Until 2020, 99% of Liberia’s Grand Gedeh county was covered by natural forests. Since then, cacao farms have rapidly encroached on those forests, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo.
Grand Gedeh in southeastern Liberia borders Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest exporter of cacao beans. Much of Côte d’Ivoire’s forests have been cleared for cacao and many of its cacao plantations are now ageing and nutrient poor. That’s prompted cacao workers from Côte d’Ivoire to turn their attention to Liberia, where landowners have offered them their land in exchange for a share in cocoa earnings.
Data from Global Forest Watch show that in 2025, Grand Gedeh lost more forest than any other Liberian county in a single year since 2002.
“In Côte d’Ivoire there are no forests, that’s why I came to Liberia,” said Mohammed, a cacao farm worker near the town of Zleh in Grand Gedeh’s Gbarzon district.
Around Zleh, roughly 82% of the community’s 6,900 hectares (17,000 acres) of customary forest land have been given over to cacao, Zleh’s town chief said.
Yei Neagor, in charge of the regional headquarters of Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority (FDA) in Zwedru, Grand Gedeh’s capital, told Mongabay that Gbarzon has seen the worst forest loss in the county. “I will be honest to tell you that about 70% of the forest there is gone,” she said.
Forests in southeastern Liberia are communally owned, and laws regulate how private individuals can lease them for commercial agriculture. In practice, those laws aren’t being followed, said Ashai Wulu Gaye, chair of a community forest in Grand Gedeh.
Commercial cacao farming is also currently banned inside most FDA-registered community forests.
Still, residents of Boundary, a town inside a 48,600-hectare (120,000-acre) FDA-registered community forest in Konobo, a district neighboring Gbarzon, told Mongabay they recruited migrant workers to cultivate cacao after they saw it transforming lives in other communities. Boundary residents have used the income to fix the roofs of their homes and send their children to school abroad.
“It is not legal, I agree. But I live on the land,” said Prince Tarley, a youth leader in Boundary. “If you say I shouldn’t do cocoa, what do you expect me to do? I need something to live.”
In 2025, an investigation by the Liberian environmental news outlet The Daylight found government officials in Grand Gedeh had been involved in an illegal land transaction with a cocoa entrepreneur from Côte d’Ivoire.
“My experience with these situations is that there is always a line from that local guy who’s making the case about his livelihood being in jeopardy that comes up to some big shot somewhere up the chain,” Silas Siakor, a long-time environmentalist and community rights advocate, told Mongabay.
Read the full story by Ashoka Mukpo here.
Banner image: A migrant worker in a cacao farm in Grand Gedeh, Liberia. Image by Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay.
In the last four years, Nepal’s wild tiger population has experienced a historic increase.
In 2022, the tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) population was numbered at 355 individuals. Now, it has reached an estimated 429 individuals — nearly a four-fold jump from 16 years ago, reports Mongabay’s Abhaya Raj Joshi.
Bed Kumar Dhakal, spokesperson for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, said that the department’s latest tiger monitoring survey results “reflect the positive outcomes of ongoing efforts in the field of tiger conservation in Nepal, such as habitat conservation and management, poaching control, conservation of prey species, and biological corridor conservation.”
However, a closer look at the latest numbers reveals an uneven recovery. Growth is concentrated almost entirely within the country’s newest national parks, Banke, Parsa and Shuklaphanta, while Bardiya, the country’s second-oldest park, experienced a population decline.
Shant Raj Jnawali, a researcher and conservationist, said the uneven growth of tiger numbers across Nepal’s parks is due to water availability, spread of weed species and improved connectivity with potential habitats in India, rather than administrative or management changes.
“We have seen some areas of Bardiya, especially the banks of the Geruwa River, and Chitwan (west) are facing droughts due to changing river course,” Jnawali said. This dry spell, he added, may be pushing tigers toward parks with better water infrastructure, such as Banke and Parsa, where officials have heavily invested in artificial ponds.
