• A new study finds that a coral-associated damselfish may help hasten the healing of wounded corals.

• The research showed a 55% faster recovery rate from larger coral wounds in the presence of damselfish, and a 38% faster rate of healing for smaller wounds.

• Algae living within wounded corals exhibited decreased photosynthetic efficiency, an energy source vital to coral healing, when damselfish were absent.

• Scientists say the findings could inform conservation management plans, focusing more attention on preserving fish habitats to better protect corals.

• This article was originally written by Shradha Triveni appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

Corals share a close bond with the fish dwelling among them and the algae living within them. According to a new study, that relationship could be even stronger than previously known, with fish aiding coral tissue repair and damage recovery, particularly in higher-stress environments.

The study, published on July 8 in Biology Letters, concluded that the yellowtail dascyllus (Dascyllus flavicaudus), a type of damselfish, helps heal injuries on Pocillopora spp., a genus of stony coral largely found in the Indo-Pacific Ocean.

“Surprisingly, we found that the bigger the wound, the faster the recovery,” said Hayden Vega, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the U.S.

Previous research has shown that coral-dwelling fish aid in the cleaning of coral wounds and help corals tolerate warming oceans. But the new evidence of wound healing via tissue repair suggests that interactions between these organisms could be more beneficial than previously thought, especially under stressful conditions.

“These positive interactions between species under stress end up creating a network of resilience in ecosystems,” Vega told Mongabay during a Zoom call. Vega thinks this sort of supportive relationship could extend beyond yellowtail dascyllus and coral. He hopes the findings will prompt researchers to look more deeply at mutualistic benefits shared between other marine species, particularly in warming oceans, with research results then applied to conservation management plans.

This is not the first time researchers have found that the damselfish provides benefits to its coral host. A 2022 study concluded that damselfish help corals withstand heat stress when water temperatures are elevated. The new study adds another dimension to this relationship: The fish may also help coral recover after they are physically injured through predation, pollution, coastal development, tourism activities and damage caused by the movement of fishing boats.

Andrew Shantz, a marine ecologist and senior research scientist at the University of Hawai’i in the U.S., who was not involved in the recently published study, told Mongabay over Zoom that the wound healing findings may be broadly applicable to damselfishes living among corals across different regions, including the tropical Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Great Barrier Reef. He suggested that other fish that live in or around corals may provide similar benefits.

Producing healthy coral tissue

To better understand the role of damselfish in coral healing, Vega’s team collected 72 corals of identical size from Mo’orea, French Polynesia, and divided them into small, large and “no wound” categories. One subset of each group was then observed under controlled laboratory conditions with fish, and a second without fish. The researchers photographed the wounded corals daily and measured how much tissue had regenerated over 21 days.

The corals with small wounds healed 38% faster in the presence of fish than those without fish. Among the corals with larger wounds, healing was 55% faster with the fish than without.

The researchers also examined how the presence of damselfish affected the algae that inhabit corals’ thin-layered tissues. These algae use photosynthesis to convert sunlight into energy vital for coral tissue repair.

The scientists wanted to know how efficiently the algae used light for photosynthesis. Higher photosynthetic efficiency means the algae are directing more of the available light into photosynthesis, helping them produce more energy for the coral, while reducing the risk of corals suffering light-related damage, according to Vega.

In the presence of damselfish, photosynthetic efficiency remained unchanged across wound size; but in the absence of the fish, photosynthetic efficiency declined as wound size increased, the study found.

Tracing the ‘how’

While the researchers found that photosynthetic efficiency and coral healing improved in the presence of damselfish, they don’t yet understand the precise role the fish played.

Vega told Mongabay that he identified three possibilities: Damselfish feces may supply nitrogen and phosphorus that act as fertilizer for coral’s symbiotic algae; fish movement could be increasing water flow around corals, improving the uptake of nutrients and oxygen; and fish may be contributing directly to wound cleaning.

Shantz added that the reason larger wounds appear to heal more quickly than smaller ones may simply be a matter of geometry: The thin layer of tissue with a larger perimeter appears to fill in more quickly than the smaller wound.

The next step, he said, would be to investigate precisely how fish promote wound healing. To better understand that mechanism, researchers could use isotope-based chemical tracers to determine whether nutrient-rich fish waste ends up in new coral tissue or its symbiotic algae, he suggested. Other tests could be devised to see if the effect is driven by nutrient supply, better water flow, wound cleaning or some other phenomenon.

Damselfish, like corals, face serious risk

With threats to corals escalating, Shantz said the current study’s findings may apply to conservation and marine protected area management across the tropics. “Conservation plans could potentially be [designed] around preserving the habitat of these fish, as much as it is about corals,” he said.

But damselfish themselves face rising threats. Their bright, vivid colors and small size make them attractive for ornamental purposes, with damselfish counting among the more than 1,800 species and 20-30 million tropical marine fish collected annually for aquariums.

Anikuttan KK, a senior scientist who heads a damselfish hatchery at the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute based in India, told Mongabay by phone that nearly 90% of damselfish used for ornamental purposes globally are wild-caught, captured from their natural habitats. He noted that breeding them in laboratory conditions for the aquarium industry could help prevent damage to corals and other marine organisms, and protect broader ecosystems.

“Often, destructive methods like dynamite and poisoning are used to catch damselfish despite a ban on employing these methods,” he said. He added that the new study’s findings may offer justification for better enforcement of damselfish protections.

Idrees Babu, a marine biologist who investigates coral reef health and conservation for India’s Department of Science and Technology, told Mongabay that stressors, such as rising ocean temperatures and ocean acidification, can reduce coral health and make them more vulnerable to disease.

“When corals are injured their wounds can be taken over by [foreign] algae or pathogens, which can make recovery more difficult,” Babu said. A coral that closes a wound faster may spend less time exposed to other threats in natural settings, suggesting that speed of tissue repair is important for overall coral health, he added.

According to Babu, the new study adds an extra dimension to researchers’ understanding of the ways coral-associated fish influence the health of their hosts. He said he hopes this study will lead scientists to further examine multiple coral stressors, including warming, injury, sedimentation and predation.

• In Ecuador’s Intag Valley, 19 families are developing a 300-kilowatt hydropower project that can provide an alternative source of income to the large-scale extractive and productive industries that are common in the Imbabura province.

• The communities own 90% of the HidroAguagrún project and half of its net electricity revenue will go directly into a trust for conservation activities once the plant is fully operational.

• The project offers a potential model for community-owned renewable energy, but replicability depends on community willingness and cohesion, water availability and funding.

• This article was originally written by Aimee Gabay appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

In Ecuador’s Intag Valley, one of the major watersheds that supply the country’s Imbabura province in the north, 19 families from four communities are developing a 300-kilowatt (kW) run-of-river hydropower plant — a project that generates electricity by capturing the Aguagrún River’s natural flows without the construction of a large dam or water storage reservoir. Engineers say this makes them less environmentally impactful.

The families, which are from the communities of Cerro Pelado, Chinipamba, Nangulvi Bajo and Barcelona, own 90% of the HidroAguagrún project. Registered as a business since 2022, half of the revenue raised from selling electricity to the national grid will go directly into a trust for conservation activities, such as the protection of cloud forests.

The idea to create a small hydropower plant came from a general concern among the families about water availability in the region and the impact of the climate crisis, said Jorge Guachagmira, the president of the Río Aguagrún Renewable Energy Production Association, which represents the 19 families of the micro-basin and surrounding areas.

“We live in a remnant of the natural world, and our daily activities are affected by the expansion of the exploitation frontier, such as agriculture, livestock farming, logging or deforestation of natural ecosystems,” he told Mongabay in a video call. “By expanding the agricultural frontier, we are generating greater water insecurity, water instability and climate instability.”

Ecuador, which depends on hydroelectric power generation for 78% of its electricity, has faced a severe energy crisis in recent decades, driven by successive droughts. In 2024, this led to daily blackouts lasting up to 14 hours and affected essential services, public health and social wellbeing.

The Intag Valley’s cloud forests and its numerous rivers and streams are part of one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, the Ecuadorian Chocó bioregion, which covers more than 200,000 hectares (494,211 acres). Local communities have long raised concerns about large-scale mining projects in the region, and the deforestation, water contamination and biodiversity loss caused by these industries.

HidroAguagrún is projected to make $120,000 a year from the electricity sold to the general national energy grid and it expects operations and maintenance to cost $40,000 a year.

According to a document provided by corporate responsibility nonprofit Fundación Futuro, the project has so far increased income and improved skills across 17 rural businesses, and 28 leaders and youth have been trained in bringing sustainable energy to their communities. It has also created 11 permanent jobs in operations, monitoring and ecotourism, and 345 people will benefit from the profits received over the 30 years of the plant’s life.

‘Locals are the owners’

From day one, the families insisted that ownership of the project would forever remain in the hands of local families. “The owners won’t be conventional corporations,” said Guachagmira. “We want the owners to be the people who live in the area.”

Companies are usually disconnected from the environmental impacts of large-scale river infrastructure projects, often not knowing where the water even originates, he said. But when local communities hold a majority stake, there is a greater awareness within the company about the need to protect and monitor the water and communities can directly benefit.

Once the project gained momentum, residents formed mingas, a traditional system of collective, voluntary labor, to build the infrastructure. Technical and financial support came from nonprofit the Corporación Toisán and Fundación Futuro, which each hold a 5% stake in HidroAguagrún and provided more than half of the funding. Local builders, transporters, mechanics and monitors were the first choices for construction.

“The minga requires willingness, camaraderie, friendship, commitment and everyone looking toward the same goal,” Guachagmira explained. “When you’re in the minga, it’s also a space for integration, socialization and the exchange of experiences and ideas.”

Decisions about the project were voted on in community assemblies or general meetings. The project is near completion, constructed largely by local residents with technical support from specialists.

“This is essential for its success,” said Denis Laporta, representative for alternative energies at Corporación Toisán, in a video call. “It’s not a solution conceived from behind a desk, but rather one that combines elements to allow for direct construction management. This is a significant advantage because it allows for the integration of local people, small businesses, service providers, food vendors and accommodation providers, creating a local economic ecosystem.”

Laporta outlined the project’s three phases to Mongabay. The first phase, now complete, involved the building of an intake system to divert the water needed to power the turbine. Unlike a conventional, large-scale hydroelectric plant, this run-of-river design does not require the construction of a dam.

The second phase, which is also complete, involves building a pipe that channels the water toward the powerhouse where the electricity is generated. To minimize landscape and environmental degradation, the community decided to build an 800-meter (2,625-foot) underground pipe, Laporta said.

The project has now entered its third and final phase, which is hydrostatic testing to check the water system. In an interview with Mongabay in early August, Laporta said the 60-square-meter (646-square-foot) powerhouse was 30% complete. The facility will house the plant’s essential equipment, including the pump, motor, valves and dismantling gaskets.

Laporta said the families hope to complete the structure by the end of 2026.

Once complete, to be able to eventually sell energy to the national grid, the plant needs to first be integrated into the local grid. The area currently relies on single-phase electrical power, typically used for residential purposes, which cannot support the plant’s output. Laporta said that HidroAguagrún is currently negotiating an agreement with the regional electricity company to co-finance the necessary upgrade.

How to replicate

Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution and 2015 Organic Law of the Public Electricity Service (LOSPEE) opened the door for the Popular and Solidarity Economy (EPS) to participate in the country’s energy sector. The Constitution, for example, establishes that while the state is responsible for strategic sectors like electricity, it can also delegate these activities to private economies and community and solidarity economy enterprises, which has worked in HidroAguagrún’s favor.

In addition, Ecuador has recently updated its regulatory framework to promote distributed electricity generation — a decentralized approach that shifts focus away from massive, cross-country transmission lines and redirects it toward regional resilience. This was in response to the country’s energy crises and severe droughts that have affected its centralized hydroelectric plants.

“Those two factors make HidroAguagrún and other HidroAguagrún-related projects interesting for the regional electric company,” said Laporta. “It helps them reduce their dependence on energy that they sometimes have to buy from abroad.”

Carolina Proaño, the executive director of Fundación Futuro, told Mongabay via WhatsApp that the organization has identified five additional sites in Intag where the project can be replicated, each capable of producing 300 kW to 1 megawatt (MW) of electricity. It is also developing financing models to accompany each new community.

“We are currently working on the second one,” Proaño said. “These are communities that have already organized themselves, and their challenge is generally access to economic capital. Technical and organizational assistance is required, but the most complex aspects have already been achieved through the self-management of the inhabitants.”

Laporta told Mongabay that there are several conditions that need to be met to make a project of this kind possible. This involves community willingness and cohesion, water availability, strong alliances, access to capital, and technical capacity that thinks beyond profits and instead prioritizes limiting environmental harm.

When selecting a site, he said he recommends prioritizing a location where a small plant can be integrated seamlessly into the natural landscape, without draining local water sources. He also emphasized the need to protect vulnerable aquatic ecosystems from collapsing, especially during the drier summer months.

Laporta said it’s crucial to avoid the idea that because something is technically possible, it should be done. It might be so, he said, but at what social and environmental cost?

Banner image: The Río Aguagrún Families Association, together with the technical team of the Toisán Corporation and the Futuro Foundation, during a day of construction of the hydroelectric plant in the Aguagrún river basin. Image courtesy of Fundación Futuro.

• There are more than 1,300 documented cases since 2000 of live coral smuggling, with many cases sourcing coral from Southeast Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia, according to data from the wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC.

• The cases involve at least 43 countries around the world, with the U.S. by far the biggest importer of corals.

• The cases include 3.15 million pieces of coral, with many shipments intentionally mislabeled as toys, clothes, or food to get endangered species past customs inspectors.

• Experts say there are solutions, including farm-raised coral substitutes and dyeing farmed coral to document that it was not grown in the wild, making it easier for authorities to spot illegally harvested varieties.

• This article was originally written by Cherry Salazar appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

ArtReef Rocks was an up-and-coming online shop offering aquarium accessories that made waves during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering hobbyists custom reefs and sculpted landscapes for their fish tanks. Aquarists raved about excellent packaging (“Not a single broken piece!”), quick turnarounds (“Arrived in only 4 days.”), and client support (“Customer service is amazing.”) — compliments that mean a lot for an online store that operates in the Philippines, more than 10,000 miles from its U.S. clients.

The company gained a solid following about six years ago within a few years and exhibited in 2023 at some of the world’s biggest saltwater aquarium trade shows: the Reefapalooza in New York and Orlando, both in the U.S. Officially registered with the Philippines’ Department of Trade and Industry as Pandorocks Artreef Artificial Reef’s Rocks Aquarium and Accessories Trading, ArtReef had distributors in the U.S., parts of Europe, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and other countries.

Back home, its late founder and owner, Glenn Albert Binoya, is credited by the local reefing community as the “inventor” of unique aquarium landscaping described as “artificial live rocks” — substrates made of the mineral aragonite and crushed reef rocks.

But court records in the U.S. show another side to Binoya’s business.

In 2022, 10 U.S. nationals were indicted by authorities in the state of Alaska for trafficking corals in violation of the Lacey Act that regulates wildlife trade. They were accused of illegally selling coral and unlawfully conspiring to smuggle wildlife. Each of the accused men operated their own businesses selling corals in different states. And each sourced corals from the Philippines through Binoya, who in text messages wrote about how he could get corals past customs officials.

The smuggling case is far from an isolated incident. Between 2000 and 2025, more than 1,300 incidents of coral trafficking were reported across 43 countries, according to a Mongabay analysis of data shared exclusively by TRAFFIC, a U.K.-based NGO that works to prevent wildlife smuggling. The data is based on law enforcement records, news reports, and social media posts compiled and independently verified by TRAFFIC.

In China in early 2025, port authorities seized at least 160 live, endangered stony coral that were found in plastic bags taped to the waist, abdomen, chest, and posterior of four inbound passengers. A month earlier, Chinese authorities discovered and seized 30 pieces of coral, weighing 3.2 kilograms (7.1 pounds) and valued at $30,000.

In August 2025, more than 1,500 live corals, as well as hundreds of live tortoises from the U.S. and the Philippines, were seized in Hong Kong. Authorities estimated a market value of HK$4.31 million (roughly $550,000). The parcels were declared on customs forms as clothes, toys and food. Five people who collected or assisted in collecting the packages were arrested and later released on bail.

In Malaysia, suspected illegal fishers were found with three boxes containing various types of corals with an estimated value of 13,000 ringgit (around $3,200). In the Philippines, a four-vehicle transport of smuggled goods, which included 250 sacks of white sand and broken corals, was stopped at a routine checkpoint.

These are just the cases where authorities stopped shipments. Experts say it’s difficult to assess the full extent of coral smuggling, which is exacerbating persisting threats to the world’s reefs, as many other cases remain unreported. But while strict regulations under international and national laws allow for the legal trade of corals, the appeal of rare species in the aquaria, jewelry, and curio markets continue to drive and incentivize trafficking.

