Rapidly scaling up renewable energy to limit future warming requires a sharp increase in the supply of critical minerals like cobalt, nickel and lithium for technologies including solar panels, battery storage and electric vehicles. Yet sourcing these minerals often comes at a steep cost for both the environment and local communities.

Now, a coalition of U.N. scientists is proposing a new way forward: a global minerals trust.

“We need to replace today’s fractured, competitive, and extractive model with one rooted in transparency, justice, and long-term resilience,” Kaveh Madani, a professor with the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and a co-author of the proposal and accompanying policy brief, said in a press release.

Broadly, a global minerals trust would treat critical green energy minerals as shared global assets “for the fair use of beneficiaries who might otherwise feel compelled to compete over them,” the scientists write in an article published in Science.

Countries would retain sovereignty and ownership of their resources, but the trust would coordinate trade to ensure a stable supply and adherence to environmental and social standards.

“This is potentially a win-win outcome because you’re reducing the environmental harm and you’re allowing for more cooperation and less conflict moving forward by having such a mechanism,” Saleem Ali, study lead author with the University of Delaware, U.S., and a member of the U.N. Environment Programme’s International Resource Panel, told Mongabay in a video call.

He said a trust could also stabilize mineral supply to manage volatilities and facilitate a circular economy by including provisions to recycle and lease metals as needed.

Many resource-rich countries, particularly in Africa, have historically been burdened with conflict and environmental damage from mining but with little compensation to show for it. Advocates for a minerals trust say it could provide a greater level of accountability and compliance standards to protect affected communities and “help bolster the prosperity of nations and people in these regions,” Stephen Northey with the Institute for Sustainable Futures in Australia, who did not work on the report, told Mongabay by email.

Emmanuel Kayembe, a professor of international relations at the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), raised concerns that in unstable, resource-rich countries like the DRC where armed groups control minerals, local people will still not see benefits. “As long as you have a government that struggles to manage its entire territory, what you’re presenting is more like a declaration of faith than a practical solution,” he said.

The paper and policy brief were published in advance of the upcoming G7 meeting in Canada. As chair of the meeting, Canada has a “strategic opportunity to facilitate early-stage consensus around the Trust,” the policy brief notes.

Banner image: A cobalt mine in Central Africa. Image by Fairphone via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Dider Makal contributed to the reporting of this article.

Scientists have warned that extreme rains could become more common in eastern Australia, following heavy downpours from May 19-23 that caused widespread flooding, claimed five lives and left some 50,000 people stranded.

The warning is based on a recent rapid analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA), a global research network that examines the role of climate change in extreme weather events.

WWA’s analysis shows that extreme four-day rainfall events, like the one that occurred in the state of New South Wales in May, are now around 10% more intense and twice as likely in today’s climate, which is 1.3° Celsius (2.3° Fahrenheit) warmer than in preindustrial times.

Report co-author Mariam Zachariah, from Imperial College London, said in a press release sent to Mongabay that it’s unclear how much climate change influenced the recent floods in NSW. “However, it is certain that floods in the state are causing serious harm and the risk of even more dangerous events needs to be taken seriously.”

The May rainfall damaged more than 10,000 properties and killed five people in the state, media reported. Farmers also lost their livestock and hundreds of residents had to flee to evacuation centers. Mongabay previously reported on floods devastating normally arid parts of the country, in addition to wildfires and cyclones, some of which have been attributed to climate change.

From May 19-23, coastal areas of NSW received 100 millimeters (4 inches) of rain per day. The WWA study showed such rainfall in the studied area has become relatively common in today’s climate, and is expected to occur once every 10 years, when analyzing April-June rainfall, and once every three years when looking at the whole year.

The researchers also examined whether the atmospheric circulation patterns driving heavy rainfall changed between two periods: 1950-1980 and 1994-2024. The latter is “marked by a stronger influence of climate change,” they write.

The analysis showed “signs of a seasonal shift,” the authors say: “atmospheric circulation patterns that could lead to similar heavy rainfall are now less common in March and more frequent in May.”

While the climate models don’t identify the exact influence of human-induced climate change in the May rainfall, the scientists said the lack of a clear trend might mean that other processes are in play.

“The weather in Australia is naturally chaotic. The country has always faced every kind of extreme weather — floods, tropical cyclones, bush fires, droughts, heatwaves,” report co-author Friederike Otto, also from Imperial College London, said in the release. “But with every ton of oil, coal and gas burned, they are getting more unpredictable and more dangerous, destroying lives and livelihoods across the continent.”

Co-author Kimberley Reid, from the University of Melbourne, said, “We do know that ongoing reliance on fossil fuels — whether burned or exported — will only make weather events more dangerous in Australia.”