Additionally, older parks are suffering from invasive weeds such as bitter vine (Mikania micrantha) and common lantana (Lantana camara), Jnawali said. “The younger national parks, to some extent, don’t face the problem, as until recently their grasslands were used for livestock grazing, which helped keep the invasives out,” he added. This grazing history preserved high-quality grasslands for deer, drawing tigers to follow their prey, Jnawali said.
A 2025 study also suggests water availability, specifically proximity to artificial waterholes, is a stronger predictor of tiger distribution than prey abundance. Bardiya’s prey density actually rose by 74% between 2022 and 2026, the highest gain of any park, even as tiger numbers fell.
The increase in tiger numbers in the new national parks may not only lead to more tiger-human conflict, but also more conflict between people and leopards, studies have found. As tiger populations expand, they displace common leopards (Panthera pardus) from core habitats, pushing them into surrounding human settlements, said researcher Saneer Lamichhane, a PhD candidate at the wildlife ecology and conservation department at the University of Florida.
Read the full story by Abhaya Raj Joshi here.
Banner image: Bardiya National Park is among the many protected areas in Nepal that are known for their tigers. Authorities here focus on keeping the habitat suitable for tigers. Image by The Advocacy Project via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
A recent investigation from Grist, a U.S.-based nonprofit media organization, raises questions about environmental activist Juan Mancias’ Indigenous claim to the land he works to protect in the U.S. state of Texas.
In 2017, Mancias traveled to France and helped pressure French banks to withdraw support for oil and gas projects that he said threatened ancestral Indigenous lands and a rare coastal ecosystem. Since that success, the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe, which Mancias is the chairman of, has received recognition in the United Nations and financing for environmental work.
The Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe isn’t currently recognized by U.S. federal or state governments; Indigenous groups seeking recognition, as Mancias has, must establish a substantially continuous tribal existence as an autonomous entity. Experts believed “Carrizo” or “Comecrudo” people disappeared from the area after violence, disease or assimilation dramatically reduced their populations.
For years, Mancias has said that his grandfather and dozens of tribal families fled their Rio Grande homeland in the 1940s and moved north to the Texas panhandle where they blended in with Mexican farm workers. According to Mancias, they kept their culture alive, secretly speaking their native language and sharing oral histories.
Mancias says he lives by two guiding principles from his grandparents. His grandmother told him, “Know your people, know who you are,” while his grandfather told him, “Go get our land back,” according to news reports.
It’s a compelling story and one shared by other Native American peoples, Grist reported.
However, Grist found inconsistencies in Mancias’ account that raise questions about the accuracy of his family history. For example, he has repeatedly cited an alleged 1871 document he discovered describing a massacre of the Carrizo/Comecrudo people. However, the original document to corroborate that event has never been produced, according to Grist.
“I know that it exists somewhere, and maybe they changed it,” said Mancias. “I didn’t make it up.”
Grist examined genealogical records for Mancias and found his Indigenous ancestors likely lived six to seven generations ago in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental mountains, not the Rio Grande delta, the historic territory of the Carrizo/Comecrudo.
In the 1990s, Mancias established a nonprofit under the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribal name and raised more than $5 million for environmental work opposing the U.S.-Mexico border wall, oil and gas development and SpaceX operations in the region.
Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council, told Grist that funding for unsubstantiated Indigenous groups, “may be taking funding, time, representation, and resources away from Indigenous Peoples’ and their organizations that are really struggling to participate [at the United Nations].”
The Schmidt Family Foundation, First Nations Development Institute, Rockefeller Family Fund, Sierra Club and others have helped fund the Carrizo/Comecrudo’s environmental work.
“We do not fund based on identity,” Joseph Sciortino, executive director of the Schmidt Family Foundation, told Grist. “Our job as a philanthropy is to support important work, not to serve as the arbiters of who does and doesn’t get to be Indigenous.”
Banner image: Juan Mancias. Image courtesy of Sharon Ellman, Associated Press.
The water level at Lake Powell, the United States’ second-largest reservoir, has fallen to a record low, heightening concerns about the ongoing crisis in the Colorado River system.
