Civil groups expressed dismay as the 30th International Seabed Authority (ISA) session recently ended in Jamaica without a moratorium on deep-sea mining, a process of extracting minerals from the seafloor, which experts say can damage marine ecosystems.
The ISA Council finished the second reading of the draft regulations for the commercial exploitation of deep-sea minerals. However, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin of the International Institute for Sustainable Development noted that many parts of the text still require further negotiations.
The bulletin said some member states wanted to finalize regulations, claiming that delays create uncertainty amid possibilities of deep-sea mining outside the ISA framework, which The Metals Company (TMC) the U.S. government is reportedly attempting. Countries like Germany, Greece and Ireland say they want to first have a better scientific understanding of the risks of deep-sea mining, a general policy for marine environmental protection or a long-overdue periodic review to account for changes in ocean governance and trends.
Working groups will continue discussions on the draft mining code until the ISA’s next session in 2026.
“With dozens of unresolved issues in the International Seabed Authority’s draft deep-sea mining regulations, the ISA still has significant work ahead before any rules can be completed,” Julian Jackson, The Pew Charitable Trusts project director, said in an email to Mongabay.
Jackson said the ISA should listen to “a growing wave of governments, businesses, scientists, organizations, and communities worldwide urging a moratorium on seabed mining in areas beyond national jurisdiction until there is sufficient science to ensure the marine environment’s protection.”
The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), which comprises more than 130 organizations and institutes, in a statement called on governments to “reflect on the political and moral costs of inaction and stand firm for a moratorium.” Among the 38 countries that support a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining are France, Brazil and Palau.
“We know that deep-sea mining will devastate life in the deep ocean, wipe out species before they have been discovered, and impact ocean functions, including carbon sequestration,” Farah Obaidullah, founder of the Netherlands-based The Ocean and Us, said in the statement.
In a separate statement, Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner Juressa Lee called deep-sea mining “the latest form of colonisation and extraction.”
The DSCC said the ISA Assembly also failed to debate important issues such as the ocean’s role in climate regulation, the world’s limited knowledge on deep-sea ecosystems and whether minerals from the seabed really need to be mined.
The ISA Council has mandated an inquiry as TMC attempts to bypass the ISA and unilaterally mine in international waters. “Unless a moratorium is established, governments at the ISA could be sleepwalking into opening the door to one of the largest mining operations our planet has ever seen,” the DSCC said.
Banner image of a remotely operated vehicle KIEL 6000 holding a manganese nodule in the sought-after Clarion-Clipperton Zone by the ROV-Team/GEOMAR via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
In Indonesia’s Central Java province, two groups of Javan gibbons have become isolated in two small forest patches. To help the gibbons make their way to larger forest areas, a local NGO, SwaraOwa, is working with farmers in the region to restore and build “corridors” that would connect the fragmented forest blocks, Mongabay reported in a video published in June.
Javan gibbons (Hylobates moloch), known locally as owa, are only found on the island of Java and are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. Only 4,000 individuals are thought to remain in the wild, with many confined to increasingly fragmented forest patches due to logging, agriculture and infrastructure.
Two such Javan gibbon groups, one with five members and the other with four, live in two tiny forest patches isolated from a larger forest area by farms and settlements. The gibbons have little canopy cover to move between the forests.
“From about 2000 until the end of 2010, hunting of primates was still massive, especially gibbons and langurs. Sometimes people hunted them to sell their meat, sometimes to sell their offspring,” Alex Rifai, a farmer from Mendolo village, said in the video.
But then SwaraOwa (“Sound of the owa” in Indonesian) started educating farmers about the biodiversity treasure on their doorstep: that the Javan gibbon is one of five primate species on the island that’s found nowhere else on Earth. “That was a point of pride for us, we were like, ‘Wow, we have to protect them,’” Rifai recalled.
SwaraOwa reforestation coordinator Sidiq Harjanto said they drew up a map showing how the forest blocks where the two gibbon groups lived were no longer connected to the larger nearby forest. “That is actually a pretty critical condition,” he said.
After realizing the dire state of the gibbons, the NGO and farmers launched a community-based conservation scheme.
“Some of the village youths were also recently concerned about the decline in quality of the forest, so we carried out tree planting,” Harjanto said.
