Natural forest regrowth in the world’s tropical rainforests is expanding. According to the Forest Declaration Assessment 2025, more than 11 million hectares (27 million acres) of tropical moist forests are under some stage of forest regrowth between 2015 and 2021.

The growth is most notable in the tropical areas of Latin America, where regrowth increased by nearly 750%. In the tropical region of Asia, it was 450%. However, data were missing for most regions. 

“We’d rather see that regrowth than not, of course. But increased regrowth is not a straightforward piece of good news,” Erin Matson, the assessment’s lead author, told Mongabay by email. “Tropical forests wouldn’t be regrowing if they weren’t cleared in the first place. An increase in regrowth is often correlated to an increase in loss.”

The increase of regrowth may simply mirror a spike in deforestation and degradation. Fires have wiped out large areas of tropical forests, which have become more prone to wildfires and drought due to human-caused climate change.

The recent report showed that despite a 2021 pledge by 127 countries to reach zero deforestation by 2030, deforestation has not yet slowed, remaining at an average of more than 8 million hectares (20 million acres) a year.

Since 1990, an estimated 51 million hectares (126 million acres) of tropical moist forest are regenerating, the assessment notes. More than half, however, are in areas that are under high deforestation pressure. Between 2015 and 2023, roughly 260,000 hectares (642,500 acres) of secondary growth in tropical moist forests were again cleared or degraded.

“Tracking forest regrowth is more challenging than detecting forest losses because regrowth is a gradual process and rates can vary greatly based on biomes, environmental conditions, and the scale and severity of disturbance,” the report’s authors write.

During the 2023-2024 El Niño, when the Amazon Rainforest was at its driest, nearly 150,000 forest fires were recorded per month in the dry season.

“This has been almost seven times more than any previous El Niño years,” Sassan Saatchi, senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founder of CTrees, a nonprofit platform that tracks the carbon stored in the world’s forests, said during a video press conference. “Especially in Brazil … even though they’re reducing deforestation, their forest loss is still really high.”

Yet natural regrowth offers a promising low-cost path to widespread restoration in tropical rainforests. If protected from new clearings and left to their own devices, these forests can help ecosystems recover, sequester and store carbon as the trees grow and slowly restore lost biodiversity.

“Amid the 2024 losses of forest cover and forest integrity, restoration efforts reveal both untapped potential and emerging success,” the authors’ write. “Protecting these young secondary forests is as critical as preserving primary and pristine forests.”

Banner image: Forest recovery in the Brazilian Amazon. Image courtesy of Celso Silva Junior.

Global deforestation hasn’t slowed in any significant way in the four years since 127 countries pledged to halt and reverse forest loss and degradation by 2030. The newly published 2025 Forest Declaration Assessment shows that nations are 63% off track from meeting their zero-deforestation target.

To be on track for that goal, deforestation was supposed to drop by 10% every year, capping out at 5 million hectares (12.4 million acres) worldwide in 2024. However, roughly 8.1 million hectares (20 million acres) were cleared globally that year, a negligible change from the 2018–2020 baseline of 8.3 million hectares (20.5 million acres), the report found.

“Every year, the gap between commitments and reality grows wider,” Erin Matson, the assessment’s lead author and a consultant for Netherlands-based research think tank Climate Focus, said in a statement. “Forests are non-negotiable infrastructure for a livable planet.”

By the end of 2025, the target is for no more than 4.1 million hectares (10.1 million acres), meaning that to get back on track, the global deforestation rate would need to fall by half in a year.

Mid-year estimates show that’s unlikely. Data from Brazil’s space institute, INPE, show there were deforestation alerts issued for 209,000 hectares (about 516,500 acres) in the Amazon Rainforest between January and June 2025, 27% higher than in 2024. However, analysts expect the rate to slow as Brazil implements antideforestation policies, ranging from cattle tracking to creating protected areas.

According to the report, the target for primary forest loss is even further off track, missed by 190% in 2024. The rate of deforestation has almost doubled since the 2018-2020 baseline. Much of that deforestation was driven by fires in the Amazon Basin, the result of a strong El Niño and historic drought conditions in the region.

The assessment found that financing for forest protection and restoration also fell short. Public financing reached an average of $5.9 billion per year, far below the estimated $117 billion to $299 billion needed to achieve zero deforestation by 2030. Over the same period, large-scale industrial agriculture received an estimated $409 billion in annual subsidies.

The stakes are high for the upcoming U.N. climate summit in Belém in the Brazilian Amazon. Nations need to move from commitments to concrete action, Matson said in a video press call. 