The alarming milestone at Lake Powell, reached Saturday, comes about a week after the river’s other major reservoir, Lake Mead, also hit a historic low. Plummeting water levels pose a major threat to the Colorado River Basin, which is a key resource for wildlife, hydropower and more than 40 million people in seven U.S. states.
The historic lows come as the federal government and states that rely on the river — California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado — struggle to reach agreement on a long-term management plan for the dwindling resource. Persistent overuse combined with a record-dry winter and rising temperatures have been depleting both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Lake Powell’s elevation dropped to 3,519.91 feet (1072.9 meters) above sea level on Saturday, dropping just slightly below a previous record set in April 2023, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The lake is more than 20 feet (6.10 meters) lower than it was at the start of the year, USBR data shows.
The reservoir is now about 30 feet (9.1 meters) away from the point at which turbines would stop producing hydroelectric power. Federal officials warned in April that a “major intervention” would be necessary to avoid reaching that threshold by the end of this year.
USBR in July proposed a 10-year plan that includes major potential water cuts for Arizona, California and Nevada.
The crisis has been in the making for years. Both reservoirs are at the lowest they have been in nearly seven decades, and levels may continue to drop, USBR data shows.
The last time their combined storage was this small was in May 1957 when Glen Canyon Dam that holds back Powell was being built, according to a recent paper published by a group of academics and retired water officials. Powell began to fill in 1963.
The depletion has also impacted Lake Powell’s substantial tourism industry, forcing marinas in the reservoir to adapt. Boat ramps have closed or moved, new ones are being added and marinas have been temporarily relocated to deeper waters.
Banner image: The Wahweap Marina floats on Lake Powell at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Wednesday, July 15, 2026, near Page, Ariz. Image courtesy of John Locher, Associated Press.
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
On April 20, on the south coast of Timor-Leste, Jafet Potenzo Lopes saw three green pigeons. He had not seen the species for years. The birds were Timor green pigeons, and the site, in Manatuto municipality, had no previous record of them. With the species nearing extinction, finding three birds in a new place was encouraging.
The latest estimates suggest how few remain. A study published this year in Oryx, drawing on more than 1,400 days of field surveys between 2002 and 2025, estimates the global population at 100-500 birds across eight sites. The true number may be near the lower end of that range. Only Nino Konis Santana National Park in eastern Timor-Leste is thought to hold more than 50 birds. The researchers recommend changing the status of the Timor green pigeon (Treron psittaceus) on the IUCN Red List from endangered to critically endangered, reports contributor Timothy Mihocik for Mongabay.
In Indonesia, where many older records came from West Timor and nearby islands, the pigeon may already be functionally extinct. Most of the remaining birds are in Timor-Leste, where hunting continues even in protected areas.
Timor green pigeons gather at fruiting trees and are unusually vulnerable: After one bird is shot, others may stay in the canopy. Forest conversion has also reduced their habitat. More than 80% of known records come from protected areas, yet researchers say those areas lack the funding and staff needed to control hunting effectively.
The danger has been recognized for years. The species has been classed as endangered since 2000, while dedicated recovery work, regular monitoring and sustained investment have remained limited. The Timor green pigeon was not among the initial 100 species selected by the Phoenix Species Project, a $200 million initiative by Re:wild and the Bezos Earth Fund to support recovery of some of the world’s most threatened species.
Researchers say the pigeon can still be saved. They recommend more surveys, monitoring of its main population every three to five years, a national action plan and work with hunters and local communities to reduce hunting. Timor-Leste already protects the species under national law and customary systems protect some of the forests where it survives. Researchers have also suggested involving former hunters in surveys and conservation work.
The three birds found in Manatuto do little to change the species’ overall position. They do show that some birds remain in places where they had not previously been recorded. With perhaps only a few hundred Timor green pigeons left, the margin is narrow. The steps needed to improve their chances are already known.
Read the full story by Timothy Mihocik here.
