Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett A. Butler has been announced a winner of this year’s Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize. The annual prize is awarded to “outstanding leaders whose work is courageous, innovative, impactful, rooted in universal values, and global in perspective,” the organizers said in a press release.

The prize was established by the Sweden-based Tällberg Foundation in 2015,and has since been awarded to 35 recipients. Butler is one of three winners this year, chosen from a pool of more than 1,500 nominees across 146 countries.

“I’m deeply honored, but this recognition really belongs to the extraordinary Mongabay team and our global network of journalists who do the hard work every day,” Butler told Mongabay in an email. “I see the prize as a testament to the power of independent, fact-based environmental journalism.”

In a press release, the foundation said Butler was chosen for his role in “redefining global environmental journalism through Mongabay, a network model of independent reporting that empowers local voices, informs global policy, and renews confidence in journalism as a force for accountability and change.”

The two other recipients of this year’s prize are Bryan Doerries with Theater of War Productions, honored for his work using ancient stories to heal modern trauma, and David Gruber with Project CETI, recognized for his work toward deciphering the language of whales.

“These extraordinary leaders remind us that courage and imagination can reshape the human story,” Alan Stoga, chair of the Tällberg Foundation, said in the press release.

The 2025 winners will be officially celebrated in June 2026 at SNF Nostos, a weeklong celebration marking the foundation’s 30^th anniversary, to be held in Athens, Greece. The event will bring together “global leaders, innovators, and artists to explore ideas, culture, and humanity’s shared future,” the press release said. The Tällberg Foundation will host a program at the event celebrating this year’s prize recipients as well as “past Prize winners, mentors, and members of the Foundation’s global leadership network.”

Butler said that as Mongabay expands its work in Europe, the prize is “a meaningful opportunity to deepen our visibility and relationships there.”

“If it helps broaden our network and connect our journalism with new partners and audiences, that would be a most valuable outcome,” Butler added.

Banner image: Rhett Butler in the forest of Brunei. Image by Aaron.

Mongabay contributing editor Malavika Vyawahare has been awarded a 2025 SEAL environmental journalism award, which recognizes reporters covering the complexities of the environment and climate.

“This award is a huge encouragement for me, as a journalist and as an exhausted toddler mom,” Vyawahare said. “It is also a recognition of the kind of work Mongabay makes possible, the space it creates for its staff and contributors to write meaningful stories.”

The annual award is presented by SEAL (Sustainability, Environmental Achievement & Leadership), a U.S.-based environmental advocacy organization. Vyawahare is the latest Mongabay journalist or contributor to win the award; previous winners include Spoorthy Raman in 2023, Karla Mendes and Basten Gokkon in 2022, and Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett A. Butler in 2020.

“Mongabay is an outstanding publication whose writers have made our finalist list for multiple years running,” Safa Bee Wesley, impact lead at SEAL Awards, told Mongabay by email. “Malavika’s writing in particular is noteworthy for her ability to flip between a diverse set of topics (fossil fuels and renewables one moment, toxic chemicals in breastmilk the next, the impact of trade on deforestation in a third moment), and she is able to translate complex concepts from scientific language into comprehensible explanations that any reader can digest, while retaining an elevated and authoritative voice.”

Vyawahare, who divides her time between La Réunion and India, currently writes and edits for Mongabay’s Africa team. “Right now, we are knee-deep in figuring out what ‘just energy’ means for the continent’s residents,” she said. “I am excited to help environmental coverage in the region expand, deepen, and become more inclusive.”

Vyawahare added she’s also always looking out for “mouth-watering oceans stories” to add to Mongabay’s reporting on everything from deep-sea mining to coral bleaching.

In addition to Vyawahare, the 2025 SEAL award honors 11 other reporters, including those who’ve written for The Washington Post, Grist, The Guardian, The Ecologist, El País, the Los Angeles Times and the Financial Times.

“Increasingly in the last several years, we have searched for winners who not only demonstrate high caliber writing but also cover a wide range of topics, geographies and varied publication styles, as we believe the complex intricacies of the climate crisis require that attention be given to the broadest possible set of perspectives,” Wesley said.

As for Vyawahare, she said she hopes her daughter will grow up to eventually appreciate the environmental stories she’s reported on. “My daughter is just starting to string together two-word sentences, and I can’t wait for her to read something I wrote and maybe feel proud or at least learn something about the planet.”