Banner image of emergency workers wading through floodwaters as they prepare inflatable boats to effect rescues near Taree, Australia, Thursday, May 22, 2025. (NSW Police via AP)

Dozens of people are reported dead amid torrential rains over the past week in India’s northeastern region, local media reported.

The most heavily affected states are Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. In Assam, more than 640,000 people have been affected as the Brahmaputra River and its tributaries overflowed beyond danger levels, flooding many areas. Around 40,000 people were staying in evacuation camps as of June 5. At least 44 people were reportedly killed in floods or mudslides as the extreme weather battered the state.

In Assam, much of Kaziranga National Park, known for its thriving population of Indian rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis), was inundated, prompting the wildlife to migrate to higher ground in the neighboring Karbi Anglong hills.

Kaziranga lies in the Brahmaputra floodplain and gets submerged during the monsoons every year. Forest officials told local media that measures are being taken to regulate traffic and help the wildlife move safely from Kaziranga to Karbi Anglong, separated by a major highway.

The Assam State Disaster Management Authority also reported that nearly 15,000 hectares (about 37,000 acres) of farmlands were affected.

In Arunachal Pradesh, heavy rainfall and landslides damaged roads and affected more than 61,000 people, The Statesman reported. A cloudburst, or a sudden heavy downpour of rain, flooded several parts of the state capital, Itanagar, damaging roads and affecting water supply.

The state’s Changlang district was hit worst, leaving more than 2,000 people homeless.

The nearby state of Manipur also saw flooding and landslides, with some of its districts establishing evacuation camps for displaced residents. In Nagaland state, a landslide damaged a 50-meter (164-foot) section of a national highway, leaving around 100 trucks stranded on this important transportation route in the region.

In the Himalayan state of Sikkim, rescue efforts are ongoing after a landslide buried a military post, resulting in the deaths of three soldiers. Rescue teams also evacuated more than 1,000 tourists.

Other northeastern states that saw fatalities due to landslides and flooding are Mizoram, Meghalaya and Tripura. A Northeast Frontier Railway spokesperson said train journeys were disrupted due to railway tracks being waterlogged.

The India Meteorological Department said in a June 6 bulletin that light to moderate rain is likely to continue over much of the northeast over the next week. The states of Assam and Meghalaya could expect heavy rainfall.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma visited some of the affected areas and highlighted the need to preserve or revive wetlands to improve water retention and drainage in urban areas.

In late May, much of Mumbai, India’s financial capital, was flooded with the early arrival of the monsoon.

Banner image of rescuers evacuating people from a flooded hospital following landslides and flash flooding in India’s northeast state of Manipur, Sunday, June 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Donald Sairem)

Bowhead whales are endemic to the icy waters of the Arctic and prefer living in shallow waters near sea ice, filtering krill and tiny crustaceans called copepods for food. However, the Arctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth, and a recent study estimates that if this continues, then by 2100 the whales could lose up to 75% of the current area where their prime habitat now exists.

Previous studies have looked at their past distributions over small geographic areas and used data from just the last 50 years or so. The new study looks at the whale’s distribution throughout its entire range, examining data going back nearly 12,000 years, from fossil evidence to whaling logbooks to more recent databases and published studies.

The researchers wanted to “build a long-term baseline for this species that stretches back thousands of years so we can understand how resilient they actually will be to future climate change. Use the past as the key to the present,” study lead author Nick Freymueller, a doctoral candidate at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, told Mongabay in a video call.

Their modeling showed that, historically, bowheads whales (Balaena mysticetus) thrived in areas where summer sea ice covered 15-30% of the ocean surface. It also found that such bowhead habitat has been relatively stable for all of the Holocene, the last 11,700 years since the end of the last ice age.

However, even under a moderate-emissions scenario, suitable bowhead habitat is expected to decrease in quality by roughly 50% by 2100. Under a high-emissions scenario, high-quality habitat could decrease by 90%. The area with the warmest habitat today, Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk, will be completely uninhabitable for the whales within the next 35 years, the researchers forecast.

Bowheads might respond to warming by moving north to colder, ice-covered waters; however such areas are frequently too deep and lack sufficient food.

Thought to be the longest-living mammal on Earth, bowheads live for up to 200 years and are listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. They were nearly wiped out by commercial whaling, and fewer than 3,000 individuals remained by the 1920s. Today, they face peril from climate change; and as the Arctic continues to melt, opening up new shipping lanes across the Northwest passage, ship traffic can add further stress to Arctic marine life.

Freymueller said he hopes this study will help identify areas of bowhead whale habitat that will still be suitable for them in the future, “and we can maybe try to design those as nature reserves, or try to usher any sort of ship traffic from going through there, that might at least give some of these species, you know, a better leg up,” he said.

Banner image: A group of bowhead whales off the coast of Alaska. Image courtesy of NOAA.

A eucalyptus boom in Brazil’s biodiverse Cerrado savanna is drying up land and water springs, making subsistence farming more difficult, local authorities and farmers tell Mongabay.

