considered significant for the area. The 2024 summer was California’s hottest in 130 years.

The record heat and drought conditions followed record rain and flooding in the region just two years earlier. From December 2022 to March 2023 much of the West Coast was inundated with rain. Los Angeles, currently battling fire, received more than 50 in (1,270 mm) of rain that season, one of the wettest events on record.

“Climate change has already increased the occurrence of extreme events, be it floods or droughts,” Stefan Doerr, a professor at Swansea University, U.K., and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Wildland Fire, told Mongabay by email.

However, Doerr said it’s too soon to say whether the ongoing fires are a result of climate change or a predictable result of an exceptional rainy season, which allows more plants to grow quickly that later dry out and become fodder for fire.

He said it can’t be ruled out that the rain created more fuel, but added “more important will be the extended dry conditions this summer and fall that make any of the existing vegetation more flammable.”

“Climate change has led to a lengthening of the fire weather season,” he added.

In addition to thousands of residents, the fires have also forced wildlife in the region to flee.

“These fires are also burning through the habitat of our wild neighbors, including the struggling mountain lion population in the Santa Monica Mountains. It’s another reminder that we have to immediately commit to policies that fight fossil fuel-driven climate change,” Tiffany Yap, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Mongabay by email.

Banner image of fire crews battling the Palisades fire in Southern California, courtesy of Cal Fire.

Extreme weather in 2024 affected around 18 in every 1,000 people across the globe, according to preliminary figures from the International Disaster Database. Mongabay has compiled the data into an interactive dashboard below.

Intense droughts, floods, storms, heat waves and other climate-driven disasters claimed more than 11,500 lives and affected at least 148 million people all over the world, though figures are likely higher, as data are missing for several events.

Floods were among the deadliest disasters of 2024, with 132 recorded events impacting approximately 43 million people. However, the devastation was not evenly distributed. The Global South experienced more than 10 times as many flooding events as the Global North, but the floods affected 900 times more people in the Global South.

In January, flooding in the Democratic Republic of Congo left 350,000 people in need of humanitarian aid as homes, schools and hospitals were destroyed and access to clean drinking water severely limited in some areas.

Catastrophic floods then hit southern Brazil in July, submerging 90% of the state of Rio Grande do Sul and displacing more than half a million people.

While some parts of the world flooded, a severe drought gripped Southern Africa, affecting roughly 24.7 million people in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Angola and Namibia. A food shortage followed as farmers were unable to grow enough crops.

East Asia faced an “extraordinary” typhoon season, rivers in the Amazon rainforest were pushed to their lowest-ever levels and the world’s corals continue to face the largest bleaching event on record due to high ocean temperatures.

Analyses of the year’s extreme weather events and historical comparisons are still ongoing, but the latest report by World Weather Attribution (WWA) indicates that climate change played a more significant role than El Niño in most of the events studied.

“As the planet warms, the influence of climate change increasingly overrides other natural phenomena affecting the weather,” authors of the WWA report wrote.

The world average temperature in 2024 was roughly 1.3° Celsius (2.3° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Scientists warn that the Paris Agreement’s target to limit global warming to below 1.5°C (2.7°F) — a threshold critical to avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change — is likely to be surpassed within the next decade.

The last 10 years are officially the top 10 hottest years on record, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a New Year message, “This is climate breakdown — in real time.”

Banner image: Millions of people were impacted by extreme weather events in 2024. Image is a compilation by Mongabay, using photos by Mark König, Mike Newbry and Saikiran Kesari via Unsplash.

Over the past decade, the population of the critically endangered Siberian crane has increased by nearly 50%, according to the International Crane Foundation.

The foundation said the boost in the snowy-white Siberian crane’s (Leucogeranus leucogeranus) numbers is the result of efforts to secure the migratory bird’s stopover sites along its eastern flyway, or migratory route, between Russia and China.

“It is a wonderful feeling to have this Critically Endangered species thriving with such a strong comeback from near extinction,” Rich Beilfuss, president and CEO of the International Crane Foundation, told Mongabay by email.

