Rarely do species presumed extinct reappear with renewed hope for a better future. But researchers in Australia not only discovered a wild population of Campbell’s keeled glass-snail on Australia’s Norfolk Island in 2020 — they’ve now bred the snail in captivity and recently released more than 300 individuals back into the wild, where they’re multiplying.
This translocation, according to the Australian Museum, is the first large-scale reintroduction of a snail species in Australia.
Officially, Campbell’s keeled glass-snail (Advena campbelli) is still listed as extinct on the IUCN Red List, based on a 1996 assessment. In Australia, it’s considered critically endangered.
In 2020, Isabel Hyman and colleagues from the Australian Museum, with the help of a Norfolk Island resident, confirmed there was still a small population of the snail living in a sheltered rainforest valley in Norfolk Island National Park.
To boost its survival prospects, organizations including Sydney’s Taronga Zoo, Norfolk Island National Park, Western Sydney University and the Australian Museum started collaborated on a snail-breeding program at Taronga Zoo in 2021.
The teams knew very little about the snail’s life history, diet, behavior, or what negatively impacts it, Hyman told Mongabay by email. But with “a lot of careful, painstaking work and record keeping from the husbandry team,” they began seeing progress, she said.
The zoo-bred population of Campbell’s keeled glass-snail has now grown to more than 800 individuals. In June, the teams flew about 600 snails to Norfolk Island, which sits in the South Pacific, closer to New Zealand than to the Australian mainland. A month later, they released 340 of the snails, each marked with an ID label, into a part of the national park where the species was once found.
The conditions of the release area closely resemble the ones where the wild population lives, Hyman said. “None of our chosen release sites overlap with the wild population. This was intentional; in order to mitigate the risk of extinction for the species, we felt it better to establish our second population in a different area of the National Park.”
The team prepared the release area by installing rodent traps and cameras to monitor predator levels. It also has a sprinkler system, Hyman said, for use when conditions become dangerously dry for the snails.
Since the release, the team has observed several newborn snails. “We realize that it is still early days and that the population needs more time to become fully established,” Hyman said. “However, the fact that we are seeing live snails including some neonates at the site is promising. We have not seen many signs of rodent predation, which is also promising.”
Hyman added they’re planning another reintroduction in June 2026 at the same site, “to bolster the new population and give it the best possible chance of becoming established.”
Banner image: A Campbell’s keeled glass-snail with a number tag. Image courtesy of Junn Kitt Foon.
The guiding star at Mongabay isn’t pageviews or clicks; it’s meaningful impact. As 2025 draws to a close, we look back at some of the ways Mongabay’s journalism made a difference this year.
Of the more than 870 impacts that Mongabay logged in 2025, many spurred community engagement and support.
These positive outcomes are what motivate our journalism. As Mongabay CEO and founder Rhett Butler puts it, “When credible information circulates freely, it holds powerful interests accountable, equips decision-makers with evidence, and gives frontline communities the tools to defend their rights and ecosystems.”
Banner image of a rainbow over a forest in Sabah, Malaysia, by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion are projected to reach a record 38.1 billion metric tons in 2025, an increase of 1.1% from 2024, according to the 2025 Global Carbon Budget.
The report, now in its 20th edition, was released Nov. 13 as a preprint. It compiles national energy and emissions data from 21 countries, with contributions from more than 100 researchers. The projections for 2025 are based on preliminary data and modeling.
Researchers predict that emissions rose in several of the world’s largest economies. U.S. emissions were expected to have increased by 1.9%, India’s by 1.4% and China’s by 0.4%. Emissions from international aviation were a standout, with a projected rise of 6.8%.
“With CO2 emissions still increasing, keeping global warming below 1.5°C [2.7°F] is no longer plausible,” Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute who led the study, said in a statement.
The global atmospheric CO2 concentration increased from 317 parts per million (ppm) in 1960 to a projected 425.7 ppm in 2025. About 8% of this increase is linked to climate change weakening the ability of land and ocean ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide.
Renewable energy made huge strides in 2025, but not enough to keep pace with the increase in overall emissions, according to data by Ember Energy.
Solar and wind supplied more than 17% of global electricity in 2025, largely thanks to China’s solar power industry, which now provides more than half of the world’s solar panels. African countries are a large and growing market for Chinese solar panels, according to Ember’s end-of-year synthesis.
