It is a peculiar irony: as technology reaches ever deeper into Earth’s living systems, the primal sonic expressions of the natural world—wind, water, leaf, and creature—have never been more imperiled. Soundscape ecology rests on a simple conviction: the collective voices of the nonhuman world are not only eloquent, but essential. Recorded and preserved over time, these biophonies become enduring ledgers of planetary health, as valuable as genetic databases or satellite images. Over more than half a century, I have gathered more than 5,000 hours of marine and terrestrial recordings. Across those decades, I have heard both the vivid symphony of life and its alarming decline. When science came under siege In recent years, the value of these scientific records—and the ethics of preserving them—has been thrown into sharp relief by forces not of nature, but of governance. In 2017, only weeks after a new U.S. administration took office, a chill settled over the scientific community. Colleagues described research suddenly treated as suspect, funding cut, and datasets removed from public view. It became alarmingly clear that science itself was under siege. Archiving natural soundscapes was no longer solely an act of devotion and curiosity. It had become an urgent responsibility. The danger was not only the destruction of habitat or the extinction of a particular songbird; it was also the erasure of a coherent body of knowledge. Beyond political reach I felt compelled to act. With a sense of defiance and duty, I copied my entire field collection—thousands of hours documenting…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Multilateralism has had a miserable few years. International institutions are under strain,  geopolitical rivalries are intensifying and governments struggle to agree on even the most elementary rules. Governments struggle to agree on even elementary rules. Yet last week in Vienna, there was an unexpected breakthrough. Countries agreed to begin negotiating a global treaty to tackle environmental crime. It is a modest but important victory for international cooperation, and one that could help turn the tables on some of the world’s most destructive criminal enterprises. The breakthrough came at the 13th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC). By 83 votes to 12, governments backed a resolution establishing a committee to design a new protocol targeting illegal trade in wildlife and timber, illicit mining and trafficking in minerals, and waste trafficking. The outcome was hardly assured. The United States, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Iran sought to dilute the initiative. They failed. The vote showed that international rules can still advance despite determined opposition. Illegal logging in Indonesian Borneo. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler Brazil deserves considerable credit. Working with a coalition spanning Latin America and Africa, its diplomats turned years of technical discussions into political momentum. Civil society organizations, including the Igarapé Institute, helped build the evidence and sustain pressure for stronger international action. The breakthrough also signals a wider shift in global diplomacy. Countries across the Global South are increasingly becoming norm-makers rather than simply norm-takers. On issues ranging from climate and biodiversity…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Fear and disbelief prevail among those in Brazil who are concerned about the environment. A climate denier and voluble supporter of dismantling Brazil’s environmental agencies may well be the country`s next president. Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known simply as “Lula”) faces Flávio Bolsonaro, one of former president Jair Bolsonaro’s sons. In the first round of the election on October 4th neither reached the required 50% plus one vote needed, and they face each other in a runoff on October 25th. Flávio was two percentage points ahead for valid votes in a poll released on October 21st, although one poll released on October 18th showed Lula ahead by two points. Flávio’s father Jair Bolsonaro’s 2019-2022 term was an environmental disaster, and Flávio frequently claims that his father was the best president Brazil has ever had and that, if elected, he will bring back his father’s policies. Under Jair Bolsonaro the annual deforestation rate in the Amazon rose sharply, peaking in 2021. He made good on his promise not to demarcate “a single centimeter” of Indigenous land. He appointed openly anti-environmental figures to head the Ministry of the Environment and IBAMA (the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources), who largely dismantled these agencies and blocked enforcement of environmental laws. Jair Bolsonaro’s constant rhetoric supporting illegal loggers, goldminers and deforesters resulted in surges of these activities, including in Indigenous areas. Most notorious was the invasion of the Yanomami Indigenous Land by over 20,000 goldminers who converted…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The past two years have been a dramatic period for conservation funding. The greatest attention has focused on the sudden dissolution of USAID in early 2025, as well as the wider crisis in aid funding as European development budgets also undergo major shifts; total international development aid fell by roughly a quarter last year. These changes are driven by political forces and financial pressures that are only likely to intensify in the coming years. USAID’s dissolution alone removed $1 billion annually from the international environmental funding ecosystem, creating sudden deficits and fiscal crises for organizations large and small, all around the world. While most conservation organizations impacted by these changes in the near term are understandably focused on plugging gaps, keeping programs running, and addressing shortfalls, the bigger picture is reckoning with the ‘end of big aid’ and what the future of global conservation funding looks like. Beyond the aid crisis and its implications, though, the present moment is also one of dynamic change and new opportunities in global conservation funding. While it cannot replace the sheer volume of lost public development aid, private philanthropic funding for conservation is on the increase. Climate mitigation funding from foundations- of which nature conservation and restoration is now a significant focus- more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, to roughly $6 billion. A great deal of much-needed focus in recent years has been on the lack of conservation and climate funding reaching Indigenous Peoples and local communities, but here there is also significant…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Fifty automated recording units scattered across the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. gather roughly 500,000 hours of ambient sound each year. Computer models then sift through those recordings for wolf vocalizations, reports Justin Catanoso for Mongabay. Jeffrey Reed, a linguist and former software engineer, helped launch the Cry Wolf Project in 2023 within the long-running Yellowstone Wolf Project. It uses machine learning to pick out and analyze wolf calls. It turns the audio into spectrograms that reveal the structure of individual calls. So far, the project has isolated more than 8,000 continuous hours of wolf recordings, creating what researchers say is the largest database of wild wolf communication. Tracking wolves has generally meant catching them and fitting them with radio collars. Dan Stahler, Yellowstone’s chief wildlife biologist, told Catanoso that doing so is expensive and carries risks for both wolves and people. Recorders can simply be left in the field. Researchers are testing whether differences in wolves’ voices can identify individuals and help track their movements. The idea is also being tested in Europe. In northern Italy’s Po Valley, Osservatorio Lupi — “Wolf Observatory” — has deployed a dozen recording units near farms and towns. It hopes eventually to use the recordings to warn communities when wolves approach livestock. Researchers are exploring similar uses for brown bears and along wildlife migration corridors. Reed has annotated roughly a fifth of the archive by hand to check the models’ results. For now, listening to wolves still involves a fair…This article was originally published on Mongabay