Between 2015 and 2018, Binoya made at least 30 shipments to the 10 U.S. nationals later indicted in Alaska, illegally exporting a total of 3,000 pieces of coral to the U.S. Coral fragments were offered for sale to hobbyists for saltwater aquariums in their homes.

Following a coordinated investigation with Philippine authorities and the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Binoya was arrested in August 2018 at his home in Bacoor in Cavite province, 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Manila, the Philippine capital. More than 1,700 live hard and soft corals, 15 kg (33 lb) of dead branching corals, and three giant clams — with an estimated total commercial value of 2.7 million pesos (roughly $51,000 at the exchange rate at the time) — were confiscated from his home.

According to the Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), Binoya was indicted for violations of the Philippine Fisheries Code, which prohibits gathering, possessing, transporting, selling, or exporting raw or processed corals, except for scientific or research purposes. He was later released on bail.

Binoya died of unrelated medical issues in 2023 while the case was ongoing. In the Philippines, criminal liability ends with the death of the accused. Had Binoya been convicted, he could have faced imprisonment of between 10 and 20 years and may have been required to pay the cost of reef restoration as well as double the amount of the administrative fine — equivalent to eight times the value of the corals or up to 10 million pesos (roughly $180,000 at the exchange rate in 2023), whichever is higher.

“The Binoya coral trafficking case underscores the urgent need to protect the Philippines’marine ecosystems,” the NBI Environmental Crime Division told Mongabay. “Only a fraction of Philippine reefs remain in excellent condition, making every trafficking incident a serious blow to conservation.”

Months after Binoya’s passing, his successor in the business had asked members of their online community not to post about “prohibited” corals.

“Bawal po mag post sa group nato ng mga pinagbabawal na coral reefs, dami po kc nag ppm sakin na bibili daw akala ako un nagbebenta eh hindi naman ako yun at alam kong bawal talaga yun,” the post read in Tagalog. “Konting respeto naman sa naiwang ala-ala ni Glenn Albert. Nandito ako para ituloy ang mga nasimulan at pinaghirapan niya.”

That translates into English as: “It is prohibited to post about protected coral reefs in this group. Many people have been sending me private messages asking to buy corals, assuming I sell them. But I don’t because I know that’s illegal. Please respect the memories of Glenn Albert. I’m here to continue what he started and worked hard for.”

ArtReef did not respond to requests for comment.

Corals already face environmental challenges from a range of factors, including warming waters, overtourism, ocean acidification that causes bleaching, and harmful fishing practices. Coral trafficking is just one contributing factor.

A scientific study published in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management in May found that the coral trade can hit certain sought-after types of coral hard, threatening biodiversity. It’s not known how much damage is caused by coral trafficking, according to the study’s author, Bert Hoeksema, a professor of marine evolution and biology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

The study listed Indonesia, Fiji, and Australia as leading exporters, and noted the trade has been valued in earlier years at hundreds of millions of dollars, though more recent figures are unavailable. The U.S. consistently topped import records.

The environmental damage from losing coral extends beyond the reef. Marine ecosystems can collapse as fish and other species lose their habitat. Reefs act as natural barriers protecting shorelines from storms and erosion. In some areas, fishing may also be an important aspect of cultural heritage. Coastal communities that rely on the seas for tourism, fishing, and sustenance can face economic loss.

A murky trade

Even as governments crack down on illegal imports, experts point to the murky nature of the coral trade. Harvesters, usually local fishermen, often don’t know they’re collecting corals illegally, according to interviews with locals and researchers in Indonesia, the Philippines, and parts of Europe. Buyers, they said, may also be unaware whether their coral purchases were plundered from the seas.

The European Union and 184 countries have agreed on rules to protect wildlife from unsustainable commerce under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Stony corals, known scientifically as Scleractinia, are classified under CITES Appendix II. These corals are popular among aquarists because of their vibrant colors, and they grow in branching and plating shapes that create a classic reef look. Species under Appendix II are those considered not currently at risk of extinction but need protection to ensure their survival in the wild. International trade for this coral type is allowed but requires a CITES permit.

A Mongabay analysis of CITES trade data showed that in 2024 and 2025 alone, 1.3 million live corals were exported worldwide. More than half a million were imported to the U.S., and a quarter of these were taken from the wild in Indonesia.

Indonesia and the Philippines are two of six countries straddling the Pacific Coral Triangle, a 5.4-million-square-kilometer (2.1-million-square-mile) stretch of the ocean that contains 75% of the world’s coral species. Comparable to the Amazon of the oceans, the Coral Triangle “supports the livelihoods of over 120 million people through fisheries and tourism, contributing an estimated $2.3 billion annually to local economies,” according to U.S.-based conservation NGO the Coral Reef Alliance.

But CITES trade data count only official records as reported by exporting and importing countries. Coral smuggling is much harder to gauge.

At least 3.15 million pieces of coral were poached and illegally transported for trade over the past 25 years, translating to a market value of at least $9.4 million, according to analysis of TRAFFIC data. Some were live. Some were dead, processed into jewelry, or dried and powdered for cosmetics or health supplements.

The figures underestimate the full extent of smuggling. Several experts said there’s no doubt that many cases of trafficking go unreported.

“It’s actually very hard to estimate the actual amount of coral that you take out of the reef,” said Christian Voolstra, president of the International Coral Reef Society (ICRS).

Most incidents of coral trafficking that are uncovered come from seizures by customs officials following routine inspections at airports, including when luggage gets X-rayed to check for their contents. Poached corals have been discovered in personal baggage, postal packages, freight parcels, and on the person, according to the data.

TRAFFIC’s data, built upon published information, also tends to get skewed toward a country, year, or species for which there may be available information. For instance, Poland, through its Ministry of Finance, reported 264 incidents of coral trafficking in 2009 and 2010, driving up the total number of incidents in those years. But a deeper look into each of these recorded incidents shows a median weight of only 0.6 kg (1.3 lb), suggesting that officials found small amounts of coral in the luggage of tourists returning home from vacation. The majority of incidents in TRAFFIC’s database also don’t document the value or the weight of corals.

“It’s easy for tourist souvenirs to increase the number of recorded seizures, so you might see an incident involving one conch shell or one item of coral,” said Antony Bagott, senior manager of TRAFFIC’s wildlife trade data.

“Although that’s still trade,” Bagott said, “it’s often incidental rather than part of larger-scale commercial activity, so it’s not necessarily where most of the volume lies.”

More recently, in January, Polish customs officers seized nearly 5 kg (11 lb) of protected coral fragments that were found inside the luggage of a tourist. According to local news reports, the traveler had collected the 360 pieces of coral on a beach in the Seychelles as souvenirs.

More than 40% of coral species currently face the threat of extinction, according to an audit by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a global environmental network that tracks and classifies species by extinction risk.

But the study, published in 2024, accounted only for corals in the West Atlantic and the Caribbean. Including coral species in the Indo-Pacific region, “the number actually hits pretty much 50%,” said one of the researchers, Michael Sweet, a professor in molecular ecology at the University of Derby in the U.K.

To be sure, global warming, overtourism, acidification, and harmful fishing practices are key factors along with harvesting and trafficking.

“This is nothing new,” Sweet said. “Scientists have certainly been shouting about it from the rooftops. But sadly, we seem to be, as a human race, sort of inept at actually making big changes.”

In some places, like the U.S. state of Florida, two major Acropora species — a kind of branching small polyp stony coral hailed by some as the “crown jewels” of reef aquariums — are now functionally extinct. This means the population of the species has become so small and dispersed that it can no longer perform its ecological functions of providing habitat for marine life and helping protect coastlines.

Such a loss is “relatively easy to record and see in an area with few species of coral,” Sweet said. “But in the Indo-Pacific, where the diversity is still quite high, we may be actually missing local extinctions.”

Scientific research tends to focus on metrics like coral cover, he added, obscuring losses in biodiversity.

Collecting corals

A study published in 2020 by the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice detailed how coral harvesting happens in Fiji and Indonesia, two of the world’s largest exporters.

In Fiji, harvesting is legal and community-based, regulated by village chiefs who decide the qoliqoli, or marine zones; who can harvest; and how much coral can be collected. Harvesters work in four-person teams: two members cull corals, one moves between them with a net to collect the harvest, and another stays on the boat to pack the corals as they’re brought up, according to the study.

In Indonesia, where harvesting is also legal, coral harvesting is more family-based, with three teams going to a harvest site at once.

Corals sought after by aquarists are usually found in shallower waters. Harvesters slice fragments with knives and saws, or chip away pieces with chisels, screwdrivers, iron bars, or bolt cutters. Red and black corals, which are more popular in the jewelry and curio markets, are mined and dredged from the deep sea.

It can be difficult for many people to see corals as wildlife because they don’t behave the way animals are expected to behave, said Miguel Azcuna, assistant professor at Batangas State University in the Philippines. Corals have plant-like appearances and rocky structures, he added, and they don’t show obvious movement or facial expressions that people typically associate with sentient beings.

But when you break a coral apart, “it suffers from an open wound,” said Azcuna, who is also a marine scientist at the Verde Island Passage (VIP) Center for Oceanographic Research and Aquatic Life Sciences. The VIP, a part of the Coral Triangle, is known to be the world’s “center of center” of marine shorefish biodiversity. Batangas, a province straddling the VIP, is popular for its diving spots.

Among harvested coral pieces, those considered desirable are placed in plastic bags filled with seawater and tied off with rubber bands, then stacked in buckets or Styrofoam boxes. On average, 50 pieces are collected per person per trip, and an average person makes 67 trips per year, the study found.

For those selling coral, time is of the essence. Corals can survive air exposure for only up to 15 minutes, depending on the type. Some corals can be transported out of the water for 24 to 36 hours if they’re covered with wet towels, Azcuna said.

Because corals die quickly when there are sudden, drastic changes in their environment, harvested pieces for trade are usually shipped by air cargo. In a study published in 2020 in Ocean & Coastal Management, researchers found that 90% of corals imported to the U.S. came through five gateways: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Dallas, and New York.

In May last year, about 200 corals were smuggled from Indonesia and confiscated at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The shipment included Scleractinia stony corals belonging to the genera Goniopora, Acropora, Lobophyllia, Alveopora, and Euphyllia. The corals were reportedly in transit for five days but are now being rehabilitated at the New York Aquarium.

This case is one of the more recent, large-scale seizures of trafficked corals.

Exporters may skirt oversight by filing permits that declare the correct quantity but then intentionally misidentify the corals in the shipment, said the International Coral Reef Society’s Voolstra, who’s also a professor of genetics of adaptation in aquatic systems at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

“The person at the airport has zero clue about coral taxonomy,” he said. “You put a name down [on the permit], he opens the box, it’s a coral. It’s ticked off. There are plenty of opportunities to import anything.”

But the difficulty of identifying coral species also extends to scientists. Even experts and researchers themselves get confused correctly naming corals based on hierarchical and shared characteristics. Voolstra bluntly termed the problem “pretty much a shitshow called taxonomy.”

Corals can be difficult to classify due to changes in appearance — also known as morphological plasticity — driven by environmental factors such as depth, amount of sunlight, or exposure to waves, Voolstra said.

Another way to sidestep regulations is to mislabel shipments. In the Alaska case, shipments from the Philippines were declared as plastic items and children’s toys with declared values ranging from $1 to $35, court records showed.

A single coral fragment can sell for anywhere from $30 to more than $500, depending on its rarity, according to price lists in online shops and forums. So-called “beginner corals” like Zoanthids, a type of soft coral, are often less expensive because they tend to be more tolerant to changes in water chemistry and easier to maintain.

Rarer species command higher prices. Some corals generally referred to as “mushrooms” — because of their circular, disk-like shape that resembles a mushroom cap — sell for thousands of dollars. One of the most expensive fetched up to $10,000: dubbed a Purple Monster Jawbreaker, from the genus Discosoma. These coral types are highly prized among aquarium hobbyists because of their unique, evolving color patterns, particularly those with rare purple color morphs.

An Acropora colloquially called Fairy Food has even been listed for sale for $1 million in an online shop owned by Adam Derickson, a hobbyist based in the U.S. state of Wisconsin who turned his stony coral collection into commerce. Derickson’s listing, though, is taken within the aquarists’ community as a joke.

Because mortality in aquariums is high, a serious aquarist would not buy only one fragment. “You don’t start an aquarium if you cannot afford it,” Voolstra said.

The challenge of growing and keeping coral fragments alive is also part of the appeal, he said, sharing stories about his aquarium hobbyist friends. “These people are interested because they want to have an aquarium on display that nobody else can basically keep alive.”

‘Low risk’

Wildlife trafficking can start as easily as a Facebook message, with retailers first reaching out to middlemen who are local to communities where coral is harvested. This, according to court records, was how Binoya, from ArtReef Rocks, got involved in smuggling corals to the U.S.

The 2022 Alaska case shined a rare spotlight on the little-noticed coral business. And this underreported environmental crime is not done in isolation.

Jerome Anthony Stringfield, who operated Florida’s Finest Reef, an online business, was indicted in the federal case in Alaska in 2022 for felony violations of conspiracy, violations of the Lacey Act, and smuggling of corals.

Stringfield received 490 coral fragments over five shipments from Binoya in the Philippines between July 2017 to August 2018, court records showed.

An excerpt from Stringfield and Binoya’s exchanges on Facebook Messenger, dated Aug. 8, 2017, indicated an agreement to “sneak in” some “chalices” (from the genera Echinophyllia and Echinopora) and “acans” (genus Acanthastrea) in the box with “zoas” (Zoanthids). Chalices, large polyp stony corals, and acans, commonly known as Starry Cup, both require CITES permits. Zoas aren’t CITES Appendix II-listed, so that trade doesn’t require documentation.

While a legal approach to coral trade exists through CITES, some buyers may be looking for specific types of corals that can be found in countries with strict prohibitions, creating a demand in the black market. Suppliers tend to be more open to taking risks, as penalties and convictions are uncommon.

“The reward far outweighs the risk because you can make a significant amount of money from this trade, unfortunately,” said Sweet, the University of Derby professor. “Obviously that doesn’t mean it’s right.”

In another Facebook Messenger exchange, dated Sept. 13, 2017, Stringfield told Binoya he could “quadruple the money” on chalice fragments and sell each for “at least $350-450.”

Stringfield, a resident of Kissimmee, Florida, faced 14 felony charges. He entered into a plea agreement, and 13 of his charges were dismissed.

For the federal crime of conspiring to smuggle protected wildlife, Stringfield was sentenced to two years of probation, a $4,000 fine, and a $100 fee. In total, his penalty amounted to roughly the value of selling only 12 chalice fragments at his minimum expected selling price of $350 each.

Allen William Ockey, a resident of Long Beach, California, procured 300 coral fragments from the Philippines through Binoya, spread out in five boxes over less than a year, according to court records. He had paid approximately $4,000 for the purchase and shipments. Most of the corals died en route or shortly after their travel.

Ockey ran two businesses: West Coast Frags, and Legit Fish Aquarium Service. He was charged with 13 felony violations.

Like Stringfield, Ockey entered into a plea deal. He was sentenced to two years of probation, faced a $100 penalty, and was required to donate $5,000 to a coral conservation project in the Philippines.

Other business owners involved in the Alaska case had similar resolutions: a plea deal for one count of conspiracy, the rest of the charges dismissed, up to two years of probation, a fee of either $25 or $100, and a fine of a few thousand dollars.

Most of the more than 1,300 incidents recorded in TRAFFIC’s database had no information on the number of people arrested, charged, fined, or imprisoned. Of those that did include such details, 108 cases involved people being charged and 22 had offenders imprisoned over the past 25 years.

One of these involved the illegal harvest of 31 Anthozoa corals — listed under CITES Appendix I, the highest level of international limits on commercial trade for species threatened with extinction — in the city of Danzhou, China. The offender used steel crowbars and was filmed poaching corals in March 2025. The video was uploaded to the internet. He confessed to the crime and pleaded guilty. The corals were estimated to be worth 201,453 yuan (roughly $30,000).

In another case, after a routine inspection at an airport in Inner Mongolia, China, in July 2023, authorities found a package containing 329 pieces of red coral from the family Coralliidae, valued at 160,000 yuan (roughly $23,000).

The red coral was being shipped to a jewelry store owner, who reportedly confessed and was imprisoned. The case is under further investigation.

Much rarer are cases where importers and retailers were held to account. In 2022, two Los Angeles-based companies, Renaissance Aquatics and Lim Aqua-Nautic Specialist, each pleaded guilty to two felony counts of unlawfully importing live coral.

‘No stopping demand’ — but some solutions

Even if a ban on the coral trade were to be implemented, scientists and advocates said hobbyists would still find a way to purchase them. But they shared some optimism that mariculture, or farm-raising corals in saltwater, could curb poaching by using fragments of a “parent” coral to grow new colonies, or “babies,” in open-ocean nurseries.

The approach, in theory, is considered a more sustainable way of meeting coral demand. The coral would be raised on ropes or racks in ocean water. But in practice, many projects seem to be falling short.