Renewable energy continues to expand rapidly, but not fast enough for a total reduction in fossil fuels. Emissions from burning oil are projected to rise by 1% in 2025, while gas emissions are set to increase by 1.3%, and coal by 0.8%.
Fossil fuel-related financing slowed down in 2022 and 2023. But in 2024, banks embraced fossil fuel projects once again, increasing funding by more than 20% to a total of $162.5 billion, Mongabay’s John Cannon reported.
In the decade before the 2015 Paris Agreement, global CO2 emissions were up roughly 18.4%, while in the decade since they’ve increased by 1.2%, according to the U.K.-based Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU). Before the Paris agreement, the world was heading for 4°C (7.2°F) of warming above the pre-industrial average by the year 2100; today, the projection is 2.6°C (4.68 °F).
“This shift reflects an extraordinary surge in clean energy deployment, stronger policy frameworks and the mainstreaming of net zero as a common global goal to tackle climate change,” ECIU wrote in its report, published in October. “More progress is still needed, but progress there has been.”
Banner image: An oil refinery in Slovakia. Image by Mariano Mantel via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Some species officially bid us farewell this year.
They may have long been gone, but following more recent assessments, they’re now formally categorized as extinct on the IUCN Red List, considered the global authority on species’ conservation status.
We may never see another individual of these species ever again. Or will we?
This grayish-brown migratory waterbird, known to breed in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe, and migrate to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, long evaded detection.
The last known photo of the slender-billed curlew (Numenius tenuirostris) was taken in February 1995 on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Since then, researchers suspected it had gone extinct, but only recently did assessments confirm this.
“We arguably spent too much time watching the bird’s decline and not enough actually trying to fix things,” Geoff Hilton, conservation scientist at U.K.-based charity Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, previously told Mongabay.
The Christmas Island shrew (Crocidura trichura) was once widespread on Australia’s Christmas Island.
But in the 20th century, there were just four confirmed records of this tiny mammal: two in 1958, one in 1984, and the last in 1985. The species’ latest conservation assessment concludes it has gone extinct.
Researchers say a blood-borne parasite transmitted by accidentally introduced black rats, which wiped out two of the island’s endemic rat species, may have also helped decimate populations of the Christmas Island shrew.
Three Australian species of bandicoots — the marl (Perameles myosuros), southeastern striped bandicoot (Perameles notina) and Nullarbor barred bandicoot (Perameles papillon) — were also declared extinct on the IUCN Red List this year. All three species were last assessed in 2022.
Bandicoots are small, mostly nocturnal, insect-eating mammals found in Australia, New Guinea and nearby islands.
All three now-extinct species were likely wiped out by the loss of habitat and the spread of feral cats, researchers say.
The last known marl specimen was collected in 1907, and researchers suspect the species was likely extinct by 1910. The southeastern striped bandicoot likely went extinct by the late 1800s, while the last known record of the Nullarbor barred bandicoot was from the 1920s.
Diospyros angulata, a large tree native to the island country of Mauritius, is only known from two herbarium collections made in 1839 and 1851. Subsequent surveys didn’t reveal any individuals either in the wild or in cultivation. Researchers say it likely went extinct by 1981.
Delissea sinuata, a plant known only from the Waianae Mountains on the island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, was last observed in 1937, researchers say.
A species of cone snail, Conus lugubris, was once abundant in a small part of the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa. But by the turn of the 20th century, it likely went extinct as much of its habitat was degraded by coastal development, researchers say. It was last observed in 1987.
Banner image: Illustration of a slender-billed curlew by Elizabeth Gould & Edward Lear via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
The “30 by 30” biodiversity target to protect 30% of the Earth’s land and ocean by 2030 is fast approaching — and the world is far off the pace needed for success: Less than 10% of oceans and just 17.6% of land and inland waters enjoy some sort of protection.
Still, 2025 saw some significant progress for land conservation. This year marked a move away from purely aspirational goals toward “more concrete planning and formal recognition in some countries and regions,” Mitchelle De Leon, chief impact officer with SkyTruth, a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks progress toward the 30×30 goal, told Mongabay in an email.
While the progress is encouraging, De Leon cautions that we must also “assess how much impact protected areas are having on land use change over time, not just how much land is designated.”