Banner image: A Timor green pigeon is seen on Apr. 20, 2026, during a Conservation International wetland survey on the south coast of Timor-Leste. Image courtesy of Jafet Potenzo Lopes.
As Bengal tiger numbers rebound in India and increasingly disperse into human-dominated areas, conservationists are urging the government to prioritize protecting ecological corridors that connect vital habitats and tiger populations. But they also warn that corridors shouldn’t become sticking plasters for compromised core habitats, reports contributor Nirmal Ghosh for Mongabay.
India is home to roughly 75% of the world’s wild tigers. The national population has more than doubled from an estimated 1,827 in 1972 to an estimated 3,682 in the 2022 census. However, this conservation success has created new challenges.
Experts estimate that 35% of India’s wild tigers (Panthera tigris tigris) now live outside protected areas. Young tigers leave their mothers to establish large home ranges, which for males can cover up to 200 square kilometers (77 square miles).
In doing so, tigers frequently navigate a highly fragmented matrix of roads, railways and urban sprawl. Without safe pathways, isolated tiger populations risk inbreeding and local extinction.
In response to rapid infrastructure development, India has constructed more wildlife underpasses and overpasses than any other Asian country, according to Bilal Habib, a scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), a government-run research center. This includes the world’s 10 largest wildlife mitigation structures built since 2017, such as a 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) underpass beneath a newly opened expressway connecting New Delhi to the city of Dehradun.
“I don’t think anywhere in the world, any developing country has spent as much money as we have on mitigation, exclusively for wildlife conservation,” Habib told Mongabay.
At the same time, linear infrastructure and projects like mining continue to divert forests. Prakriti Srivastava, a former principal chief conservator of forests in the southern state of Kerala, and Prerna Bindra, a researcher and author, have documented how the National Board for Wildlife, which reviews projects in critical wildlife habitats, has essentially become a rubber-stamp body: It approved 97% of project proposals brought before it over a 12-year period. Bindra was a former member of the board’s Standing Committee.
Ullas Karanth, a tiger expert and emeritus director of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Wildlife Studies, told Mongabay that tigers will only use corridors if there is a motivation to cross, which requires healthy habitats on both sides. “To me the context is first to secure the core habitat,” Karanth said. “India could, in fact, accommodate up to 10,000-20,000 tigers if habitats are adequately protected.”
While there’s a common belief that animals restrict themselves to wildlife corridors, that’s not how it works in reality, according to wildlife biologist Ravi Chellam. “Elegantly and clearly demarcating narrow wildlife habitats on a map and calling them corridors is not the solution,” he said. “Animals don’t limit their movements to corridors. They use a matrix of habitats available in the landscape.”
Read the full story by Nirmal Ghosh here.
Banner image: Tigress negotiating an underpass beneath National Highway 44, India’s longest highway. Image courtesy of Wildlife Institute of India.
In a landmark judgment on Aug. 14, South Africa’s Constitutional Court set aside exploration rights held by oil giant Shell and Impact Africa, a South African oil and gas company. The ruling prevents the companies from exploring for fossil fuels off South Africa’s Wild Coast.
The case was brought by Wild Coast communities and environmental organizations after Shell announced plans in 2021 to conduct a 3D seismic survey off the country’s Eastern Cape province coastline. They argued that authorities had failed to meaningfully consult affected communities or consider harms to their spiritual and cultural rights and livelihoods. Authorities also failed to consider the potential harm to marine life and climate change, the plaintiffs argued.
In the judgement, Justice Jody Kollapen wrote the majority opinion and said consulting communities isn’t just a procedural requirement, but “a process which affirms human dignity by affording a seat at the table to those whose lives are impacted by decisions.”
Acknowledging the “cornerstone role that dispossession played in the apartheid regime,” the court noted that South Africa’s natural resources are highly contested and that the case is embedded in “well-documented struggles by coastal communities to protect their land, marine resources and ways of life in the face of extractive activities.”