In 2023, young farmers from Mendolo started cultivating native pucung (Pangium edule) and timber trees in a nursery, which they then planted in the Mendolo village forest. By 2024, the group had planted 500 trees; it aims to reach 800 trees planted by the end of two years.
“Our motivation as young people is that future generations will not just hear stories about the gibbons, they’ll be able to see them from their backyards if they want,” said Rohim, a Mendolo farmer.
Besides supporting gibbons, the newly planted trees will also help with water conservation and prevent landslides, SwaraOwa researchers said.
The gibbon population in this mountainous part of Java has increased to 1,000 in 2023 from about 800 individuals 10 years ago. “That’s given us optimism that the future for the gibbons in this area looks bright,” said SwaraOwa gibbon researcher Arif Setiawan.
Watch the full Mongabay video here.
Banner image of a Javan gibbon, courtesy of Nanang Sujana.
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
In the Brazilian Amazon, where enforcement agents are spread thin across vast territories, an unlikely success story has emerged — not from drones or satellites, but from flip-flop-wearing locals paddling through forest rivers. A study examining 11 years of patrol data from two sustainable development reserves, Mamirauá and Amanã, has found that community-led voluntary environmental patrols were associated with an 80% drop in detected environmental crimes. By contrast, over the same period, government-led inspections outside these areas showed no such decline, reports contributor Fernanda Biasoli for Mongabay.
From 2003 to 2013, more than 19,000 patrols were conducted under the Voluntary Environmental Agents (VEA) program, launched in 1995. Armed with local knowledge and community trust, participants recorded more than 1,200 crimes, most of them related to fishing and hunting. Meanwhile, federal enforcement teams conducted 69 operations across broader areas, detecting fewer crimes overall and failing to demonstrate a meaningful reduction in infractions over time.
The discrepancy underscores a broader insight: legitimacy and local ownership can matter more than legal authority when it comes to enforcement. Community agents, motivated by a blend of cultural ties, informal authority and modest support from the state, were often more effective at both detecting and deterring infractions. Their efforts also coincided with greater adherence to local conservation norms and improved stewardship of natural resources.
Yet, this model is not without caveats. The VEA system does not replace government oversight. Indeed, researchers caution that increased community responsibility should not be mistaken for a mandate to reduce official support. “They should be seen as partners in a responsibility that mainly falls on the state and federal governments,” said Caetano Franco, the study’s lead author.
While some limitations remain, such as the potential for underreporting or shifting criminal tactics, the scale and consistency of the reductions suggest the results are real. In a region where government patrols are rare and corruption risks high, empowering trusted local actors may be the most pragmatic path to conservation. In the process, it gives the communities most affected by ecological degradation a central role in shaping their own environmental futures.
Read the full story by Fernanda Biasoli here.
Banner image: The Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Flooding from torrential rain in northeastern China has killed at least 60 people since July 29, according to Xia Linmao, the deputy mayor of Beijing, China’s capital city.
The region hit hardest was the Beijing suburb of Miyun, where accumulated precipitation reached 543 millimeters (21.4 inches), nearing the annual average rainfall for Beijing, which is 585 mm (23 in).
In Miyun, 31 people died in a nursing home impacted by the flash flood. Another 16 people died in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, and an additional 18 people are still reported missing.
“I’ve never seen such ferocious floodwaters in my life,” Zhai Cheng’an, a 89-year-old resident of Taotiaogou, a remote village of Yanqing district in Beijing, told China Daily.
Deputy Mayor Xia announced that all major roads will be restored by July 31 and that villages have been served with emergency water supplies, adding that local governments need to improve preparation and relief efforts for extreme weather.
“Local governments lack adequate early warning systems for extreme weather, and disaster prevention plans are incomplete,” Xia said.
More than 80,000 people have been relocated across Beijing. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, China’s most populous city, 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) south of Beijing, 283,000 people have evacuated coastal areas as Typhoon Co-May sweeps through eastern China.
Chen Tao, chief forecaster at China’s National Meteorological Center, said the typhoon isn’t particularly strong but its slow movement could lead to dangerous levels of accumulated rainfall.
In the first half of 2025, China’s emergency ministry reported that almost 8 million people were impacted by floods, leaving 51 people killed or missing and 30 billion yuan ($4.2 billion) in damages. The numbers do not include the recent floods in Beijing or the typhoon in Shanghai.