In Bali, Indonesia, some dive shops have started their own nurseries to position themselves as sustainable businesses. This is different than coral restoration. Instead, this is more like a farm, where corals are grown to be sold. But these nurseries don’t always work because they’re built “in an area where corals will never grow,” said Claudia Koch, founder of We Do Ocean, a Bali-based marine conservation and dive center.

“You have to do a site assessment first,” Koch said, citing factors such as water flow and quality, thermal history, substrate, and sedimentation. “Some put in another four nurseries and attached corals too tiny that I don’t think they’re going to make it.”

Several sources said coral farms could create an appearance of compliance during government inspections when, in reality, corals continue to be harvested illegally from the wild.

Monitoring is further complicated by the fact that there’s no visual way to identify if a coral was legally farmed or illegally harvested. A coral glued to a small base would look identical to a coral that grew in it. To address this, Sweet suggested a “coral passport, so you can showcase the ‘baby’ growing up.”

“It gives the government officials a level of confidence to really showcase that those corals are truly cultured,” he said.

Sweet also proposed staining farm-raised coral to track growth: “If you sacrificed a little bit of that coral, you should be able to see the stain quite deep down into the skeleton.”

That’s harder to fake in coral caught in the wild. A wild-caught coral that is later stained would show the blemish only in its shallow skeleton or tissue.

But staining farm-raised coral is an expense and requires expertise. “Nobody is doing that because obviously it would be a bit of an extra cost and a little bit of extra knowledge and skill needed to enforce that and push that through,” Sweet said.

Other scientists propose a DNA test to help identify whether a coral belongs to a taxon subject to international trade regulations.

Sweet’s team at the University of Derby’s Nature-based Solutions Research Centre is also developing ex-situ coral farming, or away from the ocean. They’re not alone in exploring this alternative. Ex-situ systems would allow corals to grow in land-based tanks that provide a stable and controlled environment. Sweet’s group has already set up two farms in Indonesia — on the islands of Java and Bali, both major diving destinations. “Our job is now to showcase that you can still generate money,” he said.

The coral trade can be likened to diamond mining, where those who extract the resource see little monetary benefit. Voolstra, who has worked with a few Indonesian groups as part of his research, said harvesters “would happily switch” to alternative livelihoods if there were other options.

The underlying issue, experts said, were strict policies but weak enforcement.

“That opens up the way for economic incentives that entice you to just take the risk,” Voolstra said.

Ultimately, Sweet said, there needs to be a shift in how corals are valued.

“You should really be looking after these animals as if you look after whatever your pet is in your country — a dog or a cat or a horse, whatever you value as a true companion animal,” he said. “Corals should be treated the same in my book.”

Banner image:The Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta has taken in more than 500 illegally trafficked coral species confiscated by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This confiscated Euphyllia sp. coral became part of the aquarium’s collection. Image courtesy of the Georgia Aquarium.

• Philip Fearnside has spent 50 years studying the practical limits of Amazon development, beginning with the agricultural settlements built along Brazil’s Trans-Amazonian Highway. His work repeatedly asked who benefits from projects and who bears their longer-term costs.

• He produced influential research on deforestation, forest carbon, tropical dams, and the wider effects of roads, often challenging official assumptions about emissions and economic viability. He later contributed to the IPCC’s work on climate change.

• Fearnside has paired research with public engagement, publishing in Portuguese, writing for Amazônia Real and Mongabay, speaking to journalists, and testifying on projects including the BR-319 highway. That role has also made him a target of hostility, including at a 2021 public hearing where his microphone was cut.

• Former students and colleagues credit him with generous, exacting mentorship and an unusual command of the scientific literature. At a recent tribute at Brazil’s National Institute for Amazonian Research, he rejected any suggestion of a farewell: he intends to keep working.

• This article was originally written by Rhett Ayers Butler appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

At a September 2021 public hearing in Manaus, Philip Fearnside read from a prepared statement laying out his case against repaving BR-319, the highway between Manaus and Porto Velho, two cities in the Amazon. He called the project economically unviable, argued Brazil’s licensing process was broken, and warned that road would trigger “catastrophic” deforestation.

People in the crowd started booing. Fearnside tried to keep speaking over the noise in his American-accented Portuguese, but someone killed his microphone.

He was followed by Sérgio Kruke from the Movimento Conservador Amazonas, a vocal ally of then-president Jair Bolsonaro. Kruke pointed at Fearnside and asked why an American had any business telling Brazilians what to do with their land, adding that they had the right to cut down every tree in the forest if they chose. The audience cheered him on. “This house is ours!” Kruke shouted.

The atmosphere was completely different earlier this month at the National Institute for Amazonian Research, or INPA. For two hours, researchers and former students held an event recognizing Fearnside’s 50 years of field research in the Amazon, work that made him one of the most recognized authorities on Earth’s largest rainforest.

Carlos Nobre spoke about meeting him at INPA in the 1970s, before his own climate career took off, and how they collaborated on pioneering measurements of forest-atmosphere gas exchange. Susanna Hecht recalled running into Fearnside at a Belém bar while hunting for a dissertation topic. He suggested Acre, which is where she ended up doing her work.

Ane Albernaz talked about the state of his office. When students arrived with questions, Fearnside would listen patiently, pivot to the “millions of files” stacked around him, open the right drawer, find the right folder and unearth a paper containing something useful, a gesture that was particularly valuable at a time when scientific literature was difficult to obtain in the Amazon. Albernaz is now a researcher at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, the oldest scientific research institution in the region.

Cadu Young, an economist, remembered leaving Fearnside’s office in 1995 with boxes of paper as a graduate student. Roberto Smeraldi, who spent a decade alongside him on the advisory body for the Pilot Program to Conserve the Brazilian Rain Forest, recalled Fernside regularly arriving with stacks of newly minted papers. Later he would distribute those papers via CDs and thumbdrives at conferences and other venues. Alongside figures like Tom Lovejoy, Bertha Becker, Paulo Nogueira-Neto, and Carlos Nobre, Fearnside’s peers took to placing bets over drinks on how many new papers he would bring to each meeting.

Fearnside’s journey

After earning a biology degree from Colorado College in 1969, Fearnside joined the Peace Corps and went to Rajasthan to work on food production and fisheries in local reservoirs. He then entered the University of Michigan to prepare doctoral work on human carrying capacity under traditional agriculture.

He intended to do his fieldwork in India, but the 1971 Bangladesh war intervened. After the U.S. backed Pakistan, India barred American researchers, forcing Fearnside to find a new field site.

He chose the Amazon.

In Pará, the military regime was running colonization projects along the new Trans-Amazonian Highway under a mandate to occupy and “develop” the interior. Fearnside spent two years living in the agrovilas around Altamira, planned settlements established by Brazil’s land-reform agency, INCRA. He studied the agricultural systems of the colonists and the limits of the land supporting them. By the time India reopened, he had decided to stay in Brazil.

The colonization work addressed the same question he had framed for India: how many people can an area support over time before the resource base breaks down? The Brazilian government assumed the land would keep producing. Fearnside’s fieldwork suggested the schemes were failing to account for the long-term costs of land degradation.

In the settlements, Fearnside documented how fast Amazon soils lost nutrients under continuous cropping and regional approaches to cattle ranching. As vast tracts of tropical forest were cut down, he calculated biomass losses to estimate net greenhouse emissions, consistently arriving at numbers well above official government baselines. He also published on soil loss, river hydrology, and what happened to abandoned pasture.

Ane Alencar, now at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), recounted seeing that foresight firsthand as a young scientist in the early 1990s. At the tribute, she highlighted his early models tracking the spread of secondary regrowth across the Amazon—work published well before satellite imaging could verify it. Decades on, MapBiomas maps confirmed the clearing-and-abandonment cycles he described.

Another former student, Gabriel Carreiro, said he recently checked one of Fearnside’s 1990s biomass calculations against current high-resolution datasets. The old estimate matched current numbers to within tenths of a percent.

The hidden costs of dams and deforestation

When Brazil began pushing major hydroelectric dams in the Amazon, officials sold them as clean power. Fearnside showed that shallow tropical reservoirs flooded large areas of forest, producing significant methane emissions from rotting vegetation during the first decades after flooding. He published extensively on Balbina in the 1980s, then turned to Tucuruí, Samuel, and subsequent mega-projects.

Smeraldi noted that questioning hydropower was unpopular at the time even within Brazilian environmental groups, where dams were broadly accepted as green energy. Fearnside doggedly stuck to the science, documenting gas flux and reservoir design flaws across dozens of papers. He questioned the economic forecasts and policy assumptions underlying the era’s boom in dam construction.

Juarez Pezzuti came across those papers while investigating hydroelectric impacts on Indigenous communities. When Pezzuti helped launch an independent monitoring effort alongside Indigenous researchers affected by Belo Monte—the controversial Xingu River dam criticized for inflated power forecasts and substantial ecological damage—Fearnside volunteered to help.

Cattle pasture followed a similar economic logic. Pasture accounts for the vast majority of deforested land in the Amazon, even though it is relatively unproductive as typically managed. Beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, he argued that ranching was never just about beef production. Clearing was a tool to secure land tenure and speculate on rising land prices, which often outpaced inflation.

A landholder could profit from clearing even when cattle yields were poor. The resulting costs—carbon emissions, changes in rainfall, and biodiversity loss—were borne by the public. By the late 1980s, Fearnside argued that development policy needed to pay for standing environmental services rather than subsidizing land clearing. In 2003, the Brazilian science magazine Pesquisa FAPESP notedthat he had already spent nearly twenty years advocating for environmental services as the foundation of Amazonian economics.

His biomass and deforestation calculations were used in international climate frameworks. By 2006, Thomson-ISI ranked Fearnside as the world’s second-most-cited author on global warming. He quantified carbon stocks, challenged underreported state emissions, and pushed for avoided-deforestation compensation mechanisms. He later contributed to the IPCC panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Roads created the same dynamic across entire landscapes. The paved strip itself covered relatively little area, but it opened access to public land, allowing illegal side roads, logging camps, and speculative clearing to spread outward in the classic fishbone pattern.

What follows the road

BR-319 runs roughly 880 kilometers between Manaus and Porto Velho. The middle 400-kilometer stretch was left unpaved for decades, turning into mud during the rainy season and effectively blocking vehicle traffic through the central basin. Paving that middle section would connect Manaus directly to the southern agricultural frontier. Fearnside and fellow researchers argued that formal impact assessments only looked at the right-of-way, ignoring the secondary road networks that follow paving. Those roads inevitably trigger waves of land invasions and deforestation.

“The decision to build a road is the government’s,” Fearnside remarked in a 2024 interview. But once it opens, squatters and speculators move in betting that illegal deforestation would eventually be forgiven through amnesty programs.

Where Fearnside once thought granting title on undesignated public lands might curb speculative clearing, he now views “land regularization” as an engine of forest loss, because titling programs historically legitimize land grabs and encourage new invasions, he told Mongabay.

Several of Fearnside’s students ended up working on the road with him.

Cláudia Vitel recalled bumping along BR-319 from Manaus to Lábrea with Fearnside and fellow researchers when travel funds were too tight for airfare. Fearnside spent the drive drafting a manuscript in the back seat.

Mariane Andrade joined him at dozens of tense public hearings about the highway. During one stop in Manicoré, Fearnside vanished before breakfast, turning up late after scouring the town for a copy shop so he could distribute translated research papers to local residents. Andrade snapped a photo of an Indigenous resident reading one of the printouts that morning.

Beyond the journals

That effort to get research in the hands of people outside universities has been a consistent part of Fearnside’s work. He translates his technical papers into Portuguese and writes regularly for the independent news outlet Amazônia Real. He has penned dozens of commentaries for Mongabaydissecting infrastructure licenses and dam projects. Journalists were another way to get the findings out of academic silos.

Henrique Pereira, now INPA’s director, remembered how Fearnside’s graduate lectures were routinely disrupted by media calls: someone would poke their head in to say the BBC or Folha de S.Paulo was on the line, Fearnside would step out to take it, and then pick right back up where he left off.

Lucas Ferrante, one of Fearnside’s doctoral students and frequent co-authors, worked with him on BR-319 studies and critiques of Bolsonaro-era environmental policies, mapping pressures on Indigenous lands. The work drew fierce pushback: Ferrante faced harassment, anonymous threats, and a physical assault. At the 2021 hearing where Fearnside’s mic was cut, Ferrante was sitting in the front row.

The 2021 hearing was not the first time Fearnside’s work had drawn a xenophobic response. As early as 2003, Pesquisa FAPESP observed that Fearnside’s early critiques of mega-projects like Balbina drew pointed attacks. Anthropologist Janet Chernela, who worked with him at INPA starting in the late 1970s, noted that challenging major industrial projects and state-backed dams under the military dictatorship carried genuine personal risk.

Fearnside’s 1990 Pew fellowship integrated public advocacy directly into his fieldwork. He testified frequently before Congress in Brasília—so often that ecologist Carlos Peres joked he had lost count.

Fearnside draws a distinction between how research is conducted and what a scientist does with the results. “Once you have done the research, you need to draw conclusions,” he said in 2024. Those conclusions only become meaningful if they actually inform decisionmaking.

What had changed most over his career, he told Mongabay, was the timescale. Ideas about building an Amazon economy around standing forest were still very important, but as climate and forest tipping points approached, deforestation and fossil-fuel use had become increasingly urgent.

For many of the scientists he trained and mentored, that unyielding focus on evidence left a lasting mark on their own work. Leonardo Guimarães Ziccardi noted that Fearnside rarely handed out quick solutions, teaching students how to interrogate the data themselves. Gabriel Carreiro recalled walking into his office with a sprawling list of questions, only for Fearnside to whittle them down to the single thread that mattered. Flora Magdaline arrived from Bolivia with virtually no publications; under his guidance, she mastered technical writing and returned home to build a prolific research career of her own.

Britaldo Soares-Filho, whose land-use simulations became a benchmark for infrastructure planning, first met Fearnside at a Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) conference. Fearnside invited him to Manaus to teach modeling—and enrolled in the course as a student. One afternoon, Fearnside excused himself from class early: he had to fly to Brasília to accept an award.

Work left to do

At the end of the INPA tribute, after nearly two hours of people describing work stretching back to the 1970s, Fearnside took the microphone.

The reflections, he said, felt “almost as if this were a farewell.”

He touched on an ongoing legal dispute that might force his formal retirement from INPA, though institute leadership assured him his lab space would remain open. Besides, he added, his doctor told him he would make it to 100.

There is plenty left to do. With Brazil still weighing new road projects and oil exploration near the mouth of the Amazon, the problems that have occupied Fearnside for half a century have not gone away.

“I plan to continue for many years,” he said.

Banner image: Fearnside at the Fazenda Dimona burn study in 1990. Image courtesy of Fearnside. Background graphic added by Mongabay to fit the header dimensions.

• After decades of livestock pressure, 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of farmland in South Africa’s Albany thicket biome need rehabilitation — the way a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts.

• Carbon finance seems the most likely source of funding, kickstarting the process with the mass planting of an endemic drought-tolerant succulent called spekboom (Portulacaria afra).

• Until now, restoration projects have been artisanal, but that’s changed with a $91 million loan to a new entrant and tech giant Amazon throwing its hat into the ring.

• A flush of new funding shows growing faith in a business model for ecosystem restoration, but there’s concern that if projects grow too fast and promise more carbon dioxide drawdown than the emerging science can account for, it could leave projects on shaky ground.

• This article was originally written by Leonie Joubert appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

• This is the first article in Mongabay’s three-part investigation of spekboom-led ecosystem restoration in South Africa. It is part of an award-winning collaboration between independent science writer Leonie Joubert, the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies, and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative journalism in Africa.

GQEBERHA, South Africa — The spekboom is to goats what ice cream is to a toddler, say the locals in this little nook of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. This explains why roughly 90% of the Albany thicket plant biome has been stripped by generations of livestock farming, mostly mohair-producing goats. Where there once was impenetrable bush, many farmlands now look like a desert.

This particular plot of cultivated spekboom (Portulacaria afra) — literally, bacon tree in Afrikaans — carries the weight of expectation, though.

“These are the old ones,” says Nick Hamp-Adams, gesturing to a dense line of bushes, each a spray of boughs that erupts from the ground like fireworks. After half a century, they stand a little higher than a tall person’s head. Their plush, water-laden leaves create a pointillist hedge that’s hard to see through. Where the lower branches dip to the ground, some send out roots, which allows the plant to spread and further carpet the soil.

“The farmer planted them because mud [kept] flooding his barn,” says Hamp-Adams, an environmental policy graduate and general manager at Return to Thicket, a small restoration initiative in this emerging sector.

From those humble beginnings in 1976 — a farmer needing to shore up a slope that had been stripped bare by goats — this plot has become the holy grail of thicket restoration research. Hamp-Adams is, for the time being, the keeper of the grail. Return to Thicket now owns the historic Krompoort farm, previously a commercial mohair enterprise and now a critical study site for thicket restoration, which sits about an hour’s drive inland of the port city of Gqeberha.

“Over time, [the plot has] been added to and expanded,” Hamp-Adams says. “Researchers have experimented with different methods of planting spekboom.”