Winners of the annual SEAL environmental journalism award are “selected based on a panel review of their body of work, data-driven assessment of impact and reach, and special consideration for reporting that brings fresh social relevance and creative insight to environmental issues,” according to the award press release.

Banner image by Malavika Vyawahare.

Colombian Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres has called for reform of international arbitration tribunals, saying they’re “one of the greatest obstacles” to the energy transition and favor corporate interests over sovereignty.

The investor–state dispute settlement system (ISDS), also called a “corporate court,” is an international trade mechanism that allows foreign investors, usually corporations, to sue a government for losses caused by its policies. Under this system, a nation can’t outlaw, or in some cases punish, existing extractive industries for environmental reasons without facing significant penalties.

“No government should have to choose between protecting nature and its people, and protecting itself from arbitrators,” Vélez said at the U.N. climate summit, COP30, in Belém, Brazil, in a session hosted by U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now.

“This mechanism, that has been inherited from an era in which the priority was investment over sovereignty, allows corporations to sue the state for adopting legitimate environmental and climate policies,” Vélez added.

According to Global Justice Now, corporations have sued over environmental demands made by nations several times under the ISDS framework. These include U.K. mining giant Anglo American suing Colombia after a court there stopped the expansion of an open-cast coal mine, and Chevron, a U.S. oil company, suing Ecuador after the nation ordered compensation following a devastating oil spill in the Amazon.

Vélez said Colombia has historically been dependent on fossil fuels and their exports, and that these mechanisms force nations to continue supporting extractive industries that damage the environment and emit greenhouse gases. Any attempt to ban fossil fuel exploitation, thereby impacting existing operations, she said, could lead to harsh penalties.

“Multi-billion-dollar ISDS claims have become so common that the mere threat of arbitration may be enough to deter countries from taking critical environmental and public health measures,” Nikki Reisch, climate and energy program director at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), told Mongabay by email.

“There is growing awareness that the ISDS system is incompatible with human rights and environmental obligations and should not just be reformed but terminated,” Reisch added.

A 2023 U.N. report called “Paying polluters” found that the ISDS, referred to as a “secretive international arbitration process,” had awarded more than $100 billion to fossil fuel and mining industries.

The report highlighted a case of three Australian mining corporations seeking $37 billion from the Republic of Congo for revoking their iron ore mining permits, citing project delays. The amount claimed is more than twice the nation’s annual GDP.

“We are calling for a global conversation to reform the investment regime in line with climate justice and with human rights,” Vélez said. “For a country such as Colombia, with significant foreign investment in oil, gas and coal, the ISDS has created a tangible financial risk that exposes, first of all, a clear inequality between north and south.”

Banner image: Boat on the Caquetá River in the eastern Colombian Amazon. Image courtesy of Víctor Galeano.

One of the world’s rarest birds has rebounded from near extinction after Indigenous communities on the Indonesian island of Bali committed to protect it under traditional laws, Mongabay contributor Heather Physioc reported.

The Bali starling (Leucopsar rothschildi) is a songbird with striking white plumage and a cobalt-blue face. In 2001, just six birds were known to live in the wild. By 2021, there were roughly 520. 

“All the people in our village are working together to secure this species,” said Made Sukadana, chair of an organization working to increase tourism in Bali’s Tengkudak village. “We plant fruit trees for the Bali starling and support a dedicated, passionate bird person who monitors daily.”

But that wasn’t always the case. Decades of aggressive poaching driven by the pet trade devastated the wild population, overwhelming conservation efforts by both NGOs and the Indonesian government.

For example, the Tegal Bunder Breeding Center released 218 birds into Bali Barat National Park over the course of 18 years, yet the wild population continued to plummet. Many of the released birds lingered near release sites and became easy targets for poachers. Others remained dependent on humans or didn’t survive in the wild.

In the 1990s, traffickers were paying up to 40 million rupiah (about $4,500 at the time) for a pair of Bali starlings, more than a park ranger’s annual salary, making it easy to pay off officials.

Even increased patrols by rangers couldn’t stem the losses; 78 birds were ultimately stolen from the breeding center.

The turning point came in 2006, when the island of Nusa Penida, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of Bali, was identified as an ex-situ sanctuary for the bird.