In Beijing, the heavy rainfall that began July 29 has still not stopped and is set to continue through the week. China’s meteorological observatory maintained a red alert for heavy rain in several provinces, expected to last through the evening of Aug. 1.
Banner image: Damaged road littered with broken tree branches after a heavy rain in the Miyun district in the outskirts of Beijing, China. Image © Mahesh Kumar A./AP.
Fifteen teams have advanced to the semifinal round of XPRIZE’s $5 million Autonomous Wildfire Response Track, moving one step closer to proving that autonomous systems can detect and extinguish wildfires within 10 minutes across 1,000 square kilometers of challenging terrain. Part of a four-year, $11 million global competition launched in 2023, the initiative seeks to spur breakthroughs in rapid-response firefighting technology as climate-driven wildfires grow more frequent and destructive.
Selected from a global pool, these teams represent a range of institutions, from defense contractors to university research labs and even a high school in California. Each presents a unique solution that blends robotics, artificial intelligence, and wildfire science.
“The convergence of exponential technologies such as AI, robotics, drones, and sensors offers us the opportunity to detect wildfires at inception, and put them out in minutes before they spread—that’s the mission of this XPRIZE,” said Peter H. Diamandis, Executive Chairman of XPRIZE, at the time of the competition’s launch in 2023.
Many of the semifinalists take a “system-of-systems” approach. AeroWatch, a Spain-based consortium, is integrating components from over a dozen partners to create a unified interface for fire managers. Crossfire, based at the University of Maryland, deploys scout UAVs for surveillance and “Firejumper” drones for suppression. Its system was validated in a live-fire demonstration earlier this year.
Others focus on scale and speed. Canada’s FireSwarm Solutions is developing heavy-lift drone swarms capable of operating at night. Germany’s Dryad combines solar-powered sensors with reconnaissance and suppression UAVs to detect fires at the smoldering stage. Meanwhile, Anduril, a U.S. defense tech firm founded by Oculus VR’s Palmer Luckey, is fielding its AI-enabled Lattice OS platform paired with advanced sensor towers and aerial reconnaissance.
Student-led teams are also in the mix. Wildfire Quest, from Valley Christian High School in San Jose, has built a solar-powered, self-replenishing drone system with an expandable suppression network. RAINDROPS, a collaboration between Norwegian and American universities, is piloting a low-cost system-of-systems architecture designed for global scalability.
This summer, the XPRIZE Wildfire team will visit each semifinalist’s test site to evaluate the systems in live field conditions. These trials will assess technical readiness, safety, connectivity, and resilience in real-world settings, including high heat, wind, and complex terrain. The Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration will oversee data capture for judging.
The stakes are high. According to XPRIZE, Extreme Wildfire Events now account for over 80% of fire-related damages worldwide.
“With over 30 years of experience in fire management, I’ve seen firsthand how devastating wildfires can be,” said Shawna Legarza, former director of fire and aviation at the USDA Forest Service, in the 2023 launch statement. “To better protect our land and ourselves, we need to change the way we detect and manage wildfires now.”
Two Indigenous groups in Panama are collaborating with researchers in a long-term reforestation project that promises them income in return for growing native trees for carbon sequestration, Mongabay contributor Marlowe Starling reported in May.
As part of the project, researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) have partnered with the local leadership in the rural district of Ñürüm in the Ngäbe-Buglé Comarca, the largest officially recognized Indigenous land in Panama.
With funding support from the U.S.-based Rohr Family Foundation and the U.K. government’s Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate, the project aims to plant native trees across 100 hectares (nearly 250 acres) in Ñürüm.
Ñürüm’s landscape has been heavily deforested for decades for agriculture and cattle pasture, as well as government-led plantations of nonnative pine and teak. It doesn’t help that the soil in the area is clay, acidic, phosphorous-deficient and of low fertility.
The Smithsonian, through two decades of experience from its Panama Canal Watershed Project in Agua Salud in Colón province, has worked out what types of trees work best on the land. Nearly 30 individuals and families had chosen to participate in the comarca reforestation project at the time of publishing.
The community members have already planted several native species on their land, including high-value and low-maintenance trees like cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa), a nitrogen-fixing species whose wood is used for carvings and furniture.