He points to the distinctive skirting around the base of the bushes. This loose weave of low-hanging young branches and leaves creates nursery conditions beneath it, shielding the ground from the jackhammer strikes of raindrops and softening the sun’s heat. Bare ground can bake at more than 60° Celsius (140° Fahrenheit) in summer. The power of raindrops and heat can turn fluffy, seed-friendly soil to concrete-like conditions, says Alastair Potts, a botanist and associate professor at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha.

Spekboom is just one of many woody tree species in Albany thicket. But it’s this quick-growing skirt that is part of its magic, allowing it to heal and reverse this damage and, restoration ecologists hope, allow the original thicket to recover where the now barren landscape lets little else grow.

It’s this ability to heal the landscape that has had spekboom all over the news of late. As it grows, it draws down carbon dioxide from the overburdened atmosphere that is causing the global rise in temperatures. The world’s economy has put a price on carbon — for this specific kind of project, anything from $20 to around $45 per metric ton of CO₂ cleaned from the atmosphere, sources say. That’s why spekboom-led restoration has attracted the attention of a big international carbon-capture project developer and financiers, including the World Bank, as well as interest from tech giant Amazon.

Ecologists can show early estimates for how much carbon these recovering thickets might bank away in the plant matter and soils. These calculations allow developers to build a business case so that they can draw on carbon markets to pay the bill for restoration. The idea is to kick off longer-term thicket recovery and revive farms left moribund by decades of land degradation: Get investors to pay upfront to replant the landscape, and let them cash in on carbon credits down the line.

Growth spurt

This maiden row of 50-year-old plants in the Krompoort plot is bigger by far than the other plants — each bush taller, wider, its fleshy hedge-like cover denser. Less competition, Hamp-Adams says, more water and nutrients. Uphill, younger rows were added over time, planted by researchers in a deliberate grid, with a meter’s gap, 3.3 feet, between individual plants, and varying spacing of 2-5 m (6.7-16 ft) between rows.

The plants’ carbon-capturing potential as it helps the thicket to recover has caught the attention of developers who are willing to pay for the mass planting of spekboom.

And the farmers here need it like a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts. Where many farms were once impenetrable hedge-like bush, they have been stripped to bare ground. Almost nothing can grow on the most damaged lands now. Except spekboom. And if spekboom can take root and create the nursery environment that will allow other thicket plants to sow their seeds, it may allow the wider ecosystem to return to a semblance of its former self. Wildlife could return, for instance, or even cattle, sheep and goats, though ideally at much lower stocking rates than in decades past.

Mass spekboom planting is the first emergency treatment that could, over time, allow the skin grafts to take. It could take decades. It could take centuries. But it starts with spekboom. Planted laboriously, one cutting at a time, but at scale and fast.

Artisanal versus industrial

This small emerging sector is now seeing a seismic change with a new international entrant that has attracted Global North investors with deep pockets.

The spekboom restoration community is cautiously optimistic. Wooing such hefty financiers shows growing faith in a business model for ecosystem repair that’s been in the works for roughly two decades, many say. Yet there’s concern that if restoration projects grow too fast, or if their carbon-capture numbers are more ambitious than the emerging science can account for, it could put the sector in jeopardy.

Singapore-based Imperative Global Solutions Pte. Ltd., a company that bills itself as an infrastructure developer — albeit one that builds ecosystems rather than bridges or dams — recently secured funding that should allow it to expand its initial pilot operation of 10,000 hectares (about 25,000 acres) five times over the next two years. Founded in 2022, the privately held company says it brings expertise in nature-based solutions through carbon markets.

Imperative recently announced it had secured financing of $91 million, with $25 million coming from a newly listed World Bank outcome-based bond named in spekboom’s honor, and another $66 million from a small number of big investors. Amazon has thrown its hat into the ring, derisking the investor financing by agreeing to buy some of the carbon credits coming from Imperative’s new plantings, amounting to 9.4% of the 20.8 million carbon credits that are expected to come from this next planting.

Most projects until now have been small — akin to artisanal miners panning for gold — with the most ambitious aiming for around 5,500 hectares (about 14,000 acres) or less of restored land. These smaller operations are banking on their properties drawing down an average of between 4.6 and 8.5 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂e) per hectare per year in coming decades.

Imperative is aiming for its project, which will ultimately scale up to a total of 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of spekboom plantings in the next four to five years, drawing down an average of 10.4 t CO₂e per hectare per year over the next 40 years, according to Imperative project director Tiaan Burger.

The carbon-capture estimates used in projects’ business models are still open to debate, though. Even after decades of studying sites like Krompoort, thicket ecology research is still fairly young.

One number from the Krompoort site that surfaced in 2006 helped build the sector’s business case over the two decades that followed: 15.4 tCO₂e. If thickets were allowed to recover, with spekboom leading the way, they had the potential to draw down this much atmospheric carbon per hectare per year.

Critics, though, urged caution, noting the figure comes from one study at a single location, and that this amount of carbon storage was only likely in optimal conditions, with good soil and higher rainfall. Respected ecologists said it shouldn’t be generalized across the entire thicket biome.

But other scientists countered, seeing the number as a back-of-the-envelope estimate that’s typical in any emerging field of scientific inquiry.

It was a starting point and one that has been adjusted over time to reflect a more modest carbon drawdown potential.

Whatever the case, the 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of excoriated land need emergency treatment, and restoring them with spekboom planting may be the only way to do it. Many thicket ecologists are anxious, though, that using overall optimistic numbers could jeopardize the sector, and are in favor of more conservative carbon drawdown figures. They say that projects shouldn’t be surprised if carbon yields don’t measure up to today’s model projections, warning that developers mustn’t oversell what the recovering land can do. Investors must also anticipate that the returns may be lower than hoped for and shouldn’t abandon the work as a result.

If projects don’t deliver on the promised drawdown, it could undermine investor confidence and cause capital flight from spekboom-led restoration. This could sink the broader effort, and deliver a death knell to a farming economy that’s already on life support. If spekboom projects fail, farmers won’t even be able to harvest this new kind of agricultural yield: elusive tons of atmospheric carbon.

Banner image: Angora goats, which produce mohair. Image © Samantha Reinders.

• Costa Rica’s Osa Conservation moved 13 white-lipped peccaries by truck and boat across the Golfo Dulce to reintroduce the threatened species to Piedras Blancas National Park, where hunters had wiped it out roughly 18 years ago.

• The peccaries function as ecosystem engineers, churning soil, dispersing seeds, and digging wallows that become microhabitats, and serve as key prey for jaguars, which had also vanished from the park.

• The translocation followed more than a decade of population study, community outreach, and patient corral-baiting, culminating in a 16-hour, 20-person relay to capture, transport, and soft-release the herd, which now appears healthy and cohesive based on tracking data and camera-trap monitoring.

• The herd’s long-term safety still hinges on curbing poaching and sustaining local support, and Osa Conservation plans further translocations this year toward a target of 25-30 peccaries in the park.

• This article was originally written by Liz Kimbrough appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

It’s after midnight, and veterinarian Dennise Ortiz Angulo is in the middle of Golfo Dulce, surrounded by shooting stars, bioluminescent water, and 13 boar-like beasts. “That moment, it felt like the movie Life of Pi,” Ortiz told Mongabay.

After years of preparation, hours of fast-paced decision-making, and a tedious truck drive, Ortiz, 13 white-lipped peccaries (Tayassu pecari), and a few other humans were midway through a voyage from Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula to Piedras Blancas National Park. The peccaries had finally settled, and Ortiz had a moment to catch her breath and take in the scene: stars, glowing water, and a boat full of gently breathing threatened mammals.

This group had been carefully captured on the Osa Peninsula, where the species still ranges in strong numbers. White-lipped peccaries also used to be found in Piedras Blancas until hunters wiped them out roughly 18 years ago. The plan: reintroduce the peccary to a forest across the water, an ecosystem the animals themselves had helped build.

Peccaries are a force. You often smell them before you see them, a musky, garlicky scent that clings to the forest after the herd has passed. They travel in tight, noisy groups that, in Costa Rica, can number 70 to 100 animals, and elsewhere in their range, up to 300.

On the night the herd reached Piedras Blancas, the animals began to hum and call in unison from their crates, a sound Ortiz had only ever heard from a distance. “You feel the floor vibrating,” she said. To her, it sounded like the herd reassuring itself: I’m here, I’m OK.

Peccaries’ value to the forest is immense. As the herd roots through the leaf litter for seeds, fruit and palm nuts, it churns and aerates the soil and scatters seeds across the landscape in its scat. The peccaries wallow out shallow pools that fill with water and become tiny ecosystems of their own. Ortiz has watched bats swoop in to hunt insects over water the pigs left behind.

“They are the biggest engineer of the forest,” she said. She compares them to tractors, turning the soil and making it fertile so the next generation of trees has somewhere to grow.

They are also a favorite meal of the jaguar (Panthera onca). A mammal survey of Piedras Blancas a few years ago confirmed that both the peccary and the jaguar had disappeared from the park. Osa Conservation, the nonprofit behind the reintroduction, says the loss of this prey pushed the region’s jaguars toward smaller, scarcer targets, and raised the risk of conflict with people.

That local disappearance is part of a wider retreat. In Costa Rica, both species are listed as endangered, even as their global populations on the IUCN Red List are considered vulnerable for peccaries and near threatened for jaguars. Hunting, habitat loss, and the fragmentation of the large, unbroken forests the animals need have squeezed them out of much of their former range.

“We knew one day there could be peccaries in Piedras Blancas, but that day could take 100 years. So we are accelerating, using the science,” Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, executive director of Osa Conservation, who also served three terms as Cost Rica’s environment minister, told Mongabay on a call. “What we are doing is basically giving medicine to the forest of Piedras Blancas,” he said. “You can look at them as a pill. Each of those pigs is a pill.”

Moving a herd of wild peccaries across a gulf took years of plotting. About a decade was spent understanding their populations, threats, and distribution, as well as working with local communities. Osa Conservation and Costa Rica’s Osa Conservation Area (ACOSA) began collaborating in 2023 and set their sights on returning the species to Piedras Blancas.

In 2024, the team set up camera traps around the nonprofit’s land at Piro, on the southern tip of the Osa Peninsula, to learn where a nearby herd fed and rested. They then built a capture corral and began baiting it with corn and coconuts. After about a year and a half, the peccaries were walking into the corral to eat on their own.

“These animals are very motivated by food,” Ortiz said.

“We studied the structure of the herd,” Guido Saborío-R., rewilding program manager for Osa Conservation told Mongabay when asked about how they selected these specific peccaries. “But it’s also just what you can catch.”

On the day of the capture, the peccaries showed up at the baited enclosure earlier than expected. Ortiz, watching a live feed as the connection flickered in and out, pushed the button that dropped the gate once more than 10 animals were inside.

“We closed the door and see what we have,” Saborío said. “Thirteen animals. Three males, the rest females and all healthy. We were lucky.”

What followed was a relay that ran roughly 16 hours and involved more than 20 people. The team weighed and examined each animal, loaded them into dark crates, and sprayed water through the boxes to cool the peccaries, whose body temperatures had climbed in the humid heat.

“It was 13 animals that all needed water at once,” Ortiz said. She described being very stressed and hypervigilant, checking on the peccaries constantly to be sure they weren’t overheating.

A convoy of pickup trucks, escorted by ACOSA park rangers, carried the crates overland to Puerto Jiménez, past onlookers who spilled out of roadside bars near midnight to see what the procession of boxes and police was about. From there, a boat provided by Cativo Lodge, a local ecotourism resort, ferried the herd across the Golfo Dulce. The crates were carried the final 2 kilometers, nearly a mile and a half, into the park by hand, to a soft-release corral.

The animals stayed in the corral to acclimate. It took four days before they entered the feeding area, Ortiz said. The team watched on camera traps as a single limping animal recovered on its own. About three and a half weeks later, they fitted two of the peccaries with satellite collars to follow the herd’s movements.

So far, according to the radio collar and camera-trap monitoring data from the rewilding program and park rangers from Piedras Blancas, the park’s new herd appears to be healthy and sticking together.

Now the question is: will the peccaries remain safe? Piedras Blancas is connected by forest to Osa Peninsula’s Corcovado National Park, near where the peccaries were captured. But poaching persists outside the national parks, the same pressure that emptied Piedras Blancas in the first place and stopped white-lipped peccaries from naturally migrating from Osa to Piedras Blancas.

Safety may come down not only to park rangers, but to the people living around the park. Osa Conservation started an education and outreach program with local communities years before any peccary moved, teaching communities about the unique species and its role in the forests. In 2024, the team surveyed 335 residents across 13 nearby communities around Piedras Blancas; 72% supported bringing the species home, and more than half saw a tourism draw.

“Just to have this kind of movement in Central America is a success,” Joares May, a wildlife veterinarian with Brazilian NGO Ampara Silvestre, told Mongabay. May has consulted for Osa Conservation and has worked on peccary translocations in Brazil. He noted the difficulty of the process, not just with the animals but coordinating all of the people and government agencies.

“[In] these kinds of places with a lot of pressure from human activity we need to replace some pieces, and the white lipped peccary is an important one,” he said. “In future [this allows us to] have top predators like jaguars.”

Osa Conservation’s Rodríguez called the translocation “super exciting.” He was in government when Costa Rica’s first endangered species programs began, and said it’s significant that this project “was done by a Costa Rican organization. It was done with Costa Ricans.”

Another translocation is planned this year to build toward a target of 25 to 30 white-lipped peccaries in Piedras Blancas. Osa Conservation is also working toward translocations for other species such as harpy eagles (Harpia harpyja) and giant anteaters (Myrmecophaga tridactyla).

“My generation worked on conservation and stopping deforestation,” Rodríguez said, “and the generation of my kids will work on rewilding the planet.”

Banner image of the first ever release of white-lipped peccary into Piedras Blancas National Park. Photo by Ian Rock

• An exclusive analysis found at least 36 renewable energy companies have pivoted toward building massive server hubs to cash in on excess generation.

• Nearly 80% of slated districts overlap with traditional lands where communities are unaware of industrial risks to hydrological cycles and biodiversity.

• Government officials marketed the country’s green matrix to global investors while leveraging the power surplus in high-stakes trade talks with the United States.

• This article was originally written by Laís Martins, Naira Hofmeister, and Francisco Amorim appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

• This story was published in partnership with The Intercept Brasil, with support from the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. Read it in Portuguese on The Intercept Brasil.

The global appetite for artificial intelligence is pushing Brazil to lead an unprecedented move in the world regarding data centers. While around the globe, big tech struggles to find energy to power the infrastructures that store and process data, in Brazil the story is just the opposite: Data center proposers come from the power industry itself — more precisely, renewable energy.

An exclusive analysis conducted by The Intercept Brasil and Mongabay (read it in Portuguese) revealed that 65% of the requests to connect data centers to the main power grid originated from renewable energy companies — considering only plans presented to the Ministry of Mines and Energy through December 2025. By that date, 68 connection requests had been reported across 37 Brazilian municipalities.

A combination of factors explains this phenomenon, starting with the extraordinary amount of electricity required to power data centers. The International Energy Agency projects that global data center energy consumption will double in the coming years, potentially reaching 945 TWh by 2030 — equivalent to Japan’s total consumption — with artificial intelligence accounting for 40% of that figure.

With a predominantly renewable energy mix, Brazil has become an attractive destination for data centers. “We are a vast source of opportunities for those looking to invest in the decarbonization of energy mixes,” proclaimed Brazil’s Minister of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira, in January 2025 during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — a trip undertaken with the mission of promoting Brazil to global investors, particularly those in the data center sector.

The country currently produces more renewable energy than it can distribute across its territory — a situation that can disrupt the grid and lead to blackouts. Consequently, renewable energy plants are often required to halt generation at the request of Brazil’s grid operator, ONS. This is technically known as “curtailment,” and for companies, it translates into financial loss. In the first half of 2025, curtailment resulted in losses of 3.2 billion reais ($612 million) for the companies.

As voracious and steady energy consumers, data centers are presented as a solution for utilizing surplus electricity that would otherwise go to waste. In 2025, the solar energy company Atlas had to reduce generation at one of its plants in Paracatu, Minas Gerais, by nearly 40% due to curtailments ordered by ONS — by the end of the year, the company presented a plan to the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME) to build a 1 GW data center complex at the site.

“Aiming to optimize the balance between local supply and demand and mitigate potential generation constraints, Atlas plans to set up a data center in the municipality,” the company explains in a letter to the MME reviewed by Intercept and Mongabay regarding the first of three planned projects.

The Brazilian Wind Energy Association, which represents the industry and companies in the sector within the country, has stepped forward to say that Brazil “offers an ideal setting for the installation of data centers,” citing its electricity matrix —”one of the cleanest in the world” — as the primary advantage. In April, the association hosted a meeting featuring the Brazilian Data Center Association, which brings together data center developers and technology companies, with a panel titled “Data Centers and the Environment: Less Impact Than You Imagine.”

