Human-induced climate change drastically fueled the weather behind recent devastating wildfires in France and Spain, according to a new rapid analysis by researchers studying the role of climate change on today’s extreme weather.

In its report, the World Weather Attribution (WWA), a global network of researchers, noted that severe blazes scorched 140,000 hectares (346,000 acres) in Spain and more than 115,000 hectares (284,000 acres) in France, forcing more than 300,000 people to flee.

The researchers found that “tinderbox conditions” that favor fires, including extreme heat waves and unusually low rainfall, are at least twice as likely in southwestern France and at least 20 times more likely in central Spain in today’s climate than during the preindustrial climate. (Average temperatures back then, before the advent of large-scale greenhouse gas emissions, were 1.4° Celsius (2.52° Fahrenheit) cooler.) These figures are considered conservative estimates, the researchers said.

In today’s climatic conditions, the report said, fires of the intensity seen in July are expected every 20 years in southwestern France and every six years in central Spain.

The analysis found that a critical driver of the wildfires was above-average winter rainfall that spurred lush vegetation growth, followed by an exceptionally dry spring and summer that turned that biomass into highly flammable fuel.

“Relentless heat — fuelled by human-caused climate change — has created the conditions for sparks to take hold and become massive, dangerous wildfires,” report co-author Clair Barnes, a research associate at Imperial College London, said in a press release.

The analysis also found that the fires released large amounts of pollutants that affected air quality up to 400 kilometers (250 miles) away from places like Bordeaux, France.

“Such hazardous air pollution contributes to an accumulation of detrimental conditions for a population already hit hard by repeated heatwaves since May,” the report said.

Fires breaking out across multiple regions simultaneously can overwhelm national resources, said co-author Andreia Ribeiro, a climate scientist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany.

“Overlapping fire extremes makes it harder for countries to cooperate and share firefighting resources with each other when that support is needed most,” Ribeiro in the press release.

While improved fire management has reduced the extent of burned areas in recent decades, the authors said extreme weather is now outpacing these efforts.

“Europe’s climate is shifting faster than governments are adapting,” said co-author Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London. “Our research showed how climate change is worsening drought across the continent. Now we’re seeing yet another disaster fueled by the same driver: the burning of fossil fuels.”

Banner image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image shows a zoomed-in view of the Cebreros ground station in Madrid, Spain. The area was among the worst-affected by the fire outbreak in Spain this year. This image contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2026, by the European Space Agency via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO).

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

In the Central African Republic, a country often seen mainly through the lens of instability, a different story is unfolding in its southwest.

In March, Mongabay Africa program director David Akana and I spent time in and around Dzanga-Sangha National Park, speaking with researchers, conservationists, community members, and park officials. What we heard was not quite reflected in the usual narrative.

Bayanga, the town at the park’s edge, has seen a modest rise in visitors. Dzanga Bai, where forest elephants gather in high densities within the park, and a population of habituated lowland gorillas, remain the main draws. According to local officials, around 800 tourists visited in 2025, a small figure by global standards, but meaningful locally.

“There is growth,” said Gervais Pamongui, a deputy director of the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Areas. He attributed this to both the site itself and a degree of stability that has held in the region. Others made similar points, though often with caveats.

A tour guide, Léonce Madomi, described the country’s reputation for insecurity as “both true and false,” noting that Bayanga has largely avoided the disruptions seen elsewhere.

Lodges report steadier business. Guides and trackers have more consistent work. Some residents point to income that supports school fees or medical care. Yet the gains are uneven and limited in scale. Tourism employs a narrow slice of the population, and basic constraints remain, from poor roads to food shortages.

The model is still developing. Revenue-sharing arrangements are in place between communities, the park, and government agencies, with the park and its management partners supporting local services, including health facilities and a mobile clinic, a solar farm to supply the town with power, a human rights center, a community radio station, and other services in the surrounding area. There are plans to upgrade Dzanga Bai’s viewing platform. Even so, it is not clear that wildlife tourism alone can support a broader local economy.

For now, Dzanga-Sangha stands as a partial answer to the challenges facing conservation in places with limited economic opportunity. It has created visible benefits, but its future will depend on whether those gains extend beyond the park and into the wider local economy.

Read the full story by David Akana here.

Banner image: Most tourists who travel to the Central African Republic are drawn by the western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in Dzanga-Sangha National Park. Image by Rhett A. Butler/ Mongabay.

July 31 is World Ranger Day, which celebrates the work rangers do for the natural world and commemorates those killed or injured in the line of duty.