“What happens in the next five years will have a huge impact on the livability of our planet,” she said. “We need global leaders to make forest protection nonnegotiable because our collective prosperity and well-being depend on it.”

Banner image: Recent fires in the Amazon Rainforest degraded a large portion of the world’s primary forests. Image © Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace.

From Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea, researchers have described what is officially recognized as the 1,500^th bat species known to science, according to a recent study. The newly described bat is a species of pipistrelle, a group of tiny insect-eating bats, and scientists have named it Pipistrellus etula, with etula meaning “island” or “nation” in the language of the Bubi people of Bioko Island.

“The recognition of P. etula as the 1,500^th bat species is not only a symbolic scientific milestone but also carries deep conservation significance,” lead author Laura Torrent, a Ph.D. candidate at the Natural Sciences Museum of Granollers, Spain, told Mongabay by email. “It reminds us how much biodiversity remains undocumented, particularly in under-surveyed regions like Central Africa.”

The story of P. etula goes back to 1989, when bat researcher Javier Juste first captured a few individuals of the bat from the montane forest on the slopes of Biao Peak, a volcano on Bioko. At the time, Juste suspected it was an undescribed species, but confirmation would take decades.

During a 2024 expedition, Torrent and her colleagues captured more individuals of what looked like the same bat at Basilé Peak, another volcano on Bioko.

The scientists compared the newly caught bats with the older museum specimens and found they had similar physical features. A genetic analysis  of both the old and newly caught bats further confirmed they all belong to the same new-to-science species.

P. etula belongs to a widespread group of bats called vesper, or evening, bats. What makes it unique, Torrent said, is that it lives in montane environments where no other vesper bat recorded from Bioko are known to exist.

“Finding a new species is wonderful, but finding one in remote areas like Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea or hidden in plain sight is incredibly uplifting and illustrates how intriguing nature is,” Paul Webala, a bat researcher from Maasai Mara University, Kenya, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by email.

Vesper bats, Webala added, “consume a remarkable quantity of insects that spread disease and harm crops. It is important to study these bats because if we cannot distinguish between species, we cannot record their roles in nature.”

Torrent said the volcanic areas where P. etula has been found so far are in protected zones, but “construction projects and small-scale logging are already altering the landscape.” Rising temperatures caused by climate change could further shrink the species’ montane habitat, she added.

Rohit Chakravarty, a bat researcher with the India-based Nature Conservation Foundation, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay that because the bat has only been found on mountains on an island, it “indicates that it may not be very widespread and therefore an important conservation target.”

“Now that its existence is confirmed, we will advocate for future conservation measures involving local institutions and government authorities to safeguard these unique ecosystems,” Torrent said.

Banner image of Pipistrellus etula courtesy of Laura Torrent.

POZA RICA, Mexico (AP) — The death toll from last week’s torrential rains in Mexico jumped to 64 on Monday, as searches expanded to communities previously cut off by landslides.

Another 65 people were missing following the heavy rainfall in central and southeastern Mexico that caused rivers to top their banks, Civil Defense Coordinator Laura Velázquez Alzúa said during President Claudia Sheinbaum’s daily press briefing.

“There are sufficient resources, this won’t be skimped on … because we’re still in the emergency period,” Sheinbaum said.

Thousands of military personnel have been deployed across the region. In northern Veracruz, 80 communities remained inaccessible by road.

Sheinbaum acknowledged it could still be days before access is established to some places. “A lot of flights are required to take sufficient food and water” to those places, she said.

Early official estimates note 100,000 affected homes, and in some cases, houses near rivers “practically disappeared,” Sheinbaum said.

The scale of the destruction across five states was coming into clearer focus a day after Sheinbaum visited affected communities in Puebla and Veracruz, promising a rapidly scaled-up government response.

Mexico’s Civil Protection agency said the heavy rains had killed 29 people in Veracruz state on the Gulf Coast as of Monday morning, and 21 people in Hidalgo state, north of Mexico City. At least 13 were killed in Puebla, east of Mexico City. Earlier, in the central state of Querétaro, a child died in a landslide.

By Associated Press

Banner image: A Marine helps a woman cross a flooded street in Poza Rica, Veracruz state, Mexico, Sunday, Oct. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

With the World Conservation Congress meeting this week, I thought it was useful to revisit a study published earlier this year on conservation funding.