In the view of experts and activists interviewed for this report, the alliance between the two sectors is driven by opportunity and profit — and not necessarily by commitments to the energy transition.

“Renewable energy companies are able to sign long-term power purchase agreements with data centers and Big Tech firms,” said Mikaelle Farias, a renewable energy engineer from the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), a specialist in energy geopolitics from the Rio de Janeiro Institute of Research and Technology, and a climate activist. “This guarantees the sale of that surplus for 15 or 20 years without needing to feed it into the interconnected grid or losing the energy.”

Today, data centers are customers who offer greater financial reliability than other sectors, such as automotive electrification, Farias said, and they provide energy companies with higher revenues than they would earn by distributing and selling energy in Brazil.

In response to inquiries from the reporting team, the Ministry of Mines and Energy stated that it “has been working to develop effective public policies to establish Brazil as a major global hub for data center investment” and that the country offers advantages such as “rapidly growing solar photovoltaic and wind power capacity, a long-standing mastery of hydroelectric power, and legal certainty for investors.”

The ministry further stated that the consumption profile of data centers “contributes to better utilization of already installed renewable generation, mitigating generation curtailment due to electricity oversupply — a challenge that currently poses a growing issue for the operation of the SIN [The National Interconnected System (SIN) is the large network that generates and transmits electricity in Brazil].” Read their full response in Portuguese.

Energy bought by data centers is cheaper

Last year, the Brazilian renewable energy sector saw a recovery from the energy contracting crisis thanks to the arrival of data centers.

In November 2025, the wind energy company Serena Energia announced a partnership with NextStream to supply electricity generated in Gentio do Ouro and Xique-Xique, both in Bahia state, to the company’s data centers, including one in Tamboré, in the São Paulo metropolitan area. A year earlier, Serena had already increased its supply to Odata by 135%, in that case utilizing its wind farms in Xique-Xique.

Some data center companies have opted to purchase stakes in energy projects, becoming partners with power generation companies — a model known as “self-production.” In doing so, they act as both investors and consumers of the energy involved.

Scala Data Centers, one of the leading data center companies based in Brazil, formalized “a significant partnership with a renewable energy company, aiming to secure clean energy through a self-production model.” In its 2024 sustainability report, the company states that it will utilize two operational plants in Bahia that are linked to Serena.

“This approach underscores Scala’s position as a shareholder in renewable energy projects, ensuring direct access to a sustainable source,” the company says in its sustainability report.

In direct contracts and self-production partnerships, consumer companies negotiate lower rates directly with the generators. In practice, data centers pay less for energy.

Historically, the cost of directly contracted energy is significantly lower than the tariff paid by regular consumers. While the energy tariff paid by Brazilian consumers rose by 269% over the last 22 years, reaching 310 reais ($59.77) per MWh in 2024, the increase in the free contracting market was 90%, with companies paying 147 reais ($28.34) per MWh in 2024, according to data from a study by the Brazilian Association of Energy Traders (Abraceel) published in June 2025.

Another business model involves companies that previously operated solely in the renewable energy sector amending their articles of incorporation to include the development of data centers. This is the case with Casa dos Ventos, which built and developed TikTok’s data center in Caucaia, in Ceará state, and dozens of other companies; this analysis found that at least 36 companies had filed requests with the Ministry of Mines and Energy for access to the main power grid for this purpose, with timelines extending through December 2025.

One of the companies is Atlas, which is proposing a project in Paracatu.

“Ownership of the new consumer unit — while distinct from those linked to the generation complex — will belong to Atlas, ensuring that both the load and the generation remain under the same economic group,” Atlas wrote in a request submitted to the MME.

This approach offers sustainability for companies too. Estimates from the Brazilian Ministry of Finance suggest that by moving a data center to Brazil, a company can reduce the carbon footprint of its AI processing by up to 75%.

That is why Brazil is so attractive to these companies. The country offers not just energy, but renewable and cheap energy. For big tech firms, it is a way to meet sustainability targets, burnish their reputations and save money.

In an interview with media outlet InvestNews, Rodrigo Abreu, the CEO of Omnia, the company responsible for TikTok’s data center in Ceará, stated that “few countries can compete with Brazil on renewable energy costs.”

“Amidst this entire oil crisis, relying on fossil-fuel-based energy systems poses a huge risk. Recent wars have made this clear. Renewable energy is not only sustainable but also cheap,” said Rárisson Sampaio, a policy advisor at the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies (Inesc) and a member of the Environmental Law Commission of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) in Ceará.

“Whether sustainable or not, they were going to sign contracts for renewable energy in Brazil because it is cheaper,” he added.

Brazil has become a bargaining chip in the tariff war

Brazil’s advantage in energy supply became a bargaining chip during the imposition of steep U.S. tariffs against the country. According to Brazil’s Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, data centers were a topic of discussion in meetings with big tech companies during the negotiations that preceded the tariffs taking effect in mid-July 2026.

Brazil plans to grant tax incentives and relief to data centers that meet water efficiency standards, among other environmental criteria. It remains unclear what the country stands to gain from the perks it is willing to offer.

In April, Apex, Brazil’s foreign trade agency, organized a mission to the United States with a clear objective: To attract foreign investment in sustainable data centers.

In June, the United States Embassy held a private event in São Paulo on “innovation and technology in energy distribution” to address topics including, “grid readiness for new demands, such as electrification and data centers.” Officials from the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel) were invited to join.

“Even though data centers may encourage pockets of renewable energy growth here and there, they do not help us achieve a sensible, intelligent, and well-planned transition away from fossil fuels,” climate analyst Ketan Joshi says.

Data center expansion amplifies existing environmental impacts

Another relevant aspect is the socio-environmental impact of the renewable energy industry, also frequently overlooked under the “clean energy” narrative.

Ever since the arrival of the first wind farms in Brazil’s Northeast region, two decades ago, communities have been denouncing the impacts these projects have on their territories, ways of life and health. It is in this region, which holds the country’s largest renewable energy generation output, a significant portion of the surplus energy generated goes to waste.

Problems begin with the installation of the power plants, involving allegations of land grabbing, deforestation and explosions carried out to accommodate wind turbines and build access roads, which impact both wild and domestic fauna. Residents living near the projects report cracks in their homes linked to the blasts.

During operation, the main impact is the noise from the wind turbines. The disturbance is so frequent that it has been given a specific name: Wind turbine syndrome. It is a condition that manifests as sleep disorders, headaches, dizziness and mental health issues.

In March, residents of the Pernambuco semi-arid region filed a public civil action against wind energy companies, including Casa dos Ventos, and the state government regarding the installation and operation of a complex comprising eight wind farms and 126 turbines spanning four municipalities.

A bill is currently making its way through the legislature in Paraíba that would mandate a minimum distance of 1.5 kilometers (0.9 mile) between wind turbines and residences, schools or other public facilities. If passed, this would be pioneering legislation. Currently, there are no such protections in Brazil for communities located near these projects.

Even so, climate activist Farias warned that there is a risk of problems worsening across the northeast with the expansion of renewables and the arrival of data centers.

There is yet another layer that adds complexity: findings of this report indicate that at least 29 municipalities where data centers are planned contain Quilombola (traditional communities founded by former enslaved Afro-Brazilians) territories with regularization processes underway via Brazil’s land reform agency, Incra, or Indigenous lands (either demarcated or under study). In other words, 78.3% of the 37 municipalities slated for data center installations contain one of these types of protected territories that are either regularized or currently undergoing regularization.

One of these municipalities is Gentio do Ouro, a city of 11,000 citizens in Bahia state that is home to a Quilombola community awaiting land titling from Incra. There, the company Serena requested authorization from the Ministry of Mines and Energy to connect nine data centers. At least one is already operational. Mongabay and Intercept Brasil contacted the company but received no response as of publication.

Incra stated that, so far, it is monitoring only one case in the municipality of Caucaia, where TikTok is building a data center, and that the process is currently at the stage of analyzing potential overlap with Quilombola communities. The institute added that it has not participated in “conferences, forums, or inter-institutional dialogue spaces specifically dedicated to discussing the expansion of data centers in the country.” Read Incra’s full response in Portuguese.

“Renewable energy is not infinite — it has social constraints, it has physical constraints, it has environmental impacts and it also has political capital behind it so you have to use it wisely,” Joshi said.

For the climate analyst, who currently lives in Norway, this corporate strategy is not new. “Companies say, ‘Look how we are unlocking this renewable energy,’ but they don’t specify the intended use. Why didn’t you build a transmission line or a battery or something to have that energy be used by society and to displace fossil fuels?” he said.

“Powering data centers with renewable energy is not the goal. The goal is ensuring that we protect human society from the dangers of unsafe energy like coal and gas and like burning petroleum in the transport system.”

Data centers could drive up electricity bills for Brazilians

Beyond the socio-environmental effects, the model data centers are adopting amidst their proliferation, which includes entering into contracts or partnerships with electricity generation companies, could have a direct impact on Brazilians’ finances.

Although this strategy lowers energy costs for technology infrastructure, it can drive up electricity bills for the broader public. This arises because large clients migrate to the free market (based on direct contracting), trimming the total number of consumers in the closed market, the segment tied to local distribution companies.

The closed market comprises consumers who pay electricity bills to local distributors, such as Enel. Large consumers — such as industrial facilities and, more recently, data centers — typically operate in a different market: The free market, where they purchase energy directly from producers.

Consumers in the free market are exempt from certain charges, like tariff flags, and benefit from discounts on others, such as distribution system fees. With fewer people sharing the overall cost, the individual cost borne by closed market consumers rises.

What’s more, given the enormous amount of energy required to power data centers, the transmission system needs to be reinforced to accommodate these facilities; otherwise, the grid risks failing to handle the heavy loads. In practice, however, the costs of these infrastructure upgrades — which are becoming increasingly critical as more data centers connect to the main grid — are being passed on to consumers.

This point was raised by utility companies Enel and EDP during a public consultation held by Aneel regarding improvements to the rules for accessing the electric power transmission system.

Enel stated that, since the current transmission system lacks rules regarding the costs paid by those connecting to the grid, “expansion costs end up being socialized among all consumers —including those who do not directly benefit from these projects — creating regulatory asymmetry and unwanted cross-subsidies.”

As an example, the company cited the connection of a large data center in the São Paulo metropolitan area that is requiring structural upgrades at a substation. “Although this need stems from a single connecting party, the costs tend to be passed on to consumers across the entire system — an approach that is not appropriate from the standpoint of efficiency and equity,” Enel stated.

EDP ​​made a similar point, highlighting that “the growth of new large-scale developments — particularly data center projects, green hydrogen, and other electricity-intensive loads — has in many cases required significant reinforcements and expansions of the transmission grid to enable access; the costs of these upgrades end up being socialized among all system users, even though they stem from the specific needs of certain parties seeking access.”

In practice, this means that ordinary consumers are footing the bill for infrastructure projects to enable data centers owned by private companies — many of them foreign — to connect to the main grid.

In response to inquiries, Aneel stated that the costs of any necessary reinforcements or expansions beyond the connection point, within the transmission infrastructure known as the “Basic Grid,” are shared among all system users, and that this applies to everyone, whether they are mining operations, data centers or distribution utilities.

The agency also reported that submissions received during the public consultation process are being analyzed by its technical staff and that, to date, no cost-allocation issues caused by data centers have been identified. Read their full response here in Portuguese.

In the United States, home to the vast majority of the world’s data centers, few issues unite Americans from across the political spectrum quite like data centers: Seven out of 10 people oppose their construction in their neighborhoods, according to a Gallup poll from March. The topic has already become a campaign issue, with candidates attempting to capitalize on sentiments both for and against data centers.

One of the main reasons for the discontent is precisely the skyrocketing energy bills resulting from the installation of these mega-infrastructures.

In late July, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that more than 200 companies, including utility providers, had signed an agreement to prevent electricity prices from rising due to data centers. While the agreement appears to be symbolic and difficult to implement given the current U.S. power distribution system, it signals that Trump has recognized this as a critical issue that voters will take to the polls in the midterm elections scheduled for November.

• Daniel Janzen’s scientific work helped reshape ecologists’ understanding of tropical forests, especially the relationships among plants, insects, pathogens, predators, and seeds.

• With Winnie Hallwachs and Costa Rican partners, he helped turn degraded ranchlands in Guanacaste into a protected, working landscape that now connects ecosystems from the Pacific coast to cloud forest and Caribbean rain forest.

• ACG’s parataxonomists, educators, field staff, directors, and neighboring communities have made the project durable through their day-to-day work, linking conservation to local employment, education, and scientific expertise.

• Janzen and Hallwachs’s more recent work on DNA barcoding and bioliteracy aims to help Costa Rica identify, study, and value the extraordinary diversity of life within its borders.

• This article was originally written by Mongabay’s founder Rhett Ayers Butler appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

In northwestern Costa Rica, the forest did not return all at once. First the cattle were removed. Then the fires had to be stopped. Introduced grasses made the old ranchlands burn too easily. Fence lines had to be watched. Seeds had to arrive by wind, birds, bats, and the stomachs of passing animals. People had to believe the land could become something other than pasture, and then stay long enough to see it happen.

A park on paper can still burn. It can still be poached, logged, ignored, or resented. The work requires science, salaries, political agreements, national investment, school programs, local trust, and daily maintenance. It requires people who remain after the first burst of money and attention has passed.

Popular accounts sometimes reduced the story to a solitary figure: an American ecologist with a beard, a camera, a theory, and a park. It was never that simple. For more than half a century, Daniel Hunt Janzen has worked in tandem with Winnie Hallwachs, his wife, scientific partner, and frequent interpreter to the human world. Around them grew a larger Costa Rican undertaking, carried by park leaders, field staff, parataxonomists, teachers, donors, government ministers, neighbors, and families who turned a conservation idea into a working landscape.

Janzen is now 87. His field work has slowed, and he has stepped back from university teaching to focus on his role as Chief Scientist of the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF), the nonprofit conservation organization he and Hallwachs founded with his Kyoto Prize award money in 1997. They are currently in Guanacaste, where the scientific enterprise they helped build continues to produce important research. In June 2026, Janzen and Hallwachs were among the authors of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences built on more than 1.6 million DNA-barcoded insect specimens collected in Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). They conservatively estimated that Earth may hold 14 million to 20 million insect species—two to three times the prevailing estimate—with a broader extrapolation approaching 30 million. Two more major publications followed, one tracing insect vulnerability to climate change and another examining insects’ distinct biogeographic distributions across Costa Rica. Each grew directly from the decades of biodiversity inventory that Janzen, Hallwachs, ACG’s parataxonomists, and their collaborators developed and sustained.

Janzen is one of the most influential tropical ecologists of his generation. He helped change how scientists understand tropical forests, especially the intricate relationships among plants, insects, predators, pathogens, and seeds. He also helped change what conservation means. His work treats a forest as a collection of specific life histories, each knowable and connected to others in ways that reward close attention.

Janzen was born in Milwaukee in 1939. His father came from a Mennonite farming family and later served as Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Janzen grew up with the habits of a field naturalist: looking, collecting, sorting, and asking why one organism was there and another was not. A boyhood trip to Mexico, where he collected butterflies, helped set his course. He studied biology at the University of Minnesota and earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Tropical biology was expanding rapidly when Janzen began his career, and he immersed himself in it.

His early scientific work ranged from broad ecological questions to close natural-history observation. He studied ants and acacias, seed predators, flowering cycles, caterpillars, parasitoids, and the many ways that animals and plants had shaped each other in co-evolution. Again and again, he turned observations in the field into questions other scientists could test. One of those questions became the Janzen-Connell hypothesis, developed independently with Joseph Connell. It proposed that tropical tree diversity could be maintained in part because seeds and seedlings near parent trees are attacked by enemies, including insects, fungi, and other pathogens. The idea helps explain why tropical forests can hold so many tree species in close proximity. It has also given generations of ecologists a hypothesis to refine, challenge, and build upon.

His papers often move from field detail to theory. He is willing to speculate, and he is willing to revise. His science keeps returning to the same conviction: organisms have histories, and those histories matter. A fallen fruit, a missing disperser, a bruchid beetle, an ant at the base of an acacia thorn, or a caterpillar feeding on one plant but not another can become evidence of a larger ecological pattern.

Janzen has little patience for abstractions that float free of organisms. Biodiversity, to him, is not a decorative word. It is a set of living things with names, roles, enemies, and uses. The word has to be brought down to earth, pinned, sequenced, reared, photographed, databased, taught to children, and made visible to the people living near it. That emphasis on identification helps explain his interest in DNA barcoding. A short genetic sequence, linked to careful field work, can help reveal what the eye alone misses. It can show that what has been treated as one species might be several. It can help a country know more of what it contains.

For much of his career, Janzen has held a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. The center of his life, however, has been Costa Rica. He first went there in the 1960s, and the country became the place where his science and conservation work fused. In Guanacaste, he found a dry forest ecosystem that was reduced and damaged by ranching, fire, and conversion. Tropical dry forest once covered large areas of Central America. Much of it has been destroyed. It receives less public attention than rain forest, and its long dry season can make its richness harder for outsiders to see.

