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.

Colombia will no longer approve new oil or large-scale mining projects in its Amazon biome, which covers 42% of the nation’s territory, according to a Nov. 13 statement by its environment ministry.

Acting Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres said the entire Colombian Amazon will be made a reserve for renewable natural resources. She made the announcement at a meeting of ministers with the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, during COP30, the U.N. climate summit taking place in Belém, Brazil.

“This declaration is an ethical and scientific commitment. It seeks to prevent forest degradation, river contamination and biodiversity loss that threatens the continent’s climate balance,” Vélez said.

She also called on other Amazonian nations to adopt similar protections, highlighting that Colombia controls just 7% of the Amazon biome. Across the Amazon, 871 oil and gas blocks cover an area roughly twice the size of France; 68% of the blocks are still in the study or bidding phases. 

“We do this not only as an act of environmental sovereignty, but as a fraternal call to the other countries that share the Amazon biome, because the Amazon does not know borders and its care requires us to move forward together,” Vélez added.

Brazil, which controls nearly 60% of the Amazon, has moved in the opposite direction over the past year, despite successfully cracking down on deforestation. The nation auctioned off several oil blocks near Indigenous lands and approved drilling for an offshore site at the mouth of the Amazon River.

Peru is courting foreign oil companies to restart production at Lot 192, a huge Amazonian crude oil site in in the north of the country. The Ecuadorian government is planning to auction off 49 oil and gas projects worth more than $47 billion, despite protests.

In Colombia, 43 oil blocks and 286 mining requests haven’t yet broken ground. The new measure, the ministry says, will prevent these projects from going forward. “Their activation could put the climate balance of the continent at risk,” the environment ministry wrote in a statement.

At another COP30 event, Vélez criticized a mechanism that allows corporations to sue governments for losses caused by environmental policies, saying it infringes on state sovereignty. Such a system, she noted, makes it difficult for a nation to outlaw existing extractive industries without facing significant penalties.

“Future generations must be able to find nature in a healthy state, the way we have known it,” María Soledad Hernández, coordinator of the sustainability program with the Colombia-based Amazonian Institute for Scientific Research, said in a video statement.

“Talking about conservation does not mean talking about not making use of it. Talking about conservation means being sustainable, being responsible and having activities that are balanced and in harmony with nature,” she added.

Banner image: The Curare-Los Ingleses Indigenous Reserve in the Colombian Amazon. Image courtesy of Víctor Galeano.

Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, is expected to be officially announced on Nov. 18 as the host city of the 2027 U.N. climate conference, or COP32. Backed by the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change, the expected decision would mark the international climate summit’s return to the African continent after COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022.

“As host of the next COP, Ethiopia now has a vital platform to amplify African voices and priorities, particularly around adaptation finance, renewable energy access, and climate justice,” Mohamed Adow, director of the think tank Power Shift Africa, said in an official statement from the group. “It could also spotlight Africa’s capacity for innovation and its determination to move from vulnerability to strength in the face of global climate disruption.”

The annual COPs bring together the member states to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to negotiate global climate goals and commitments.

Each year, the host country rotates among the U.N.’s five regional groups: Western Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Each regional group proposes a host country, the COP considers the proposals and accepts one of the offers, then the UNFCCC Secretariat must undertake a fact-finding mission to ensure the proposed host is suitable.

Despite the stated rotation, Africa has hosted less than its share of global climate conferences. Since the first COP in 1995, the event has been held on the continent just five times, including twice in Marrakech, Morocco (COP7 and COP22). Europe, meanwhile, has hosted 12 COPs.

2027 host Addis Ababa is also the headquarters of the African Union and the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, making the city an existing hub for major international institutions.

“The country has long been a regional leader in sustainable development, with flagship initiatives that integrate climate adaptation into national planning and community livelihoods,” Adow said. “From its Green Legacy Initiative, which has seen billions of trees planted across the nation, to its massive investments in hydropower, wind, and geothermal energy, Ethiopia is charting a path toward a low-carbon, climate-resilient future.”

Among the government’s largest investments is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the most powerful in Africa, with a capacity of 5.15 gigawatts, or enough energy to power millions of homes in the region.

Africa contributes less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet the region is one of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Severe droughts and intense floods are exacerbating food insecurity and degrading natural resources.

Banner image: Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Adaba, at night. Image by Abshewaga via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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

Belize has built an enviable brand as a small country taking on a big problem: how to keep the sea alive while sustaining the people who depend on it. The story sells well. A 2021 debt-for-nature “blue bond” reduced public debt and guaranteed conservation funding for two decades. Targets for 30% ocean protection are law. Donors and the press have applauded. Yet, on the water, the question lingers: are the reefs and fish showing it?

The achievements are real. The blue bond converted Belize’s “Superbond” into a conservation-backed loan that cut debt by 12% of GDP and directed roughly $180 million toward marine protection. Monitoring pilots are underway, linking results-based finance to measurable ecological and social outcomes. Lighthouse Reef, one of the country’s crown jewels, gained new legal protection. These are serious gains. But they coexist with troubling signals.

The regional “report card” for the Mesoamerican Reef, released in 2024, inched upward thanks to herbivorous fish rebounds, yet the overall grade remained “Poor.” Independent assessments show that conch and lobster, Belize’s export mainstays, are under stress. The Sea Around Us project estimates most stocks are fished beyond sustainable levels. Groupers and snappers have declined by about 60% in regional monitoring, echoing fishers’ accounts that large individuals have become scarce. A 2025 peer-reviewed study found Nassau grouper at Glover’s Reef nearly gone despite two decades of closures and bans, and warned of “impending extirpation.”