For decades, conservationists have warned that the planet’s attention—and its purse—are skewed toward the charismatic few. A sweeping analysis of some 14,600 conservation projects over 25 years confirms that bias in stark terms. The authors, led by Benoit Guénard, found that 83 percent of funding and 84 percent of projects went to vertebrates, leaving plants, invertebrates, fungi, and algae to divide the scraps. Within vertebrates, mammals and birds claimed nearly all support, while amphibians—though the most threatened of all vertebrate groups—received just 2.5 percent of recent funding, a share that is declining.

The pattern is perverse. About a quarter of all amphibian species are at risk of extinction, yet funds continue to flow to the familiar and photogenic. Roughly 6 percent of species identified as threatened received any dedicated conservation support, while 29 percent of total funding went to species of “least concern.” The elephant and panda, both conservation darlings, each attracted hundreds of projects; the world’s 24,000-plus threatened species together saw only a fraction of that attention.

The authors found no correlation between the amount of money a species received and whether its populations were increasing. In other words, the best-funded animals are not necessarily the ones recovering. The study estimates that roughly $4 billion a year would be needed to mitigate extinction risks—orders of magnitude above the roughly $80 million actually directed to species-level efforts.

The analysis covers only documented, species-based projects by large funders, omitting many habitat-level and local efforts. Yet its scale and consistency leave little doubt that the global picture it paints—a few favored species soaking up most of the world’s conservation money—is broadly accurate.

Why such imbalance persists is partly psychological. Large, furry creatures inspire empathy and attract donors. But funding elephants while amphibians vanish means conservation fails to protect the ecological fabric that sustains life itself. Small-bodied, overlooked species—from frogs to freshwater snails—provide essential ecosystem functions yet remain unmonitored and unsupported.

To conserve biodiversity effectively, governments and international NGOs will have to resist their bias for beauty and size, they argue. Aligning funding with scientific assessments of risk, rather than public affection, would not only spread resources more equitably but also make conservation more honest about what is being lost—and what might still be saved.

Banner image: Blue dart frog (Dendrobates azureus). Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler

On Sept. 23, the city of Kolkata in eastern India came to a standstill: The capital of West Bengal state received more than 12% of the city’s average annual rainfall in just 24 hours, some 247.5 millimeters (9.7 inches). The subsequent flooding claimed lives and caused extensive property damage.

Scientists say climate change has made such extreme weather events in Kolkata more frequent, but the city’s stressed and aging drainage system exacerbated the impact, reports contributor Snigdhendu Bhattacharya for Mongabay India.

Research shows that the Indian Ocean, including the Bay of Bengal, which borders the coastline of West Bengal, is warming faster than the global average. Under such conditions, a low-pressure area over the bay draws in more moisture from the oceans, leading to more intense weather events, said Mahesh Palawat of Skymet Weather, a private weather forecast service.

Kolkata itself has the highest recorded urban warming among global megacities over the past seven decades: about 2.6° Celsius (4.7° Fahrenheit) between 1950 and 2018. Warm air can hold more moisture, so “every degree rise leads to a rise in moisture content by 7%,” said Kartiki Negi of Climate Trends, a New Delhi-based research and advocacy group. More atmospheric moisture can also lead to more intense weather activities, he added.

Kolkata’s climate action report notes the city is facing increasing threats from heat waves, flooding, sea level rise and more intense cyclones.

Urbanization, too, has taken a toll. New townships and roadways have been built on natural drainage paths of rivers and swamps. What were once mighty rivers and wetlands have shrunk considerably, affecting the city’s drainage and flood control.

Bhattacharya writes that the Sept. 23 flooding in Kolkata showed that the city’s aging underground drains and canals, clogged with silt and plastic waste, couldn’t handle the combined strain of urbanization and extreme weather.

Tarak Singh, from the municipal sewage and drainage department, said the agency has been working on maintaining the aging system. They removed more than 200,000 metric tons of silt from the city’s underground sewer in 2024-2025. “Pumping stations, the number of pumps, mechanised desiltation … every capacity has been significantly enhanced. The September 23 rain would have left any megacity waterlogged,” he added.

Pankaj Kumar Roy, a professor at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, said recent upgrades to the drainage system by the municipality likely lessened the impacts from the September rain. However, such intense rainfall events are likely to happen again, he said, so the city needs to focus on restoring the drainage system and increasing its capacity, particularly the outlets where pumped water will be discharged during future cloudburst-like situations.

Read the full story by Snigdhendu Bhattacharya here.

Banner image: Kolkata was waterlogged after a sudden intense downpour on Sept. 23. Image by Dipanwita Saha.