By the mid-1980s, he and Hallwachs shifted from studying the forest to helping rebuild and defend it. The project that became ACG connected existing national parks with degraded ranchlands and recovering forest. It stretches from the Pacific marine zone across dry forest, volcanoes, cloud forest, and down toward Caribbean rain forest. Degraded areas were allowed to recover through natural processes where possible, with people intervening where necessary, while the protected area was built into Costa Rican society rather than set apart from it.

Janzen sometimes calls it a “wild farm,” or a farm with hundreds of thousands of crops. The crops, in his formulation, are species, interactions, services, knowledge, beauty, education, climate benefits, and possibilities not yet understood. The farming analogy insists on management: workers, neighbors, productivity, and a place in the economy.

Janzen can lecture, cajole, raise money, write proposals, buttonhole visitors, and turn an idea into a diagram or a provocation. He can also be blunt. Hallwachs often makes the work understandable to other people. Janzen summarizes the division with characteristic economy: “Winnie thinks, I talk.” He has long acknowledged that many thoughts attributed to him were hers, or theirs. Friends and colleagues see the two as a unit, though that description can understate her own standing. Hallwachs is a tropical ecologist, a strategist, a field partner, and a co-builder of the institutions that make the work endure.

ACG has relied on Costa Rican leadership, staff who stay in place and develop allegiance to the land, and people from surrounding communities who can earn a living by knowing the forest better than almost anyone else. Children encounter the dry forest as a classroom rather than as wasted land. Government agencies and private donors support the same landscape. The institution is national in ambition and local in daily life.

ACG’s parataxonomists embody much of that work. The word, coined by analogy with paralegal and paramedic, never meant amateur. It described people trained to be professionals, to do serious field-based biodiversity work: collecting caterpillars, rearing them, identifying host plants and parasitoids, recording data, preparing specimens, taking photographs, and later linking that work with DNA barcodes. Many come from rural communities around ACG. Some work in remote research stations. Some work as couples or as part of families. Over time, the program has become multigenerational.

Their labor made possible a scale and continuity of scientific inventory—365 days a year—that visiting researchers alone could never sustain. It also tied conservation to employment and expertise. A person paid to know the forest has reasons to defend it. A family whose work is bound to a research station becomes part of the institution. A child who sees a neighbor employed in the naming and understanding of local species grows up with a different idea of what the forest is worth.

ACG’s Costa Rican directors, administrators, educators, field staff, parataxonomists, and local allies do the work day to day. They fight fires, maintain trails and field stations, host students, handle specimens, monitor species, manage relationships, and keep the institution functioning through political and financial changes.

At Penn, visitors found a lean, bearded man walking on a treadmill while working at a raised desk, surrounded by specimens from Costa Rica. He logged miles indoors so he could keep doing field work outdoors. In Guanacaste, he and Hallwachs live for most of the year in modest quarters in Santa Rosa. Animals come to bowls of water outside. Over the years, they have taken in rescued creatures, including a porcupine and a pygmy owl. Janzen once wished aloud that a rattlesnake could be kept as a pet. From someone else, the wish might have seemed theatrical. From him, it sounded like a matter-of-fact disappointment.

In the 1990s, Janzen and Hallwachs helped arrange for waste from a Costa Rican orange juice company to be spread on degraded pasture in ACG in exchange for a land donation. The project became mired in legal dispute and was halted. Years later, researchers returned and found that the treated area had become a dense young forest, with far more aboveground biomass than nearby untreated land.

His honors are many: the Crafoord Prize, the Kyoto Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, the Blue Planet Prize, and election to the National Academy of Sciences, among others. He treated awards as leverage for the work in Costa Rica. Prize money, visibility, and institutional influence could be converted into land purchases, staff support, biodiversity research, and education.

In the later decades of his career, Janzen’s work has pushed toward what he and colleagues called bioliteracy. The ambition was to make a tropical country literate in its own living wealth. DNA barcoding, in this view, is a public instrument as well as a scientific one. A moth, a wasp, a caterpillar, or a fungus does not have to remain invisible because it is small, cryptic, or unnamed. If it can be recognized, it can enter databases, classrooms, management plans, and public imagination. A country cannot value every species individually, but it can learn that each is particular.

Janzen knows what has been lost and what is still being lost. He sees climate change lengthening dry seasons and altering the rhythms he has watched for decades. He knows that tropical forests are being simplified by forces far larger than any one protected area. He also distrusts despair when it becomes an excuse for inaction. He keeps returning to practical tasks: raise the money, train the people, collect the caterpillar, stop the fire, teach the child, sequence the tissue, repair the truck, defend the budget, and return again tomorrow.

Janzen treats conservation as a long negotiation between human needs and the needs of other species to complete their lives. He believes that wild biodiversity must be given a place in society, not as an ornament or a relic, but as a working part of the national future.

Janzen’s papers have altered tropical ecology, and his questions continue to guide research. The land he helped protect and restore is vast by the standards of most conservation projects. ACG also remains an unusual example of tropical conservation joined to national government, local employment, education, and long-term scientific work.

In Guanacaste, trees grow where cattle once grazed. Children learn to read tracks, leaves, insects, and seasonal change. Rural Costa Ricans become experts in forms of life that much of formal science has not yet named. Park staff stay long enough to make a protected area into a home institution. Scientists around the world receive specimens, sequences, papers, and provocations. Hallwachs remains beside and within the work, as thinker, builder, and witness.

Janzen has little use for too polished an account of what he and others have achieved. A restored forest remains vulnerable. An endowment can shrink. A political arrangement can fray. A species can disappear before it is known. A program built over decades can be damaged in a season. He has spent too long in the field to confuse success with completion.

Janzen and Hallwachs have helped leave behind procedures, institutions, habits, names, maps, trained hands, and defended places. Their work also rests on a particular way of seeing a forest: as an immense set of relationships, most overlooked, many fragile, and some recoverable if people work at the necessary scale and for long enough.

In Guanacaste, decades of work have left recovering forest, long-running inventories, trained Costa Rican staff, and institutions built to persist beyond any one researcher. Janzen’s name is attached to much of it, but not his alone. Hallwachs, ACG’s Costa Rican leaders and staff, parataxonomists, educators, neighbors, donors, and government partners have made the project durable. Janzen has spent more than half a century trying to understand the forest and keep it alive.

Banner image: Dan Janzen at work with pet porcupine Espinita exploring his cheek, and 1999 vintage laptop

• The energy firm Serena filed 12 requests to build data centers in a remote town of only 11,000 people already affected by wind farms in Brazil.

• The project sits in a protected area, stressing the waters of the Itaparica Lagoon, local fishers and Quilombola communities.

• Tech firms in Brazil are exploiting a lack of specific regulations and renewable power surplus to plan data centers without undergoing environmental licensing.

• This article was originally written by Laís Martins appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

• This story was published in partnership with The Intercept Brasil, with support from the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. Read it in Portuguese on The Intercept Brasil.

GENTIO DO OURO, Brazil — From the main square in Gentio do Ouro, in northern Bahia state, you’ll see what appears in almost every small Brazilian town: The city hall, a bank branch, a bandstand and a sign with the town’s name. What distinguishes this landscape is on the horizon: Regardless of which direction you look, you’ll see giant windmills used to generate energy. The town was put on the wind turbine map more than 15 years ago, and now has 28 active wind farms, according to data from the Energy Transition Observatory.

The turbines, however, don’t make Gentio do Ouro, on the outskirts of the beautiful landscapes of the Chapada Diamantina mountains, a sustainable hub. In the main square, a sculpture of a gold nugget is a nod to mining, an activity that runs strong in the region. And yet another outside influence is gaining traction: A plan to make this peaceful town a data center backyard.

Similar to factories, these facilities process everything that is done on the internet — using lots of energy, benefiting few people, hiring even less and bringing about a new wave of environmental impacts.

Although it has only 11,000 citizens, Gentio do Ouro is targeted by 12 requests to connect data centers to the energy grid. At the front of this race are the same companies that filled the region with wind turbines, impacting threatened biomes and even disturbing the sleep of the wind farms’ neighbors.

The data center boom in Brazil’s Northeast was sparked by the energy surplus from renewable sources in the region. At first sight, it might appear positive. Experts, however, warn that these new facilities are discouraging investments in transmission networks that could bring energy to where it is truly needed — like street lighting, electric cars or replacing coal-fired electricity. Instead, the turbines that disturb the residents of Gentio do Ouro may end up serving only to meet the excessive demands of data centers, which are only likely to grow with the development of artificial intelligence.

The project in Gentio do Ouro is led by Serena, a renewable energy company that operates wind farms in the region. The first data center has already been built — a small unit inside the Assuruá Wind Complex — and two others have been authorized, according to documents accessed by Intercept Brasil.

Serena also requested authorization from the Ministry of Energy and Mines to install at least another nine data centers in the town. According to Brazil’s independent energy grid operator, ONS, the company received a favorable response, but did not follow through with the process within the deadline — which does not necessarily mean it gave up on the idea.

The company’s plans include small data centers, hosted inside containers and focused on data processing — different from hyperscale facilities, such as the one being built by TikTok in the state of Ceará. But, despite being smaller, the projects in Gentio do Ouro, when put together, could reach 270 MW in capacity — equivalent to a large data center.

Serena’s press office was reached for comment, but the company did not reply by publication.

Gentio do Ouro is only one of many locations where renewable energy companies are bringing the AI development boom. An exclusive analysis by Mongabay and The Intercept Brasil found that the renewable energy sector accounts for six out of 10 requests to connect data centers to the power grid submitted by December 2025.

Like Gentio do Ouro, many of the municipalities sought after by these companies are home to traditional communities, such as Quilombolas or Indigenous groups. This analysis found that 78% of municipalities planning to install data centers have at least one protected territory or a territory under study.

Turning a lemon into lemonade

The energy surplus in Brazil is a threat to the power sector’s profits. Today, this electricity is being wasted because, if it was added to the grid, it could unbalance it, leading to blackouts. To avoid an overload, ONS forces firms to turn off generation, leading to losses. A study shows that curtailment, the technical name given to this process, has caused the energy sector to lose 3,2 billion reais ($618 million) in the first six months of 2025.

This is where data centers come into the picture: Voracious energy consumers, they enable companies to reduce losses.

The strategy has earned the support from governments, because it helps put an end to businesses’ complaints. “Data centers interest us because they are consumers of lots of energy,” said Paulo Guimarães, president-director of the Bahia state investment agency, Bahiainvest, in an interview with newspaper A Tarde.

Serena also doesn’t hide its objectives. When requesting the Ministry of Energy and Mines speed up the authorization process for the data centers it wants to connect near its wind farms in Gentio do Ouro, the company argued that “the project is strategically positioned in a region of electricity generation surplus, favoring a more efficient use of transmission infrastructure”.

“We could direct this energy surplus to actions and initiatives that effectively contribute to combatting socioenvironmental crises,” said Julia Catão Dias, a lawyer, activist and researcher who has been studying the arrival of data centers to Brazil over the last few years.

While the plan to transform Gentio do Ouro into a data center backyard moves forward, many local residents struggle without power. This is the case for Valmir Pereira de Carvalho, who lives in the village of Santo Inácio, one of the town’s districts. “During the rainy season, when it thunders, there are times where we go three days [without power],” he said.

The region where Carvalho lives holds treasures. A 10-minute walk among the rocks leads to an archaeological site registered in Brazil’s Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage, IPHAN. There, Carvalho points out reddish cave paintings. In the municipality of Gentio do Ouro, more than 234 locations have been recognized as archaeological sites.

In the 2010s, Carvalho worked for renewable energy companies surveying archaeological sites that could be impacted by the turbines. “We captured 22,000 historical artifacts. There were arrowheads, a scraper, a horse’s hoof, a ceramic vessel, a pipe, and an intact hearth,” he said.

Nothing stayed in the region. “Everything is in São Paulo. It was supposed to have stayed here,” Carvalho said, holding the only record of this heritage he still has access to: A brochure featuring faded photos of archaeological sites produced by an environmental consulting firm.

Similar to what happened to the archaeological findings, very little of the progress from the evolution of technology promised to Gentio do Ouro stays with the “wind neighbors,” as the communities that live close to wind farms are called.

The energy produced in the region already benefits the outskirts of São Paulo. In November 2025, Serena announced a partnership with NextStream to supply the company’s data centers, including one in Tamboré, in the metropolitan region of São Paulo.

Contracts to provide the energy produced in Bahia were also signed with Scala Data Centers, the firm behind the AI City project in Eldorado do Sul, in southern Brazil, and with Odata, a data center developer that, in early August, became partners with Serena in three wind farms in Bahia that are not even operating yet, according to information submitted to the Brazilian antitrust authority.

But in Carvalho’s home, things seem the same. Although he acknowledges the village has seen improvements in the last few years — including the renovation of a multi-sport court and a party hall funded by Serena —, he complains that, recently, he paid 400 reais ($77) on an energy bill for a three-person household that does not have air conditioning or electric water heating.

“If they distributed it for us, so we didn’t have to pay for energy, I would see it as a very good thing,” he said.

A Quilombo in between

There’s a gap in the narrative that data centers are coming to Gentio do Ouro only to use up the energy surplus. With an oversupply, it would be expected that companies would stop increasing power generation. Serena itself has publicly declared that it is time to hit the brakes on investment because of curtailments. However, the company is in the final stage of obtaining licenses for Complexo Assuruá VI, which includes the installation of at least 91 new wind turbines in Gentio do Ouro.

This example reflects the risk of a vicious cycle: Data center installations are stimulating the construction of new wind farms, which will attract more data centers, perpetuating the unbridled proliferation of turbines throughout Brazil. Last year, the former Environmental and Climate Change minister Marina Silva had already alerted about the issue, saying that the intensive energy use in data processing “makes new sources become even more sought after.” At that time, the Environmental Ministry was in discussions with other ministries about how to protect Brazil from an “unsustainable pressure” related to the topic.

In a statement, the ministry said it “continues to focus on this issue within its agenda for future sector policies.” The ministry further noted that data centers “are subject to the country’s existing environmental regulatory framework, including the National Water Resources Policy, the National Solid Waste Policy, and the National Environment Policy.” Read the full statement in Portuguese.

In Gentio do Ouro, the Assuruá VI complex will take up an area of 8 square kilometers (3 square miles) in a hilly area close to the BR-330 highway. Just a few kilometers from there, sits the Pacheco Quilombo Remnant Community, territory that received a certification from the Palmares Cultural Foundation in 2018 and now awaits the title from Incra, Brazil’s land reform agency.

A dirt road cuts through the community from one end to the other. Houses sit side-by-side, and all residents are related on some level. In the middle of the community, a recently renovated square houses the old local school, currently deactivated due to a lack of students and serving as the headquarters of the residents’ association. From there, you hear a constant background noise: The incessant sound of the wind turbines’ rotation.

Initially, Serena proposed that the Assuruá VI complex cut through the middle of the Quilombo’s territory. The firm tried to get the community to sign a term authorizing the project, promising to pay a sum for the installation plus a monthly fee, but the residents refused.

They made this decision after community leaders reached out to Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) to analyze the contract and see if there were any loopholes. Connected to the Catholic Church, the organization works in the defense of rural workers and traditional communities.

“By default, the contracts are terrible in every aspect: Judicially, financially and politically,” said Carivaldo Ferreira dos Santos, an agent and researcher with CPT-Bahia who assisted the community.

Serena was persistent in the negotiations. “Their interest was so big that they brought many proposals,” Damares Teixeira, secretary at the residents’ association, told Mongabay and Intercept Brasil. After five months of back and forth, with countless modifications, the company gave them an ultimatum. The community then got together and voted not to sign the contract.

One of the people who voted against signing was Elexandra Torres Peixoto, the association’s treasurer. She said the community will be impacted anyhow by the complex’s expansion, but making a deal with Serena would have brought the wind turbines’ impacts closer to their homes.

Today, there are already turbines installed in the Pacheco territory, but they are in a region that the Quilombola leader calls “the other side”. Peixoto refers to the opposite margins of the BR-330 highway, which divides the Pacheco territory, where Engie, the French energy giant, has a wind farm.

As part of the environmental licensing process for that farm, the company conducted an anthropological study on the remnant Quilombola community, including interviews. The research became a book, but according to residents, only one copy stayed with the community. In addition to the book, residents also received the renovation of the small square in the middle of the village.

Engie stated that copies of the book and a video documentary were distributed at an event and that it was unaware of “any potential limitation on access to the publication and will make additional copies available to the community.”

The disturbances caused by the wind turbines go beyond the nonstop noise and began during the installation of the towers. Although the towers currently sit in the part of the territory that doesn’t have houses, the controlled explosions used to open paths resulted in cracks in houses on the opposite side of the highway, villager Valdenir Alves de Souza said. Issues persisted after the complex began operating, since the wind farm sits on land where many locals have their farms.

“My father plants cassava in the back of these towers,” Eloísa Cerqueira, president of the Pacheco Residents Association, said. “Because of the noise, the caititu [a type of small wild hog] left their habitats and destroyed the entire farm.” She said she took the case to Engie representatives, but “they laughed.”