Though the bird is endemic to Bali, local veterinarian Bayu Wirayudha, founder of Friends of the National Parks Foundation, said he believed the neighboring island would provide a safe conservation site against poaching.

After in-person meetings with all the villages on Nusa Penida, the communities collectively agreed to turn the island into a refuge for the Bali starling.

The villages applied Hindu-based customary laws, called awig-awig, to protect the bird. The laws must be agreed upon by the entire community, with violators facing penalties more severe than under national laws, including community service, ceremonies and steep fines.

The sanctuary on Nusa Penida was a success. Former poachers have become bird guides as ecotourism flourishes on the island. Visitors include bird-watching groups and National Geographic expeditions. Antipoaching compliance improved by nearly 1,200%.

As the species’ recovery improved, the villages of Tengkudak, Bongan and Sibangkaja villages on the Bali mainland joined in, also introducing community protections to safeguard the starling.

“You get everyone in your community in a wild bird preserving culture, and it becomes self-regulating,” said Jessica Lee, head of avian species programs and partnerships at Mandai Nature.

Read the full story by Heather Physioc here.

Banner image: A Bali starling photographed in the wild. Image by Heather Physioc.

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — Brazil is ramping up efforts at the U.N. climate conference with a direct letter to nations and a draft text released Tuesday. The letter, sent late Monday, comes during the final week of the first climate summit in the Amazon rainforest. COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago released a proposal with 21 options for negotiators on four key issues. These include improving climate plans, distributing $300 billion in climate aid, addressing trade barriers, and enhancing transparency. The documents urge leaders to finalize many aspects by Wednesday, ahead of the conference’s scheduled end on Friday.

By Melina Walling, Seth Borenstein and Anton L. Delgado  Associated Press

Banner image: A sign at the site of the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, on November 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)”

For the last 20 years, Dominican nuns in a Mexican monastery have cared for the largest known captive population of the critically endangered achoque salamander. Now scientists from Chester Zoo in the U.K. are collaborating with the sisters and Mexican conservationists to test a microchipping method that they hope will help them monitor the species’ dwindling wild population, reports Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough.

Fewer than 150 adult achoque salamanders (Ambystoma dumerilii) are thought to remain in the wild, all of them in Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico’s central Michoacán state. Adding urgency to the situation, the lake is shrinking in size and growing increasingly polluted with sewage, fertilizer runoff and sediment from deforestation, Kimbrough reports.

In the 1980s, when Lake Pátzcuaro’s wild salamander population declined drastically, the Dominican sisters at the Monastery of Our Lady of Health began raising achoques in captivity at their monastery. They traditionally used achoques to produce a cough syrup, which became the convent’s main source of income.

Over the years, the nuns worked out how to get the salamanders to breed successfully in captivity, and how to raise their babies. Today, the breeding facility includes two rooms filled with tanks housing hundreds of salamanders at a time.

The Chester Zoo scientists wanted to use captive achoques to test a new tagging method — small, rice grain-sized microchips — before deploying them on wild individuals. If the microchipping was successful, the team planned to use the technique to tag wild achoques to ID and monitor them via a quick scan.

The researchers microchipped 80 captive salamanders in total across four sites; 28 in the monastery. “We were chipping them with the nuns watching protectively,” Adam Bland, assistant team manager for amphibians at Chester Zoo, said in a press release.

Individual achoques can be very difficult to identify since the salamanders don’t have natural markings unique to individuals, Kimbrough writes. Traditional scientific methods of marking amphibians, such as clipping toes, also fails in the salamanders since they regenerate lost tissue.

“Every [amphibian] species is unique, and marking techniques for amphibians often have to be species specific,” Bland told Kimbrough. “It’s also crucial that the process doesn’t affect the animals’ health.”

The microchipping experiment was successful: the microchips remained in place in 97.5% of achoques for more than 175 days, with no negative health effects.

The microchipping technique they used also allowed the researchers to tag achoques quickly without much handling stress, and the microchips can last for the salamander’s lifetime, Bland said.

Conservationists now plan to microchip all remaining wild achoques in Lake Pátzcuaro, so their health and population can be monitored more easily.

Read the full story by Liz Kimbrough here.

Banner image: Microchipping project brings high-tech hopes for the critically endangered achoque salamander. Image courtesy of Chester Zoo.