Among them was Anton Mzimba, head ranger at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve in South Africa, where he had served for 25 years. On July 26, 2022, Mzimba was shot dead outside his home by two men, allegedly in connection with his rhino protection work. Four years later, the case remains open, with no arrests made.

“If a ranger of Anton’s standing and integrity can be killed for doing work that serves the greater good, and there are still no consequences for the people who perpetrated this crime, what confidence does that inspire in the men and women holding the line on the front lines of conservation?” John Jurko II, lead director of a documentary about Mzimba titled Rhino Man, told Mongabay by email. In 2024, Jurko II launched a “Justice for Anton Mzimba” campaign to help speed up the investigation.

Mzimba’s killing is being investigated by the Hawks, a specialized unit within the South African Police Service. Hawks typically investigate organized crime and police murders, but took over Mzimba’s case because of its links to rhino poaching and an ongoing investigation, according to Nico J. Gerber, the police general who heads the Hawks in Mpumalanga province, where Mzimba was killed.

Gerber told Mongabay by email the case “has progressed well” and the case file was submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions, which decides whether there’s enough evidence to bring criminal charges. “As the matter currently stands they declined to prosecute based on the available evidence,” Gerber said. “The matter is still being pursued and further leads are followed up as they emerge.”

Jurko II said justice for Mzimba is essential for his family, friends, and the generations of rangers and conservationists to come. “The system must back them up,” he said.

Rangers often work in dangerous environments, guarding elephants, rhinos, tigers and other wildlife against poachers and organized criminal networks. However, rangers themselves have also been a source of controversy. In some areas with military-style policing, rangers have been accused of human rights abuses, including deadly violence against local communities.

At the same time, rangers continue to be killed or maimed in the line of duty, at the hands of militias, poachers, mining mafias, or by the very wildlife they set out to protect. On March 3, for example, a militant attack on the headquarters of Upemba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo left three rangers and four civilian staff dead.

Between June 1, 2025, and May 31, 2026, at least 147 rangers were killed across 40 countries, according to the nonprofit International Ranger Federation (IRF). Forty-three of those deaths were homicides, while 32 rangers were killed in wildlife attacks.

Banner image: Anton Mzimba (front right) on patrol in Timbavati Private Nature Reserve. Image courtesy of Nick Smith/Global Conservation Corps.

The Indo-Pacific finless porpoise is one of India’s smallest cetaceans, inhabits turbid coastal waters, and lacks a dorsal fin — all of which make it a difficult species for researchers to spot.

Recent research suggests these animals are far more prevalent in Indian waters than visual sightings suggest, yet they may be disappearing before they can be accurately counted, reports contributor Mansab Sayyad for Mongabay India.

A fully grown Indo-Pacific finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides) measures 1.5-1.9 meters (4.9-6.2 feet) in length and weighs about 30-45 kilograms (77-88 pounds). It’s highly inconspicuous: it has a blunt, rounded head, no dorsal fin, and occupies shallow, muddy waters, surfacing only briefly.

But the finless porpoise can be “heard”. It navigates turbid waters by echolocation, emitting high-frequency pulses that are unique to the species and far above the range of human hearing — but detectable by specialized sound-recording devices.

In 2025, a study counted finless porpoises using both visual and acoustic surveys off the Sindhudurg coast, north of Goa state. The acoustic surveys detected finless porpoises four times more often than visual surveys.

Lead author Isha Bopardikar, from the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) Tirupati and Cornell University’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, said relying on visual estimates in Indian waters is a significant drawback due to limited visibility and the animal’s brief surfacing. This means that population assessments that only use conventional visual sightings from boats may be capturing only part of the picture.

Understanding the population trends of the finless porpoise in India is essential since the shallow coastal zones these porpoises inhabit are increasingly becoming a hazardous zone of boat traffic. The porpoises frequently get entangled in fishing nets as bycatch and suffocate. In Goa alone, an estimated 26 porpoises die annually along a 100-kilometer (62-mile) stretch of coastline.

Their biology makes entanglement particularly lethal. Unlike dolphins, whose conical teeth sometimes allow them to tear through nets, porpoises have spade-shaped teeth that snag easily. “Dolphins can sometimes tear out of nets, but porpoises cannot,” said marine mammal researcher Dipani Sutaria. “They get stressed easily and fishers say they cry like human children when entangled.”

The high-frequency clicks that finless porpoises use for communication are inaudible to the Indian Ocean humpback dolphin (Sousa plumbea) and orcas (Orcinus orca), which is a great defense mechanism against these larger cetaceans, Sutaria said. However, the porpoise’s private acoustic world is being shattered by industrial noise, commercial engines, and high-speed vessel traffic, which impairs their ability to distinguish between food and danger.