Regarding the impact on small-scale farms, Engie said it had found no records of such issues in its complaint channels or among field teams. Read the full response in Portuguese here.

Coming in without asking for permission

Although the majority of the residents of Gentio do Ouro likely don’t know, there is already a data center operating in the town. Since it is connected to an electrical substation located within the wind farm complex, it’s only visible in aerial views or satellite images. The project takes up less than 1 hectare (2.5 acres), is composed of six modules and was installed between July 2023 and July 2024 .

Soon, other data centers may join this facility, since Serena has already secured authorizations from Inema, Bahia’s state environmental authority, to clear the land, opening space for two new projects. Each of them is expected to take up an area of 5 hectares (12.4 acres), formerly covered by native Caatinga vegetation.

What all these projects have in common is that they didn’t undergo environmental licensing, a more rigorous procedure than an authorization to clear vegetation and manage wildlife. The same applies to the other nine data centers Serena plans to build in Gentio do Ouro. Among the documents submitted by the company for the new data centers’ authorization process is a letter from Inema declaring that licensing isn’t required, exempting the company from submitting its projects for environmental impact assessments.

This occurred, because, at the time the requests were made, the agency didn’t yet have specific regulations for data center operations, according to Jefferson Araújo and Marcelo Guimarães Costa, staff members at Inema’s Infrastructure, Energy, and Tourism Coordination unit. A decree regulating the permit requirements of this type of infrastructure was only approved by the agency in February 2026 and applies solely to projects submitted from that date onward.

In Bahia, the size of data centers will be determined based on the area occupied in hectares. Projects covering less than 10 hectares (24.7 acres) will be classified as small-scale and subject to unified licensing in a single stage.

The three Serena data centers already authorized by Inema have a combined area exceeding that threshold, which would classify them as medium-sized projects. However, because the authorization process was split into three parts, the company would avoid more rigorous licensing, even under the rules of the new decree.

Inema confirmed in a statement that Serena holds a declaration of non-applicability regarding the other two data centers, but that the expansion has not yet taken place. The agency further stated that the currently operating data center uses water from “duly permitted” artesian wells, but that the company is “decommissioning said data center to install a new facility, switching the equipment cooling technology to a closed-loop system using refrigerant fluids.” Read the full response in Portuguese.

The data center complex, which is being developed without an impact assessment, is located within the environmental protection area of ​​the Itaparica Lagoon, a 24-kilometer-long (14.9-mile) body of water upon which local communities rely on for fishing. “It is a lagoon that requires attention because it is a fragile body of water, despite its size. It is a floodplain area,” said Roberto Rivelino, the environmental and sustainable development secretary of Xique-Xique (a city neighboring Gentio do Ouro) and a member of the São Francisco River Basin Committee.

Water and energy used by data centers are the most critical aspects of their environmental footprint and inversely related: Data centers that use less water consume more energy. Power demand for cooling is also affected by outdoor temperatures, a key factor to consider when planning to install data centers in Brazil’s Northeast, where temperatures tend to be higher.

“During hot periods, higher ambient temperatures can reduce the effectiveness of dry heat rejection and need higher fan power, higher compressor power, or other mechanical cooling support to maintain the required coolant temperature”, U.S. researchers from the University of California, Riverside, the University of Texas at Arlington, and the California Institute of Technology wrote in a May 2026 research paper.

But anyone who views the arrival of data centers solely through the lens of energy risks repeating the arguments made by renewable energy companies, according to Rárisson Sampaio, a lawyer and consultant advising the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies on socio-environmental issues and the energy transition.

“If you frame the arrival of this type of project solely in terms of energy, the debate is already flawed, because you have to look at the entire cumulative picture — water usage, territorial impact,” he said. “None of that is taken into account, because it is viewed merely as a bargaining chip for the [energy] sector.”

Paying the price for ‘progress’

None of the residents Mongabay and Intercept Brasil met in Gentio do Ouro had heard about the arrival of the data centers. “It’s the first time I’ve encountered that word, and knowing that it’s already been authorized for a site near us worries me a lot,” Teixeira, a Quilombola leader, said. “Technology is good, but it often causes harm, too.”

Part of the skepticism comes from the residents’ own experience with the wind industry, which promised a lot to the municipalities but delivered little.

“Gentio do Ouro was supposed to be a dream city today — a princess. Yet, that is not what we see,” said Claudia Oliveira, a municipal councilwoman and member of the Pacheco community, referring to the promises that accompanied the arrival of wind farms in 2009.

“Today, the municipality suffers various setbacks due to a lack of organization, guidance, and planning,” Oliveira said. One of the most pressing issues, according to her, is the lack of opportunities for young people and the lack of investment in training to enable local workers to take on roles in these ventures.

As is the case with data centers, wind power projects generate jobs during construction but require few workers once operations begin. The economic impact on municipalities is, therefore, temporary.

The expansion of facilities or the construction of a new wind farm fills the city with workers, mostly outsiders. When the construction is finished, they leave. But the impact of those waves of migration can last.

This is felt, for instance, in the local real estate market. The arrival of workers drives up the demand for housing in Gentio do Ouro downtown. Consequently, rents that used to cost 500 reais ($96) soar to 2,000 reais ($385). The problem is that prices do not return to previous levels once outsiders leave. This inflationary trend extends to purchases at supermarkets and restaurants, according to locals.

“When the company was here, the price of everything went up. They left, but it remained [expensive] for us, which ended up complicating things,” Teixeira said.

With the possible expansion from Assuruá VI, they expect another inflation wave. “If the expansion comes, certainly more people will come from outside because there is no skilled labor,” said Oliveira, who also complains that the city’s increase in tax revenue collection during those waves didn’t turn into investments for the population.

The wind farm setups are subsidized through a combination of tax incentives and exemptions on both federal and state levels and public-sector subsidized financing. In May last year, Sudene, the Northeast development agency, released an investment of 8.6 million reais ($1.7 million) for the implementation of four plants within Serena’s Assuruá V Complex, which had already received 556.4 million reais ($107 million) in credit from Sudene.

Meanwhile, in municipalities like Gentio do Ouro, the numbers don’t add up. According to data from the Bahia State Court of Auditors, the city collected 27.3 million reais ($5.2 million) in 2025, yet local spending on health and education alone totaled 45.9 million reais ($8.8 million). The city relied on 62.4 million reais ($12 million) from other sources to cover expenses.

When asked if there had been any improvement in the city since the wind power boom, resident Valdenir shook her head. “Nothing has changed. One mayor comes in, another takes over — it’s the same thing,” she said. Regarding jobs, she noted that fewer than 10 people from the community were hired, and those who did find work served as security guards, drivers or construction assistants.

As tax incentives vary by municipality and state, there are no studies quantifying the scale of this tax revenue loss. However, it invariably results in reduced revenue for local areas, according to Rárisson Sampaio, an advisor from Inesc, a think tank that monitors public spending.

Sampaio also said that there is no transparency in the distribution of these incentives, nor any guarantees that they will benefit the communities and territories affected by the investments.

Cicero Elizeu Oliveira da França, the mayor of Gentio do Ouro, was reached for comment, but he was unable to receive us for comments. Questions in writing were also sent to the press office, but there was no response.

• In the Colombian department of La Guajira, at South America’s northernmost tip, Indigenous Wayuu fishers from the community of Punta Gallinas are working with marine biologists to conserve and document shark populations.

• Despite a 2021 law banning targeted shark and ray fishing in Colombia, the meat remains a vital protein source in one of the country’s most remote and food-insecure regions.

• Colombian shark conservation initiative Proyecto Puyuii is working with Wayuu fishers to record shark species in the understudied waters of La Guajira, implementing sustainability measures such as larger-mesh nets, safe release techniques and avoiding longlines.

• With sustainable tourism touted as a potential economic alternative to shark fishing, some fishers argue that compensation will need to be offered before they can afford to stop.

• This article was originally written by Euan Wallace appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

LA GUAJIRA, Colombia — Feet from the ocean, four sharks and a ray lie dead on the wind-battered sand. Above them stands Wilfrido Arends, 46. The blade of a short knife glints in his hand.

Carefully, he bends down to cut a small fin from the underside of one shark — an endangered species known as a blacknose (Carcharhinus acronotus). He hands the sample to a woman next to him, who places it delicately in a vial.

A tape measure is passed over the still glistening back of the dead shark. Each measurement is read out and noted down.

Arends, a fisher from Colombia’s Wayuu Indigenous community, is spearheading shark research and conservation in Punta Gallinas, a Wayuu community where shark meat is part of the traditional diet. Home to around 50 families, the community sits at the northernmost tip of South America.

“If we wipe out our sharks, I think that further down the line we will miss them,” says Arends, who is known locally as “Caracas.”

Together with researchers from Colombian shark conservation initiative Proyecto Puyuii, Arends and other Wayuu fishers are documenting shark diversity in the largely unstudied waters of La Guajira.

“There’s almost no data on anything,” says Diego Cardeñosa, a marine biologist at Florida International University in the U.S. A member of Proyecto Puyuii, he has been training Wayuu fishers to record the shark species they catch.

A 2021 law banned shark and ray fishing in Colombia, with a 2024 revision subsequently allowing the incidental bycatch of 15 species. Despite the ban, the meat remains an important source of protein for Wayuu communities across this stretch of arid desert coast — one of the most food-insecure regions in the country.

While commercial poaching is the leading threat to shark populations in Colombia, biologists say that without additional research even traditional subsistence hunting can increase pressure on sharks, possibly affecting their numbers or threatening endangered species — as happened with overconsumption of turtles.

Proyecto Puyuii aims to promote economic alternatives for fishers, minimize pressure on the local shark population with scientific research and implement sustainable fishing practices.

The consumption of sharks is accepted by the project, as it is a traditional practice and form of subsistence. But directed shark fishing (generally practiced with longlines in the deeper ocean) is not encouraged. A more sustainable model would limit consumption to incidental bycatch, which depending on the species is not illegal, and include safe release techniques of juveniles.

“If the fisher earns more showing it than killing it, there’s the solution,” says Felipe González, who co-founded the project with Arends over a decade ago. “How do we make these sharks worth more alive than dead?”

‘I gave up shark-directed fishing many years ago’

Like many Wayuu boys in the region, Arends began fishing at the age of 9. As a child, he watched his grandparents hunt shark species ranging from hammerheads to tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier).

“As I got older I took to fishing them too, because it was a custom of the Wayuu,” says Arends, who recalls participating in a once booming trade that saw shark meat and fins exchanged for money, fuel or resources with buyers in neighboring Venezuela.

“You’d sell it and buy fuel to keep fishing,” he remembers. “We’d buy nets and hooks. That’s how we kept ourselves going.” At this time, fishers in Punta Gallinas would use artisanal longlines specialized for shark fishing, as well as finer-mesh gillnets that result in higher levels of shark bycatch. According to Arends, the trade began to disappear from Punta Gallinas over a decade ago, before vanishing from the community with the 2021 prohibition.

Local fishers told Mongabay that other Wayuu communities do still participate in a market, with buyers from the towns of Riohacha and Uribia paying around 50,000 Colombian pesos (about $15) per kilo for shark fins.

Though the fin trade is absent in Punta Gallinas, shark meat is still commonly consumed in the community, forming the key ingredient in a traditional dish known as salpicón. Oil is also extracted from the carcasses and used for cooking, while the liver is used in the production of a traditional cough medicine.

Whatever meat is not consumed by the fisher’s own family is typically sold to locally owned hotels and restaurants. Biologists have not assessed the mercury levels (which could be harmful at high concentrations) of shark meat in Punta Gallinas. González says it may be low and is currently not a concern of the project.

“It’s an important protein source,” Arends says, “the first source we have here to feed ourselves and our children is shark.”

Despite the ongoing subsistence use in his community, Arends is determined to promote shark conservation.

“Now I fish mostly with nets — I’ve stopped using what we call the longline, because that fishing is more directed at sharks,” he says. “I gave up shark-directed fishing many years ago.”

Since the early 2000s, Arends has worked on community-based mangrove and sea turtle conservation. Locals report that sea turtles, once a common sight, have disappeared from the area due to overconsumption in local Wayuu communities.

“What happened with the turtles — we don’t want the same thing to happen with the sharks,” he says.

He and other Punta Gallinas fishers began to use large-mesh nets to avoid catching juvenile sharks, focusing instead on other fish species by placing nets away from the open sea, where sharks are commonly found.

If he catches a shark incidentally, it will be released if found alive.

Locals report that these measures have been widely adopted in Punta Gallinas. And, according to Arends, around 17 boats out of an estimated 20 in the community no longer practice shark-directed fishing. Numbers aren’t available on how many have also changed to larger-mesh nets.

“You feel like your programming has been changed — from hunter to protector,” he says. “You feel almost the same as what the animals feel.”

‘A high concentration of shark species’

Though still largely understudied, biologists believe that the waters around Punta Gallinas are likely to contain a wealth of shark diversity.

“In La Guajira and other parts of the Colombian Caribbean, there appears to be a high concentration of ray and shark species,” says Camilo Garcia, professor of marine biology at the National University of Colombia, who mapped the distribution of sharks and rays across the Colombian Caribbean using research data from as far back as the 1960s.

Though his work identified a total of 90 species, he describes the inventory as “incomplete” and believes that further research is needed to establish sustainable catch levels and ensure the sustainability of current and future fishing practices.

In Punta Gallinas, Wayuu fishers have reported the presence of species ranging from tiger and silky sharks to endangered blacknose and the critically endangered smalleye hammerhead (Sphyrna tudes).

Cardeñosa believes that Proyecto Puyuii’s drive to document shark species is a crucial step toward facilitating more informed conservation measures in the future, such as fishing quotas and conservation areas.

As part of the project, Wayuu fishers measure every shark they catch, with dated fin samples passed to Arends for storage.

“This is going to give us a bigger picture of the species composition of the fishery, how much they’re catching and whether it can be sustainable,” Cardeñosa says. “Then we can start to formulate more advanced projects.”

‘What are we going to live off?’

Amid mounting food and water insecurity across La Guajira’s desert coast, a potential transition away from shark fishing is a challenging proposition for some communities. The Wayuu fishers Mongabay spoke to generally consider the 2021 law unfair on communities that still subsist on shark.

Locals report that a lack of rain in 2025’s wet season resulted in widespread plant and livestock death. Luzmila Arends, sister of Wilfrido, reports losing around 247 of her 300 goats after the failed rainy season left little vegetation to feed them. Goats are another common source of meat in Wayuu communities.

Meanwhile, one in three children in the region suffers from chronic malnutrition.

“Many people live off of shark meat,” says Juan Manuel Uriana, 33, leader of the fishers’ association in Bahía Hondita, a larger Wayuu community around 7 kilometers (about 4 miles) from Punta Gallinas. “Since there’s no other way for people to live, they do it to survive … they know it’s a crime now.”

According to Uriana, many of the 120 fishers in Bahía Hondita use hooks and longlines to catch sharks and rays, a trade they still rely on for survival.

“You have to compensate people. Then they would stop fishing shark,” he says. “What are we going to live off?”

Proyecto Puyuii members hope that sustainable tourism can provide alternative opportunities. The project is currently affiliated with a Wayuu-run hotel and kite surfing school in the area, a short drive from the famous Taroa sand dunes — a renowned beauty spot.

“The idea is that the money stays in the community,” González says, “that the tourist arrives, sleeps in their guesthouse, eats what they prepare, uses their boats and their guides.”

For some in Punta Gallinas, this has already become a reality.

“I’m earning more now,” says Alexi López, 56, uncle of Wilfrido Arends. Once one of Punta Gallinas’ most prolific shark fishers, he now makes most of his living driving cars and boats for tourists. “It’s easier [than fishing] because I go out, am done in two hours and am back home again.”

Luzmila Arends runs a local guesthouse, which offers visitors the chance to accompany fishers on boat outings.

She hopes that economically viable alternatives will help the community to shift away from a historical dependence on shark meat. “It’s all culture,” she says. “It’s not that we talk today and tomorrow it’s done, but that people go forwards with that vision for the future. It won’t happen overnight.”

‘Better we release them’

Even amongst those who live off shark fishing, there is evidence of a growing willingness to protect what remains.

“If this project works out, we can participate in conservation, we can work with this,” Uriana says. “The people are open to it.”

In May 2026, fishers in Bahía Hondita caught a large female tiger shark. On opening the animal, they found that it was pregnant. “One of the boys was going to gather [the pups] to take them away,” Uriana says. “I said: no, why are you going to take them? Better we release them.”

According to marine biologists, the protection of young sharks is of particular importance for a sustainable fishery. “More dangerous is fishing juveniles,” Garcia says. “If you catch them, especially before they’ve reproduced, you’re destroying the population directly.”

Using safe release techniques learned from Proyecto Puyuii, Uriana released 43 living tiger shark pups into the ocean.

He speaks from behind dark glasses and the low brim of a cap. “We started releasing them with the children,” he says.