Adilso Cruz, a 46-year-old rancher from the Alecrim settlement in Mato Grosso do Sul state, said the water shortages began around 2013, coinciding with the growth of eucalyptus plantations in the region, and have gotten worse since.

“Streams that used to run all year started flowing less, drying up, and then taking a long time to fill again,” Cruz told Mongabay by phone. “Grass is suffering because water is disappearing from the topsoil.

”I had 70 head of cattle. Now I have 42, and I’ll need to sell more,” he added. As farms sold their land to eucalyptus plantations, they also sold off their herds, causing cow prices to plummet. “I estimate about a 45% drop in income,” Cruz said.

A study led by Valticinez Santiago, the deputy environment secretary of Selvíria, a eucalyptus-heavy municipality, found that springs located 50 meters (164 feet) from plantations, the legal minimum, had either dried up or were severely degraded. Santiago told Mongabay that they used satellite imagery to map out 400 springs surrounded by eucalyptus farms and now recommend expanding the buffer to 500 m (1,640 ft) to better protect water sources.

The expanse of eucalyptus farms in Mato Grosso do Sul state has increased fourfold in 15 years, from just over 375,000 hectares (741,000 acres) in 2010 to 1.6 million hectares (3.95 million acres) in May 2025.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a law in May 2024 that eliminates the need for environmental licenses for eucalyptus. In practice, Santiago told Mongabay, authorities can no longer access private land to evaluate environmental impacts without a warrant, which is hard to obtain without on-site evidence.

Roughly 90% of the farms are owned by large investment banks.  

Corporations including Apple, Meta and Microsoft have invested millions in eucalyptus to offset their carbon emissions. However, critics say eucalyptus is not effective at sequestering carbon, as the trees are harvested every six years and turned into pulp for cardboard and toilet paper, meaning any carbon they’ve stored is easily re-released into the atmosphere.

Cruz said about half the families have already left his settlement. Those remaining are struggling to survive and often take extra work with the eucalyptus companies.

“A lot of people here end up providing labor to the very people who are taking away their ability to produce food and have financial freedom,” Cruz said. “This land was something we fought for … It was a dream. But many are seeing that dream fall apart and feel forced to resign themselves to it.”

Banner image: Aerial view of eucalyptus logs. Image courtesy of Tamás Bodolay/Repórter Brasil.

In 2008, the United Nations recognized June 8 as World Oceans Day to spotlight the rising vulnerabilities facing the oceans that cover more than 70% of Earth’s surface.

Seventeen years later, average ocean temperatures have never been higher. Heat stress has hit 84% of the world’s coral reefs. In places as far as Antarctica, whales are competing with fishing boats for krill, and in the deepest parts of ocean floor, steps toward mining threaten deep-sea creatures we do not yet know.

At the same time, scientists are uncovering more about marine life than ever before, from new species in Chile’s deep trenches to insights into the behavior of marine animals that may help shape future conservation efforts.

On World Oceans Day 2025, we present two discoveries from the past year about life in our oceans:

Deep-sea predator identified in Chile’s Atacama Trench

In November 2024, scientists identified a large and active predatory crustacean at a depth nearing 8,000 meters (26,200 feet) in the Atacama Trench off Chile’s coast.

The Dulcibella camanchaca is considered huge for the nutrient-poor hadal zone in the deep sea, growing up to 4 centimeters (1.6 inches). Robotic landers that were adapted to withstand pressure 800 times greater than at sea level successfully captured four individuals of the newly identified species.

“DNA and morphological data suggest this is also a new genus, highlighting the Atacama Trench as an endemic hotspot,” Johanna Weston, a biologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Akhyari Hananto, a journalist with Mongabay Indonesia. “The discovery … underscores this uniqueness, indicating an evolutionary lineage found only in this trench.”

Whales sing more when there is more food

In a six-year study off California’s coast, scientists discovered that blue (Balaenoptera musculus), humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and fin whales (B. physalus) sing more when food is abundant, and that humpback whales may even be able to understand when a blue whale is announcing a krill swarm through song.

“This idea that information about the ecosystem can travel between species is very realistic,” John Ryan, an oceanographer with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, told Mongabay Newscast host Mike DiGirolamo. “These animals use the same frequency range … so that information should be available to their senses.”

The researchers also found that whales sang significantly less during a 2015 heat wave in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, when there was less food available. “They were hard times for whales,” Ryan said, adding that whales had to swim farther to forage and may have had less time and energy to sing. “All three whale species showed by far the lowest occurrence of whale song.”

This discovery, Ryan said, may give us some insight into how whales respond to warming oceans and sudden changes in climate.

Banner image: Humpback whales in Western Australia. Image courtesy of Emilie Ledwidge/Ocean Image Bank.