Some conservation wins and announcements from 2025:
In March, Colombia established a 1.1-million-hectare (2.7-million-acre) protected territory for the uncontacted Yuri-Passé people in the Amazon. The decision followed petitions from neighboring Indigenous communities who were alarmed by growing threats from mining and organized crime on the Yuri-Passé land. The new territory marks the first time the Colombian government has established a protected area specifically for people living in voluntary isolation.
In November, Colombia announced it would no longer approve new oil or large-scale mining projects in the Amazon. The announcement will protect roughly 48.3 million hectares (119 million acres) of the Amazon from future extraction.
In October, the Australian state of New South Wales announced plans to finally establish a 475,000-hectare (1.1-million-acre) reserve that connects existing protected areas with a state park to protect roughly 12,000 koalas and many other threatened species. Just eight months before the announcement, Mongabay reported that the area was still being logged.
In September, Suriname pledged to protect roughly 90% of its rainforests by creating new protected areas and demarcating Indigenous territories. In November, Mongabay interviewed Suriname President Jennifer Geerlings-Simons to understand how she plans to balance development and finance with her conservation goals.
At the U.N. climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém in November, the governments of nine tropical forest countries pledged to recognize roughly 160 million hectares (395 million acres) of Indigenous lands over the next five years. Indigenous and other traditional communities steward more than 1.3 billion hectares (3.2 billion acres) of land worldwide, but just 11% is formally recognized.
The summit also saw the launch of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a fund that aims to pay tropical countries to keep their forests standing. Observers have, however, raised concerns about how TFFF is structured.
Banner image: Part of the proposed the Great Koala National Park. Image courtesy of Paul Hilton/Earth Tree Images.
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
He has spent much of his life in the shadow of the Dauphiné Alps in southeastern France, where limestone cliffs catch the morning light and the silhouettes of horned ibex move across the ridgelines. To Fabien Quétier, who helps steer Rewilding Europe’s newest and largest French project, these animals and their battered landscape are reminders of what had slipped away — and what might return, if given a chance, reports contributor Marlowe Starling for Mongabay.
Rewilding was a young idea when Quétier began working on it, more theory than practice. In the 1990s, it sounded utopian: let nature repair itself by restoring the species that once shaped it. But in the past decade, the notion took on urgency. Forests were collapsing under heat, rivers ran dry in late summer, and even here, in this quiet corner of the western Alps, droughts and fires arrived with unsettling regularity.
A “fixed approach to nature doesn’t really work anymore,” Quétier tells Starling. Rewilding, he believes, offers something sturdier than nostalgia.
Quétier admires the region’s stubbornness. Roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and marmots (Marmota marmota) crept back in the mid-20th century, drawing in wolves (Canis lupus) and Eurasian beavers (Castor fiber) that crossed from Italy. Friends who share Quétier’s faith nominated the area as France’s first rewilding site in 2019.
It wasn’t starting from nothing, says Olivier Raynaud, director of the subgroup Rewilding France and Quétier’s colleague. The land had been quietly healing itself for decades, he adds.
Still, Quétier and Raynaud know the work requires more than biology. It means earning the trust of landowners, persuading farmers wary of wolves, explaining to skeptical villagers why vultures matter. It means accepting that some species like Eurasian brown bears (Ursus arctos arctos) cannot yet return.
Quétier understands the fragility of the enterprise. Climate projections point to hotter, harsher decades ahead. Forests might falter. Rivers might shrink. Yet he insists the only real gamble is doing nothing.
“People are looking for new ideas,” he says. Rewilding, in his mind, is not a cure. It is simply a way of giving life a fighting chance.
Read the full story by Marlowe Starling here.
Banner image: Two male ibex in front of Mont Aiguille in the Dauphiné Alps, France. Image © Luca Melcarne.
A Kenyan environmentalist hugged a palm tree for 72 straight hours in Nyeri county to draw attention to the rapid loss of the country’s native forests, many of which face extinction.
Truphena Muthoni’s feat, reported by Mongabay contributing editor Lynet Otieno, is in the process of being considered for a new Guinness World Record. It surpassed the previous longest tree hug, also held by Muthoni, by more than 24 hours. She didn’t eat or sleep for the duration of the hug.