The Siberian crane, known for its extremely long and arduous annual journeys, is one of the world’s rarest cranes. It’s western and central populations, which once bred in western Russia, then migrated to parts of Central Asia and India, is nearly extinct today.

Most Siberian cranes that remain belong to the eastern population, which migrates between northeastern Russia and China. By 2012, researchers estimated there were around 3,500-4,000 individuals left in this eastern population.

The latest bird counts from Russia and China suggest their numbers have nearly doubled to 7,000 individuals, Beilfuss said.

The recovery of the eastern flyway is heartening, he added, because the western flyway of the species “was lost due to over-hunting and the entire population is now concentrated in this one eastern flyway between Russia and China.”

The eastern population, too, has declined in the past due to the loss and degradation of its summer breeding and wintering grounds, as well as its stopover wetland habitats. The habitat losses are driven largely by climate change and human activities like the construction of dams.

To help the Siberian cranes along this flyway, the International Crane Foundation, with support from the Disney Conservation Fund, has been working with organizations in Russia and China over the past decade to identify and secure the wetlands the bird relies on, Beilfuss said.

In China, for instance, the foundation has collaborated with local partners at Lake Poyang, which supports nearly the entire wintering population of Siberian cranes and several other threatened waterbirds. Beilfuss said they’re managing the lake system in a way that ensures enough feeding areas for the cranes. Additionally, the organizations have been raising awareness about the threatened status of the species along the flyway, including school curriculums about the crane.

The Disney funding ended in late 2024. However, the International Crane Foundation will continue to work on Lake Poyang, Beilfuss said. This includes focusing on “restoring the natural habitat for cranes and managing enough safe agricultural land as refugia, developing a water level control and vegetation restoration plan for two sub-lakes within Poyang, and strengthening community engagement to reduce disturbances to cranes,” he said. “Still much to do to keep this species thriving!”

Banner image of Siberian cranes at Lake Poyang in China by A Dim Light Chaser via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

With just two weeks remaining as president, Joe Biden invoked the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to ban new offshore oil and gas drilling for the entire U.S. East Coast, West Coast, eastern Gulf of Mexico and sections of the North Bering Sea in Alaska. The move will ban fossil fuel extraction from nearly 2.5 million square kilometers (977,000 square miles) of federal water, an area larger than Texas and Alaska combined.

More than 90% of Alaska’s federal water will still be open to drilling as well as the central and western Gulf of Mexico. The exempted regions are the most productive areas in the country for offshore oil and gas. The areas included in the ban are not central to U.S. oil production. There are currently no federal leases on the U.S. East Coast and there hasn’t been a federal sale off the California coast since 1984.

The move will only affect leases for new offshore drilling and not projects currently underway, so the ban is “not particularly consequential for U.S. exploration and production going forward,” Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, told CNN. 

Nonetheless, fossil fuel interests say the move could hamstring their ability to ensure a steady supply of domestic oil and gas. In a statement, American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers said, “We urge policymakers to use every tool at their disposal to reverse this politically motivated decision and restore a pro-American energy approach to federal leasing.”

In a news conference, president-elect Donald Trump vowed to undo the ban: “I will reverse it immediately.” He also said he plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

Reversing the ban would require action by Congress, a tall order. California Representative Jared Huffman described the move as “Trump-proof” in a statement. Adding, “We know the President-elect will do everything in his power to enact his ‘drill baby drill’ agenda, but fortunately for us all, handing our oceans over to Big Oil billionaires will be off the table.”

Though the regions recently protected were not under threat of oil and gas development, environmental groups applauded the move as a way to protect marine wildlife and coastal communities.

“By not allowing these public waters to be sold off to the highest corporate bidder, President Biden has put people and nature over polluters,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.

In a statement announcing the move, President Biden highlighted his environmental legacy of conserving 670 million acres (271 million hectares) of American land and water.

 “Protecting America’s coasts and ocean is the right thing to do and will help communities and the economy to flourish for generations to come,” President Biden said.

Banner image of federal waters withdrawn from oil and gas leasing in the continental U.S. courtesy of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.