  Last year the Christmas Island shrew, slender-billed curlew, and three Australian bandicoots were among the species formally declared extinct. None has been seen in at least 30 years, but bureaucracy takes a while. They may be joined in the next decade or so by the vaquita and the Sumatran rhino. A child born today may grow up knowing them through archival footage of the last few animals or AI-generated simulations. But biodiversity loss isn’t only about species extinction. The death of a single elder elephant can have consequences for the entire herd. Her knowledge of water sources, for example, can be critical in a drought. And the disappearance of that herd can have knock-on effects on a forest. Seeds lose their dispersal mechanisms, and clearings maintained by elephants may fill in. The result is a less resilient ecosystem even if the change isn’t immediately apparent. Forest elephants in Dzanga Bai, Central African Republic. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay. Delegates gathering in Yerevan, Armenia, for the U.N.’s COP17 biodiversity talks will assess countries’ progress toward goals to slow these kinds of losses. Under the Kunming-Montreal biodiversity framework, adopted in 2022, governments pledged to conserve 30% of land and seas by 2030 and restore degraded ecosystems. Only four years remain before that deadline. The previous agreement doesn’t inspire much hope: not a single one of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets had been fully achieved globally by 2020. Implementation of these agreements is also entirely at the mercy of whoever holds office.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Thousands of delegates are now gathering in Yerevan to discuss the future of life on Earth as we know it at the U.N.’s COP17 biodiversity summit. Countries have made considerable progress in developing national conservation plans under the biodiversity framework agreed to at COP15 in Montreal in 2022, but most remain well off pace to meet the overall goals set for 2030, according to an assessment published by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity on Thursday. The report finds that nearly 90% of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 196 parties have established national biodiversity targets, close to 60% have completed national biodiversity strategies and action plans, and more than 70% have submitted national reports. However, fewer than half of the national targets assessed by governments are on track. The U.S. is not a party to the treaty. Graphical representation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. From State of Biodiversity Action: Global Report on Collective Progress in the Implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework The framework set 23 targets aimed at halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030. They include conserving 30% of the world’s land and seas, restoring 30% of degraded ecosystems, reducing pollution and invasive species, slowing species extinctions, reforming subsidies that damage nature, and mobilizing $200 billion a year for biodiversity. Most countries have incorporated much of that agenda into national policy. At the time the report was prepared, 162 parties (83%) had established targets aligned with the global framework, covering an average of 22…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen to the lowest level on record. Data released today by Brazil’s national space research institute, INPE, shows that forest clearing in Earth’s largest rainforest over the 12 months ended July 31, 2026, amounted to 3,335 square kilometers (1,288 square miles), an area smaller than the Spanish island of Mallorca. That is 42% below the previous year’s figure. INPE PRODES data for 1988-2026. Deforestation in the Cerrado, the wooded savanna next to the Amazon rainforest, fell 24% to 5,516 sq km, also the lowest tally on record. The Cerrado has been the fastest-deforested biome in Brazil in recent decades, as vast areas have been converted to ranchland and industrial agriculture.  The reduction has accelerated since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2023. Lula restored environmental law enforcement, expanded conservation programs, and resumed efforts to establish protected areas and recognize Indigenous territories. He faces a tough re-election bid later this month, raising concerns about whether recent progress in reducing Amazon forest loss will continue. Seven of the nine governors of Amazon states are allied with Flávio Bolsonaro, the frontrunner, who has campaigned on reducing protections for the Amazon. Beyond the political dynamics, the near-term outlook for the Amazon is challenged by the super El Niño brewing in the Pacific. El Niño events are associated with drought in the southern Amazon, and fires typically increase in the year after a strong event. INPE PRODES data for 1988-2026. Deforestation in the Amazon now amounts…This article was originally published on Mongabay

In recent years, there has been a steady stream of ocean conservation pledges, from French Polynesia extending marine protection across its nearly 5 million-square-kilometer exclusive economic zone, including more than 1 million square kilometers of highly or fully protected waters, to the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (CMAR), where Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Panama agreed to establish a contiguous, transboundary safe passage of more than 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) for migratory species. There is also much greater recognition of the contributions made by traditional stewards, including Indigenous communities, artisanal fishers, and other coastal communities. On paper, at least, this would seem to bode well for progress toward protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030. Yet at the same time that these announcements are being made, we also hear about “paper parks” — those protected in name only — industrial fishing vessels entering protected areas, boats turning off their transponders, and abandoned fishing gear drifting through supposedly protected waters. Coral reef in the Pacific. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler / Mongabay Over the summer, looking across academic literature and Mongabay’s multilingual coverage, I tried to pin down what the evidence actually shows about marine conservation outcomes in the Americas. Merging peer-reviewed datasets with field reporting has its limitations, but it helps bridge a common divide: studies document broader ecological trends, while journalists track the political compromises and enforcement lapses that shape what happens on the water. Unsurprisingly, the central takeaway is that marine conservation is most likely to…This article was originally published on Mongabay