Policy isn’t the only culprit. Implementation gaps persist. The flagship “Managed Access” program — territorial fishing rights meant to curb overexploitation — still lacks license caps per zone. Officials say the registry limits entry, but numbers keep rising. Without hard limits, effort continues to climb even as regulations multiply. Fishers admit that when prices spike and enforcement thins, undersized catch increases. The data support them.

Officials counter that Belize is “well advanced” in small-scale fisheries management and that talk of collapse is overstated. Yet recent stock assessments remain unpublished, and transparency around licensing and catch data remains patchy. The rhetoric is polished but the evidence is elusive.

Belize’s conservation architecture is far ahead of that of many of its peers. But credibility now depends on proof that reforms are restoring biomass, not just generating press releases. Cap licenses, publish data, tie disbursements to measurable recovery. The blue bond was a landmark in finance. Its legacy will be decided not in meeting rooms, but in the water.

Read the full commentary by Rhett A. Butler here.

Banner image: Corals and fish in Lighthouse Reef atoll, Belize. Image © Greg Asner.

South Africa plans to lift a 13-year moratorium on shale gas exploration in the ecologically sensitive Karoo Basin, despite serious environmental and climate concerns raised by advocacy groups.

In 2011, the government imposed a ban on hydraulic fracturing in the Karoo, a semidesert region spanning more than 400,000 square kilometers (154,000 square miles) across northern South Africa and home to about 1 million people.

The ban was put in place to develop a regulatory framework for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial extraction method that involves drilling deep into the earth and injecting a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals to fracture shale rock and release trapped natural gas. Research suggests that fracking operations negatively impact human health, consume large volumes of water, contaminate groundwater, and degrade soil and air quality.

In July this year, Gwede Mantashe, the petroleum minister, announced the government is making “concerted efforts” to lift the moratorium in the Karoo Basin. He added that environmental baseline studies are underway.

On Nov. 7, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) released its draft environmental regulations for onshore oil and gas extraction and fracking, which covers shale gas extraction. The draft is currently open for a 30-day public consultation period. “Once those regulations are gazetted, I lift the moratorium,” Mantashe told Reuters in October.

The move could pave the way for several companies, including Shell, to resume previously submitted applications for exploration.

“Lifting the moratorium prioritizes short-term economic gains over long-term environmental and socioeconomic well-being,” Paul Wani Lado, a lawyer at the South African NGO Centre for Environmental Rights, told Mongabay. Lado added the move follows a 2024 law aimed at fast-tracking oil and gas exploration and production, which is still pending presidential proclamation.

Earlier this year, Mantashe said at a conference that oil and gas are key components of the country’s economy and energy trajectory as it seeks to shift its energy mix away from coal.

Critics of oil and gas exploration in the region, however, argue that the push for fossil fuels contradicts South Africa’s international commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, as well as its constitutional obligation to protect citizens from the impacts of climate change.

Lifting the moratorium “risks entrenching fossil fuel dependency, diverting investment from renewables, and undermining efforts to create sustainable jobs,” Lado said.

“The Karoo is an arid area, and the consequences for its scarce water resources will be disastrous,” added Jan Glazewski, a retired professor of law at the University of Cape Town, who has assessed South Africa’s technical readiness for a shale gas industry.

Neither the DFFE nor the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy responded to Mongabay’s requests for comments by the time this story was published.

Banner image: A hill in the main Karoo Basin, near the area where exploration would take place. Image by flowcomm via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

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

In the shallows off northern Bali, where the reefs flicker with life and the sea carries the rhythm of work and prayer, a quiet revolution took root. Women who once had few choices began tending tanks of clownfish and Banggai cardinalfish, learning the art of aquaculture. Fishers in nearby villages abandoned cyanide and explosives, watching their catches recover. Coral fragments, anchored to man-made structures, began to grow again. The transformation seemed to come from the sea itself, but it began with a woman who believed that to save reefs one must first listen to the people who depend on them.

She had started, as many conservationists do, beneath the waves. Trained in marine biology, she dived across the archipelago, recording the decline of once-vivid ecosystems. But over time, she realized that the reefs would not heal through data alone. “Managing those resources means managing people,” she once said. So she turned from counting fish to understanding fishers, from studying ecosystems to shaping livelihoods.

Gayatri Reksodihardjo-Lilley was a reformer who worked without fanfare. In 2008 she co-founded the LINI Foundation, a small nonprofit that would become a lifeline for Indonesia’s coastal communities. Her projects reached from Bali to Sulawesi and the Banda Islands, linking conservation with dignity. She trained teachers to teach the sea, coaxed policymakers toward collaborative management, and built a center where women could “learn and earn.” When local fishers asked for help rebuilding reefs destroyed by poison fishing, she did not arrive with lectures but with cement molds and patience.

Her methods were deceptively simple: conversation, persistence, and an insistence that communities own their success. Two years after she began working with the Bajo people of Banggai—long dismissed as unreachable—the fishers themselves led a sustainable octopus fishery. Students who interned under her guidance learned not only science but empathy. “I could ask her anything,” recalled one. “She made me feel like family.”

Awards followed, including recognition from Ornamental Fish International for her contributions to marine sustainability. Yet she remained grounded, forever testing ideas in the field, sleeves rolled, hands wet with seawater. To her, reefs were not symbols but neighbors—fragile, generous, and worth defending.

On November 13, 2025, at Bali International Hospital, Gayatri died. She was survived by her husband, the herpetologist Ron Lilley, and their son, Lawrence. But in the coastal villages she helped transform, her influence endures. She built no monuments, except the living ones beneath the waves: reefs that are growing again, tended by the communities she helped inspire to bring them back to life.