“It grows on crappy soils, good soils, grows fast when it’s young, it’s good for covering the land area and it’s got big roots, so it enhances filtration,” Jefferson Hall, a Smithsonian tropical forest scientist and director of the project, told Mongabay. “And it’s super water-use efficient.”
Another staple in the comarca project is zapateros (Hyeronima alchorneoides), a tree that grows well in the area. Both species are considered high value if the farmers decide to harvest them. They get paid a daily wage for cleaning and maintaining the land, and are given seeds and tools. Furthermore, by growing several species of high-value, native carbon-sequestering trees, the farmers will eventually earn carbon payments.
Most importantly, the communities retain full ownership of their land. This is in contrast to a previous project where Panama’s environment ministry in 1973 offered food or money to the people of Ñürüm in exchange for growing pine plantations. But what the locals didn’t understand at the time was that they would lose ownership of the land and that growing pine would cost them more than the benefits they’d receive.
For the comarca project, the Smithsonian team spent a year holding forums and meetings to obtain the Indigenous peoples’ free, prior and informed consent. They tried to ensure the communities understood the concept of planting trees to store carbon, and the compensation and benefits involved.
Read the full story by Marlowe Starling here.
Banner image of Isidrio Hernandez-Ruiz and his son, who are participants in the reforestation trial with the Smithsonian. Image by Marlowe Starling for Mongabay.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — Ethiopia has launched a national campaign to plant 700 million trees in one day. The ambitious goal, announced Thursday, is part of a conservation initiative seeking to plant 50 billion trees by 2026. The reforestation campaign has been a personal project of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed since 2019. Authorities say some 40 billion tree seedlings have already been planted since 2019. The target for 2025 alone is 7.5 billion trees. Some critics have dismissed the campaign as a publicity stunt by Abiy.
By Amanuel Gebremedhin Birhane, Associated Press
Banner image: Participants planting in a park as part of Ethiopia’s Green Legacy Initiative, which aims to plant 7.5 billion trees by the end of the year, at Jifara Ber site, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Thursday, July 31, 2025. (AP Photo/Amanuel Birhane)
The critically endangered African penguin has several predators to fear, including gulls, seals and sharks at sea, and leopards, caracals, domestic dogs and mongoose on land. A recent study has now documented the first confirmed case of yet another predator: a Cape clawless otter was observed preying on the African penguins of a mainland colony.
African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) historically bred on islands around South Africa and Namibia, where they were safe from larger mainland mammalian predators like leopards and caracals. However, as growing human settlements kept large predators at bay, the penguins began establishing mainland colonies.
One such mainland colony is in Simon’s Town, along South Africa’s southwest coast. Between 2020 and 2023, the penguin population there has declined from 1,100 breeding pairs to 870, the study’s authors write.
Local authorities first observed Cape clawless otters (Aonyx capensis), which typically eat fish and crustaceans, near the Simon’s Town penguin colony in September 2022. They also found seven penguin carcasses, but couldn’t confirm what had killed them.
In March 2023, authorities finally caught an otter in the act: they observed and photographed a female otter attacking penguins. They rescued two adult penguins and recovered carcasses of three others and sent them to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) for autopsy.
With the predator visually confirmed, SANCCOB researchers were able to record and identify the characteristic measurements, location and nature of the wounds linked to otter attacks. “This will help separate otter predation from other predators,” Albert Snyman, study lead author and a SANCCOB researcher, told Mongabay by email.
With African penguin populations in dramatic decline, some conservationists say that identifying the penguins’ predators and deploying the appropriate management actions is important.
Rangers, for instance, caught the female otter responsible for the 2023 penguin predation and moved it to an undisclosed, faraway location within Table Mountain National Park. There were no further otter attacks on Simon Town’s penguins until more than a year later, suggesting “that the initial relocation of the predator was successful and that appropriate or predator specific interventions can help to reduce mortalities,” Snyman said.
From July-September 2024, however, authorities recovered five more penguin carcasses from the Simon’s Town colony that exhibited injuries consistent with an otter attack.
The researchers aren’t sure why the otters around Simon’s Town targeted penguins again. Otters have also been spotted around another mainland colony at Stony Point, but there haven’t been any confirmed cases of those otters preying on penguins.
Snyman said the recent observations suggest that otters could potentially become an issue to other mainland colonies and that further monitoring is needed.
Banner images: A Cape clawless otter. Image by Mark Paxton via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
you're currently offline
