Criminal organizations linked to illegal logging, illegal gold mining, land grabbing and cattle ranching now dominate large sections of land around the BR-319 highway in one of the Brazilian Amazon’s largest stretches of forest, according to a new study. The finding comes as Brazil is moving forward with further improvements to the controversial highway. ​The recent study measured the sharp increase in deforestation after 2015, when then-president Dilma Rousseff authorized the first maintenance work on the highway, abandoned since 1998. Her successor, Jair Bolsonaro, promised to pave the road, which intensified land speculation and the conversion of large forest areas into cattle pasture. According to the research article’s lead author, São Paulo University (USP) researcher Lucas Ferrante, the lack of government surveillance made the area fertile ground for organized crime. He said that drug trafficking and environmental crimes often share the same routes and financial flows, while cattle ranching is frequently used to launder money from criminal activities. ​“This region is becoming a hub of large farms controlled by organized crime,” Ferrante, associated with the Center for Research on Biodiversity and Climate Change[1] (CBioClima), told Mongabay in a video call. ​The BR-319 highway, which connects the cities of Manaus and Porto Velho in Brazil’s northern Amazon, was built during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and later fell into disrepair. The highway’s 339-kilometer (211-mile) middle section is largely impassable in the rainy season, though many still try to traverse it. ​In April, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva moved to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Incumbent Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was reelected on Oct. 25 in a surprise defeat of his far-right rival who had promised to remove “environmental obstacles” in the Amazon rainforest. Lula won 51.8% of valid votes. Flávio Bolsonaro, eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is imprisoned after being convicted of attempting a coup d’état when he lost the previous election, won 48.2% of the vote. Flávio was favored to win after he got 2% more of the first-round votes on Oct. 4. However, neither candidate got more than 50% of the vote, triggering a runoff election. Lula was able to secure an additional 10 million votes in 20 days. “This election was a defeat for denialism, a defeat for lies,” Lula said in his first speech after the election results. “We are going to teach the world how climate policy is done, here in this country. This year is the first time we have managed to reduce deforestation for four consecutive years.” Deforestation soared to its highest level in 15 years under Jair Bolsonaro’s government. Lula took office in 2023 pledging to end both legal and illegal deforestation by 2030. Since then, deforestation has gradually slowed to its lowest rate since records began in 1988, though the Amazon rainforest is still shrinking. Between August 2025 and July 2026, around 333,500 hectares (824,000 acres) of forest were cut, an area equivalent to roughly 7,300 Olympic-size swimming pools cleared every day. “The reduction in deforestation in recent years…This article was originally published on Mongabay

YEREVAN, Armenia — Like the dark spaces they often prefer, mushrooms, yeasts, and some 160,000 known species of fungi rest in the background of conservation efforts. But their crucial role as ecosystem engineers makes protecting them vital, said Greg Mueller, chief scientist emeritus at the Chicago Botanic Garden in the U.S. “They really are responsible for life on Earth,” he said, “and life as we know it would not exist without fungi.” Mueller called fungi “nature’s recyclers” at the launch of the first global conservation strategy for fungal conservation on Oct. 21 at the United Nations biodiversity conference (COP17) in Armenia. Many fungi also form symbiotic relationships with plants, helping shuttle nutrients and water between them; they can sock away carbon in soil and help provide food for animals and people. Historically, international negotiations to stem the global loss of species haven’t fully considered fungi. Now, a team of fungi conservationists from 30 countries led by Mueller has set out to integrate fungal conservation into the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a central part of negotiations at COP17. To date, mycologists — scientists who study fungi — have little data on the conservation status for most species known to science. “When we talk about … halting extinction risk, how can we talk about it [while] ignoring a whole kingdom of life?” Cátia Canteiro, a conservationist with U.K.-based NGO Plantlife International who co-led the strategy, said during the launch. The guidelines aim to spur new research and the protection of rare species,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The Bezos Earth Fund and eight other organizations have pledged more than $500 million over five years to help rescue some of the world’s most threatened plants and animals, giving species recovery greater attention in global conservation funding. The Species Recovery Alliance, announced Oct. 16 at the United Nations biodiversity summit, or COP17, in Yerevan, Armenia, will coordinate funding and conservation efforts rather than establish a single pooled fund. Cristián Samper, managing director and leader of nature solutions at the Bezos Earth Fund, said the initiative grew out of concerns that efforts to expand protected areas were overshadowing the urgent needs of threatened species. “We’re forgetting some of the other targets, in particular, the Target 4 on recovery of endangered species,” he told Mongabay in an interview at COP17. Target 4 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for urgent action to halt human-induced extinctions and help threatened species recover. Yet biodiversity continues to decline. WWF’s 2026 “Living Planet Report” found that populations of monitored vertebrate wildlife declined by an average of 73% between 1970 and 2022. Africa recorded an 80% decline. A new U.N. assessment also found that fewer than half of assessed biodiversity targets are on track. “Setting up protected areas and dealing with the other issues is not enough,” Samper said. Many threatened species, he added, require targeted interventions to recover. The Species Recovery Alliance includes Re:wild, Rainforest Trust, Fondation Segré, and five other organizations alongside the Bezos Earth Fund. Its members will coordinate investments and support…This article was originally published on Mongabay

A 1,000-year ecological reconstruction reveals that Australia’s ongoing wildfire crisis stems from the colonial disruption of Indigenous fire management rather than climate change alone, according to a study published in Nature. For more than 800 years prior to British colonization in 1788, the Indigenous Gunaikurnai people maintained stable, open eucalypt woodlands across southeastern Australia using frequent, low-temperature “cool” burning, the study says. Researchers analyzed sediment cores from Purghagoolah (also known as Lake Elusive) in the East Gippsland region of southeastern Australia and found tree cover averaged roughly 10% under Indigenous stewardship. High-temperature crown fires and severe soil erosion were virtually nonexistent, according to the researchers. However, that long-term stability collapsed after colonization in the 1840s forcibly severed Indigenous care for Country, the Indigenous concept of a holistic, living entity encompassing the physical land, waters, skies, and all living things. Without cultural burning, woody fuels accumulated and eucalypt tree cover — oily and highly flammable — roughly quadrupled to 34% by the 1970s. Once-open woodlands thus became dense, flammable forests, the study says. Evidence of more intense burning emerged alongside this transition, in the form of high-temperature charcoal, whose abundance doubled or even tripled. Its presence indicates a shift to canopy-consuming crown fires that also destroyed ground vegetation and exposed the topsoil to erosion. Crucially, these changes occurred long before modern human-caused climate warming began, suggesting that the buildup of woody fuels under colonial forestry practices had already rendered the region more prone to severe fires, according to the study. “The…This article was originally published on Mongabay