The judges also considered last year’s International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on countries’ obligations in the context of climate change: “Decisions must be taken within a framework of heightened diligence, informed by scientific knowledge, international commitments and the foreseeable impacts of emissions on present and future generations,” Kollapen wrote.
The question of oil exploration rights in the area began in 2014, when the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy granted Impact Africa Limited the right to undertake a seismic survey to look for oil and gas reserves on the Wild Coast. Impact Africa Limited is a subsidiary of Impact Oil & Gas Limited, which in 2021 transferred a 50% stake of its exploration rights in the area to Shell.
The case has appeared before several South African courts over the past decade before reaching the Constitutional Court, the highest in the country.
Carmen Mannarino from the South African nonprofit Masifundise Development Trust, which works with communities in the area, told Mongabay that the court’s decision is a victory for fishing communities. “The court recognized that exploring for resources in light of potential future financial benefits does not compare to the constitutionally recognized rights of fishing communities,” Mannarino said.
“This is the apex court and the first time that it has dealt with issues relating to the community and environmental rights in relation to oil and gas exploitation,” Melissa Groenink, an attorney with one of the applicants, civil society organization Natural Justice, told Mongabay, adding that the ruling might influence similar cases currently in process.
Shell did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment by the time of publication.
Banner image: Fisherpeople in Port St. Johns, Eastern Cape. Image courtesy of Aletta Harrison CC BY 4.0.
For wildlife moving between Lake Manyara and Tarangire, a line on a map was never enough. Elephants, wildebeest, and other animals crossed land used by pastoralists and farmers, where roads, cultivation, and settlements were expanding. Keeping such routes open meant persuading people who lived there that wildlife had a place in their future. It meant dealing with livestock killed by predators, arguments over revenue, and the tedious business of local institutions.
John Gospel Yonazi Salehe, who died on June 19th aged 71, spent much of his working life on such problems. A Tanzanian forester by training, he worked for the government, FAO, UNDP, WWF, and, eventually, the African Wildlife Foundation, where he became Tanzania country director. His career stretched for more than four decades and across forests, wildlife areas, and development projects in East Africa.
Salehe’s conservation was practical and strongly social. In the Maasai Steppe he worked to protect wildlife corridors and strengthen community-run Wildlife Management Areas. He wanted the benefits from conservation to reach households, and supported measures such as predator-proof livestock enclosures and compensation for losses to wildlife. Communities were not an audience for conservation after the important decisions had been made. They were part of how it was supposed to work.
The same thinking shaped his work on forests. In central Tanzania, where charcoal production and farming put pressure on woodland, he argued that restrictions had to be accompanied by viable livelihoods. Higher agricultural productivity, land-use planning, and secure tenure could reduce pressure on forests, he believed. Researchers who later examined one REDD project in Kondoa challenged some of its claims of success. Salehe’s underlying proposition was clear enough: conservation would endure only if it made economic and institutional sense to the people living with it.
This required patience. Wildlife Management Areas brought disagreements over money, investors, expectations, and authority. The work was administrative as much as ecological, and progress could depend on arrangements few outsiders ever saw. Salehe seems to have been unusually comfortable in that territory. His approach rested on partnerships among communities, government, businesses, NGOs, and donors. A filmmaker who interviewed him in 2014 found him “incredibly accommodating” and “quite the character.” Colleagues later recalled his integrity, humor, humility, and willingness to mentor younger conservationists.
He had begun working in conservation in the 1970s. Long after formal employment ended, he kept chairing organizations and advising others. He had joined the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group in 1994 and chaired it from 2012. He also chaired the Tanzania Association of Foresters and the Community Wildlife Management Area Consortium, and helped found Nature Tanzania. There, birds became another route into the same larger question: how to protect habitats while giving Tanzanians a reason and a means to protect them themselves.
Salehe believed, Nature Tanzania recalled, that conservation belonged to the people. The phrase could sound grander than the man’s working methods. Those were meetings, land-use plans, budgets, negotiations, and years spent keeping alliances together. In the landscapes where he worked, that was often what conservation required.
Header image: Courtesy of AWF
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