Muthoni began her embrace of a royal palm (Roystonea regia) tree on Dec. 8 and ended the 72-hour feat around midday on Dec. 11, cheered on by crowds that included the Nyeri county governor, Mutahi Kahiga, as well as an online audience of hundreds of thousands.
“I want to inspire people to fall in love with nature and treat it with care,” Muthoni told Kenyan newspaper Daily Nation. “Conservation begins with love. Nowadays, there are many tree-planting initiatives, but people often replace Indigenous forests with saplings, believing it is mitigation, yet it is not. We must first protect what we already have.”
According to the latest State of the World’s Trees assessment, Kenya is home to 1,131 tree species, but more than 13% are threatened with extinction due to deforestation, climate change and urbanization. The royal palm that Muthoni hugged isn’t native to Kenya; it comes from the American tropics.
Of Kenya’s 49 endemic tree species on record, most are under some level of threat. Nineteen are endangered and another eight are listed as critically endangered.
The endemic and endangered Meru oak (Vitex keniensis), for example, is one of the nation’s largest trees, growing to a height of 35 meters (115 feet). It’s found in a handful of locations, including on Mount Kenya, close to where the tree hug took place.
Pandanus kajui, another endemic tree, is important for stabilizing riverbanks in wetland ecosystems. It has also been classified as endangered and is found in only five locations in Kenya.
On Dec. 15, Kenyan President William Ruto appointed Muthoni as the ambassador for the nation’s campaign to plant 15 billion trees, increasing Kenya’s total area of tree cover from 12% to 30% by 2032.
“This is profound,” Ruto said during a conversation with Muthoni. “I am sure this will have a big impact, that people will think about trees much more positively.”
On Dec. 17, Muthoni was also awarded a full scholarship to Mount Kenya University.
Read the story by Lynet Otieno here.
Banner image: Truphena Muthoni hugging a tree for 72 consecutive hours. Image by Nyeri Governor Mutahi Kahiga via X.
Researchers have described a new-to-science species of carnivorous plant that’s known from only three locations on the Philippines’ Palawan Island. The newly described pitcher plant, which grows on very difficult-to-access vertical limestone walls, may already be critically endangered given its extremely restricted range and tiny population, the researchers say in a recent study.
Nepenthes is a group of tropical carnivorous plants found in South and Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and parts of Australia. Their leaves are modified into specialized pitchers that function as slippery, passive traps: small prey like insects fall into a fluid at the base of the trap, where enzymes liquidize them for the plant to consume.
Researchers have named the newly described species Nepenthes megastoma, its species name meaning “large mouth,” referring to the pitcher’s large opening.
Ecologists first spotted a few individuals of the plant with binoculars in 2013. The plants were hanging off the vertical face of a limestone cliff within the Mount Saint Paul karst formation of Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park (PPSRNP) on Palawan island. At the time, they thought these were specimens of N. campanulata, a pitcher plant native to Borneo.
However, thanks to a local nature guide, researchers were made aware of another, more-accessible location where the same pitcher plant seemed to be growing. A few expeditions and drone surveys later, the researchers were able to study the plant’s morphology and ecology, eventually confirming that the species was new to science.
So far, N. megastoma is only known from three locations within PPSRNP, where it grows on steep cliff walls. The scientists could access only two of these locations, they write. In those locations, they estimated there were about 25 individual plants.
While the researchers say they can’t rule out the presence of additional populations of N. megastoma, they suggest categorizing the species as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, given its limited distribution and small population.
The species’ small area of occurrence also puts it at risk from sudden events like fire or typhoons, the authors write. The clearing of forest for agriculture and development around PPSRNP poses another risk.
“It’s amazing that these plants have evolved to survive in such difficult and inaccessible conditions,” John Charles Altomonte, study co-author from the nonprofit Philippine Taxonomic Initiative, said in a statement. “And yet, despite their hardiness, their existence is threatened by human activity — directly by way of encroachment and poaching, and indirectly through the effects of anthropogenic climate change.”
Banner image: Photos of Nepenthes megastoma, a newly described critically endangered species endemic to Palawan in the Philippines, showing its lower pitcher (a) and two distinct variant forms of its upper pitcher (b-c). Image courtesy of Altomonte et al., 2025 (CC BY-NC-ND)
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