The 2025 study concluded that acoustics is a more efficient tool for tracking this species in this region. According to Sutaria, shifting toward acoustic monitoring can help generate the long-term population data needed for conservation.

Read the full story by Mansab Sayyad here.

Banner image: An Indo-Pacific finless porpoise at Shimonoseki Marine Science Museum, Japan. Image by Cipher01 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Long-tailed macaques, monkeys native to Southeast Asia, have been listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2022 after their populations declined by at least 50% over 30 years. Yet, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has twice now declined to consider protecting the species under the domestic Endangered Species Act. The most recent decision was announced on July 14, 2026. Such a listing would have restricted the primate’s import for biomedical research, one of the biggest threats to its population.

Mongabay asked FWS for comment but did not receive a response by publication.

Long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) can live in a wide variety of habitats, from riverbanks and mangroves to rainforests and, even, cities. Despite their adaptability, populations of the medium-sized primates have declined sharply due to habitat loss, climate change, hunting and trade, primarily for biomedical research, according to the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

A 2025 study found that macaques poached from the wild are likely supplementing the breeding farms in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam that supply laboratories abroad.

Lisa Jones-Engel, chief scientific advisor for primate experimentation with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said trapping macaques for medical testing is the biggest factor in their population decline.

“Because habitat change, climate change — these animals are so fabulously adaptable, they could roll with that,” Jones-Engel told Mongabay in a video call.

She said entire troops of long-tailed macaques are captured from the wild, including infants and breeding females, and sold to breeding facilities already housing tens of thousands of macaques.

The U.S. imports upwards of 30,000 long-tailed macaques each year for biomedical research, making it the largest importer in the world. PETA petitioned the FWS in 2023 and again in 2025 to list long-tailed macaques on the domestic endangered species list to help curb demand for wild-caught monkeys.

Both times the federal agency declined. In its most recent finding, the FWS said, “the petition does not provide substantial scientific or commercial information indicating that listing the long-tailed macaque as a threatened or an endangered species may be warranted.”

In 2024, Martha Williams, the then FWS director, testified before the House Committee on Natural Resources about a state indictment that alleged that some long-tailed macaques imported into the U.S. for biomedical research were “illegally taken from multiple sources, including national parks and protected areas in Cambodia.” The indictment also alleged the animals were illegally laundered through Cambodian breeding facilities as captive-bred animals then exported under falsified CITES permits, the global wildlife trade agreement.

Jones-Engel said the monkey’s endangered status on the IUCN Red List and FWS’s own testimony of illegality in the trade should have triggered a full Endangered Species Act review. “Instead, FWS relied heavily on the idea that long-tailed macaques are adaptable and can persist in human-modified environments,” she said. “That framing misses the point.”

Banner image: A long-tailed macaque in Bali, Indonesia. Image by Philip Nalangan via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0).

PRAGUE (AP) — Keepers at Prague Zoo used tons of ice on Thursday to give its animals some much-needed relief as yet another heat wave hit Europe.

Polar bears Aleut and Gregor wasted no time and were rolling in the beds of ice cubes after entering their outside enclosure.

The twins looked to have fun with the ice treat that was meant to keep them cool amid the extreme temperatures forecast to soar to 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) later in the day.

“The bears cool off with it and at the same time it’s an enrichment of their life in the zoo,” said zoo spokesperson Filip Mašek.

The zoo began providing ice to some of the animals two years ago in response to climate change and the increasing number of days with extreme temperatures.

The polar bears, who were born in Nuremberg, Germany, 16 years ago and have adapted to the European climate, were the ones who enjoyed it the most.

This year, the plan was to order ice for the animals in July and August, which are traditionally the hottest months. But the first heat wave struck early and the Czech Republic experienced its hottest day ever with 41.9 C (107.4 F) on June 28.

“The weather keeps surprising us,” Mašek said. He said the ice will be ready sooner next year. “We’ve been taught a lesson.”

Other animals that have benefited from the provision of ice to keep cool in previous years include otters, elephants and parrots.

Some animals in the zoo are used to heat, others could stay in the shade or inner enclosures and use various pools to keep cool. Gorillas were given pieces of ice with frozen fruits in previous years.

Banner image: Polar bears cool down on a pile of ice that was brought to their enclosure on a hot and sunny day at the Zoo in Prague, Czech Republic, Thursday, July 30, 2026. Image courtesy of Petr David Josek, Associated Press