A group of young boys, aged between 8 and 12, watches on as he talks. Uriana gestures to them. “They already know how to fish,” he says.

Back on his fishing boat, Wilfrido Arends scans the horizon, one hand guiding the onboard motor at the rear. A ragged black flag, marking the position of his net, appears from behind the crest of a wave.

Without a word, his 22-year-old son moves to haul it into the boat. He is nicknamed “Caraquitas” (“Little Caracas”) after his father.

“Everything we’ve tried to do is to leave something for our children,” says Arends, whose granddaughter and one of his sons want to become marine biologists. Arends, himself, dreams of one day establishing a shark research center in Punta Gallinas.

“Our ancestors have left this to us,” he says. “We want to leave something better for those who come next.”

Banner image: Wilfrido Arends’ 22-year-old son, known as “Caraquitas” (“Little Caracas”) after his father, hauls a fishing net into the boat. Image by Euan Wallace.

• Wildlife conservationist Bill Konstant has spent more than four decades helping build species-conservation programs, connect field biologists with funding, and support threatened wildlife around the world.

• Konstant argues that successful conservation often depends on strong local leadership, committed species champions, diverse teams and relatively small, strategically targeted grants that can launch or sustain field projects.

• He sees the growth of career biologists and conservation organizations in primate range countries as one of the field’s most encouraging changes, even as habitat loss and wildlife population declines remain persistent problems.

• Konstant spoke with Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler in August 2026 about his career, his memoir Wrestles With Wolves, and what decades of species conservation have taught him about how conservation succeeds.

Russell Mittermeier has a running joke about Bill Konstant. The two have worked together, off and on, for more than four decades, and Mittermeier writes in the foreword to Wrestles With Wolves that Konstant seems to have a tolerance of roughly five years working directly for him before departing for another organization.

Konstant has an explanation for that pattern. He has never been much interested in becoming a “company man.” Instead, he has compared his role to that of a catalyst in a chemical reaction — something that helps raise the energy of the system but need not remain once the reaction is underway.

There have been plenty of reactions.

Konstant has worked for the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, built conservation programs at zoos, and helped direct grants to field biologists working on threatened species. Much of his career has centered on primates, although the animals in his 2023 memoir range from golden frogs and rhinos to wolves, elephants and a squirrel his family raised when he was young.

The route into professional conservation was less orderly than the résumé makes it look.

At Cornell University, Konstant became an undergraduate teaching assistant for ornithologist Tom Cade, founder of the Peregrine Fund, whose work helped restore peregrine falcons after DDT contributed to steep population declines. Later, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Konstant took a job caring for and training chimpanzees. Jane Goodall had helped spark his interest in the animals, but it was Mittermeier — then a primatologist at Stony Brook — who helped turn that interest into a career.

Konstant went looking for him. In the memoir, he recounts learning that Mittermeier tended to work late and waiting outside his office until he appeared. Mittermeier eventually hired him at WWF, brought him to Brazil and introduced him to primatologists working in the field.

Konstant’s job was to help those researchers find the resources they needed to run their projects. That proved useful for what followed.

At the Houston Zoo, for example, Konstant worked with longtime colleague Rick Barongi to expand what he describes as a dormant, low-six-figure conservation program into one roughly an order of magnitude larger. In other roles, the sums have been much smaller. Konstant has spent years involved with grant programs in which a few thousand dollars can help a field biologist begin collecting data on a poorly known species, keep a project going between larger awards or demonstrate enough progress to attract additional funding.

He says small grants can fill gaps that larger conservation funding does not. The best field biologists, he says, often become adept at “cobbling together funds from multiple sources.”

Over the years, Konstant has seen a lot of successes — and failures — in conservation, many of which revolve around leadership. A zoo conservation program can languish if the director is not committed, he says; staff have to feel involved, boards need to support the work, and species need champions. The strongest efforts, in his experience, assemble what he calls a “motley crew” — people with different backgrounds and abilities who can be brought to bear on the same problem.

Konstant spoke with me during an August 2026 exchange.

An interview with Bill Konstant

Rhett Ayers Butler for Mongabay: You describe yourself in Wrestles With Wolves as someone drawn to animals from a very young age. What is your origin story as a conservationist?

Bill Konstant: I can remember beginning to think about working with wild animals as a career in my early teenage years. On Sunday afternoons, my family would watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler and I could imagine myself lassoing an alligator or tranquilizing a bear.

When it came time to apply to college, Cornell University was my first choice. It had strong biology and wildlife conservation programs, and since I was a New York resident, I qualified for reduced tuition and a state scholarship.

I really lucked out when I was recruited as an undergraduate teaching assistant for Dr. Tom Cade’s vertebrate anatomy class.

Dr. Cade directed Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology and founded The Peregrine Fund. During my four years at Cornell the Fund developed the captive breeding and reintroduction program that helped save not only the peregrine falcon but osprey, bald eagle and brown pelican populations across the country.

Mongabay: Was there a particular animal, place, or person that first made you think this could become your life’s work?

Bill Konstant: In Wrestles with Wolves, I tell the reader right off the bat that my life can easily be summed up in just four words – “Mowgli meets Forrest Gump.” I have what I’d call an innate fondness for animals and a learned understanding of animal behavior, just like Mowgli the Man Cub in the Jungle Book.

Then there’s the fact that I just seem to stumble upon one opportunity after another to help save threatened wildlife and have somehow been able to weave these together into what I guess you could call a career.

If I had to credit a single species for making that possible, I’d have to say the chimpanzee. As for a place, I’d have to say the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I was hired to care for and train chimpanzees.

As for a person, I’d have to name two. It was Dr. Jane Goodall who first inspired my interest in chimpanzees. We became good friends over the years and I wish Jane well on her next great journey, whatever that may be.

In the end, I credit Dr. Russell Mittermeier with putting me on a career course. Russ hired me as his assistant at the World Wildlife Fund, took me to Brazil, introduced me to a number of primatologists and told me it was my job to help them find the resources they needed to run their field projects. Pretty straightforward on-the-job training.

Mongabay: Why did you choose Wrestles With Wolves as the title of the book?

Bill Konstant: “Wrestling” With Wolves was my original choice. Even though there’s only one wolf story in the whole book, I’d play-wrestle with a gray wolf and my wife, Nannette, was able to snap a few shots of our “match”.

Then maybe I got “a bit too clever by half” and decided to piggy-back on William Blake’s and Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves. It’s one of my all-time favorites, but you’ll recall that neither the book nor the movie is really about wolves, so I figured that I’d follow their lead and perhaps share their success.

So, I imagined that a Native American who might be observing me could easily decide to name me Wrestles with Wolves. Readers will quickly figure out that the book is not just about wolves as they come upon stories of golden frogs in Panama, lemurs in Madagascar and rhinos in Indonesia.

Mongabay: What made you want to write the book after so many years in conservation, and what did you want readers to understand from its many species and stories?

Bill Konstant: I decided to write the memoir while taking an adult education course at a local library. Over the years, my work has required the preparation of grant proposals, project reports, scientific papers, magazine articles, books chapters and the like, not opportunities to tell stories, which I enjoy doing.

People quickly forget lists of facts but tend to remember the important points that are embedded in stories. I’d waited long enough to share the stories I’ve collected over the years and this was a chance to treat a serious subject with a touch of humor, because no one wants to be fed a steady diet of doom and gloom – habitat loss, illegal hunting, disease, human-wildlife conflict, global warming and the list goes on.

I’d like my readers to feel good when they pick up something I’ve written, to want to turn the page and learn that people not very different from them have found a variety of ways to enjoy nature and perhaps play a role in saving species. Folks whose favorite creatures might be lions, African elephants or mountain gorillas might be encouraged to go on safari and see these animals up close and personal, as I’ve been able to do.

Mongabay: Your next book appears to begin with “Accepting the Universe.” What did you still feel you needed to say after Wrestles With Wolves?

Bill Konstant: The next book, which I’m in the middle of writing and have yet to pitch to a publisher, will begin with a tribute to the late John Burroughs. A collection of his writings fill one of the bookshelves in my den.

Burroughs wrote prodigiously about nature and wildlife conservation. He “talked the talk” and “walked the walk” well into his golden years and as one of the most influential biologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I can imagine myself following in Burrough’s footsteps. Accepting the Universe, a stab at determining the meaning of it all, was one of his later books but not his last. He wrote it in Slabsides, the log cabin he’d built by hand in New York’s Catskill Mountains, the cabin where then President Teddy Roosevelt might stop by for lunch and a chat.

My writing nook isn’t quite so historic but I’m not hurting for tales that remain untold and it seems that new story ideas pop up all the time. For instance, the next book will tell about the time, many years ago, that two pythons bit me at the same time. And now, I have new anecdotes about manatees in Cuba and toads in Israel.

Mongabay: You write about climbing Kilimanjaro with Rick Barongi to mark your 70th birthdays. What did that experience make you think about at this stage of your life and conservation career?

Bill Konstant: Let’s be clear. Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro was Rick’s idea and he asked me to come along for the ride. Not that I didn’t want to give it a try but wouldn’t have thought up the adventure on my own. Rick was Bill Bryson in A Walk in the Woods and I was his sidekick, Matt.

That being said, summiting Kili was an incredibly enriching experience. It replenished my spirit and renewed my confidence in my own abilities. Despite being one of the older climbers to stand there at the top at close to 20,000 feet, I felt youthful for having met the challenge and anxious to tackle new ones.

During the climb, I began to reminisce and quickly realized that there were many tasks left unfinished, as well as people and places I needed to revisit.

I needed to prepare myself for the next adventure, the one after that and the one after that. But they need not involve mountains.

Basically, I began thinking about seriously attacking the bucket list I’d written just before the climb – the first item on the list. Why waste any time planning trips to see aye-ayes, tigers and other species that I’ve always wanted to see in the wild?

Mongabay: You have worked on primate conservation for much of your career. What has changed most in the field since you began, and what has not changed enough?

Bill Konstant: Yes, primates have been the major focus of my career in wildlife conservation. In most cases, endangered primates serve as flagship species for entire groups of plants and animals that may be under threat of extinction. This is especially true in many of the world’s tropical forest regions.

I’d have to say that the most important change I’ve seen over the last 40 years is the encouraging increase in the number of career biologists from primate range countries, as well as the emergence of primatological societies and small non-governmental organizations in those same countries and regions. Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Vietnam and a handful of other countries are good examples of where this is happening.

Armies of wildlife conservationists are being assembled and that bodes well for the future.

At the same time, we’ve not done as good a job of stemming habitat loss and population declines. But we can do better. The game isn’t over yet.

Mongabay: You’ve been involved with “Primates in Peril” for many years. What has that effort accomplished, and what are the limits of using lists and attention campaigns to help threatened species?

Bill Konstant: I was there at the beginning of Primates in Peril in the program’s earliest days and wrote about my involvement in the upcoming book.

This international effort convenes at bi-annual meetings of the International Primatological Society, bringing together the world’s leading primate conservation experts to list The World’s Top 25 Most Endangered Primates.

The original list was launched in January 2000, appearing on the front page of Timemagazine.

Several of the original 25 species still make the list and may continue to do so unless they fall over the brink.

The list has become a major fundraising tool over the decades, not only drawing attention to the threats that continue to face these lemurs, monkeys and apes, but also to opportunities for supporting their conservation.

It’s difficult to put limits on the usefulness of lists like these. For example, a fair number of Primates in Peril species have been named as candidates for support from the Phoenix Species Project, a recently announced $200 million global initiative.

Mongabay: You have worked with organizations including WWF, Conservation International, zoos, Re:wild, and species-conservation funds. In your experience, what usually determines whether a species program succeeds?

Bill Konstant: In my experience, programs succeed because of good leadership that builds team strength and momentum.

For example, if a zoo director isn’t fully behind, excited about and willing to promote the institution’s conservation program, that program will languish. If the staff doesn’t feel involved, it will wither and die. If the institution’s board isn’t packed with movers-and-shakers who like to put on their conservation caps, get out into the field and get their hands dirty, then that institution’s conservation programs will be lackluster at best.

Then there’s the need for champions. Each species needs one at the very least.

In my opinion, the most successful species conservation programs are those capable of assembling a “motley crew” of players and supporters, people of various backgrounds and talents that can be brought to bear on the tasks at hand.

Diversity is not only important in biology.

I serve as an advisor to the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund along with close to a dozen colleagues whose collective expertise spans the world’s mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, plants and fungi. The grants we’re able to award span the globe and are increasingly being received by young biologists from countries where critical resources are often difficult to come by.

Mongabay: You have helped support many small grants for species conservation. Why can relatively small amounts of money matter so much for endangered species?

Bill Konstant: Most species conservationists work in remote areas where, fortunately, modest amounts of funding can go a long way and have significant impact. Small, targeted grants can serve as important seed money for projects operating at the grass-roots level.

They provide funders with a better sense of how well grantees can manage field research efforts in combination with program administration.

The first grant received by an applicant for work on a species for which data is deficient can be very important, not only to get the ball rolling but to attract matching funds from other sources.

The most resourceful field biologists who become adept at cobbling together funds from multiple sources. In addition, small grants can very nicely fill in gaps in funding provided by much larger programs.

Even the most prominent sources, such as the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, for example, can’t provide all the necessary resources, so a small grant here or there from other donors can actually make a big difference.

Mongabay: Zoos have played a role in parts of your career. How do you see the relationship between zoos and field conservation today?

Bill Konstant: Over the last quarter century, zoos have played an increasingly important role in species conservation worldwide. I’ve had the opportunity to help develop conservation programs, essentially from the ground up, at several US zoos and I continue to work closely with zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens internationally in different advisory roles.

Committing to Conservation: The World Zoo and Aquarium Conservation Strategy was published in 2015 and my Kilimanjaro climbing partner, Rick Barongi, was the senior editor.

A decade earlier, Rick, then director of the Houston Zoo, and Russ Mittermeier, then president of Conservation International, shared my services for a year so that I might help Rick revitalize the Houston Zoo’s wildlife conservation program. Together, we took what was a dormant, low six-figure program and built one an order-of-magnitude larger that had global impact.

Other zoos and aquariums have different models but, pretty much across the board, these institutions are committing a greater percentage of their budgets to field conservation.

Mongabay: Conservation often involves long timelines, setbacks, and uncertain outcomes. What gives you hope, and what advice would you give young people who want to contribute?

Bill Konstant: Yes, there’s no simple recipe, is there? In my first job as director of a small conservation organization, I was told by the late British naturalist and author, Gerald Durrell, that if I couldn’t commit to a project for the long term, I shouldn’t commit at all. Good advice.

If a species is endangered, it didn’t get that way overnight, so there’s not one grant, one person or one institution that has any chance of bringing it back quickly.

And, yes, trial and error will almost always factor into the equation but we tend to learn more from our failures than from our successes, at least initially.

Winston Churchill once said, “Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” There would seem to be an element of hope in that statement, enough for me to bank on.

As for advice to young folks who want to contribute, I would say get in touch with people at your local zoo, aquarium or botanical garden and let them know what your interests are. These institutions represent a wealth of information and opportunity – a valuable resource to be sure.

I’ll give you an example. My wife, Nannette, is not a biologist. She’s a registered nurse-turned-quilter who shares my love of wildlife. A few years back she made a colorful quilt based on Albrecht Durer’s famous 16th century woodcut of an Indian rhino and donated it to the Houston Zoo. The Zoo auctioned it off for several thousand dollars, enough to help reintroduce one of these rare animals to Kaziranga National Park. Someday, I’ll take Nannette to India to see the results of her handiwork firsthand.

Banner image: Bill Konstant with a camel in the UAE. Photo by Jean-Christophe Vie

• The Iraya Mangyan ancestral forestland supports hundreds of plant and animal species, including many that are rare, threatened or found only on the Philippines’ Mindoro Island.

• Culturally important birds include the Mindoro racket-tail (Prioniturus mindorensis), Mindoro boobook (Ninox mindorensis) and Mindoro scops owl (Otus mindorensis), whose calls and behaviors guide weather preparation, farming decisions and spiritual practices.

• Iraya knowledge also links medicinal plants, wildlife and healing, showing how customary beliefs can regulate harvesting, discourage disturbance and protect forest habitats.

• Community-led documentation will help carry this knowledge into ancestral-domain planning, ecotrail interpretation and broader conservation of Mindoro’s endemic wildlife.

• This article was originally written by Keith Anthony Fabro appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

PUERTO GALERA, Philippines — The forest settles into a gentle rhythm as the trail climbs into the Iraya Mangyan ancestral domain in Puerto Galera town, on the Philippines’ Mindoro Island.

Only birdsong breaks the silence as towering trees sway overhead. A clear stream tumbles across the trail over smooth rocks.

Ahead walks 43-year-old Lenito Pampilo.

Every few steps, he stops — not because the climb is difficult, but because the forest is speaking, he says. He points to an unseen bird in the canopy. Another answers from farther uphill. For him, each call carries meaning.

“Our elders taught us these birds,” he tells Mongabay.

Pampilo, an Iraya community leader and ecotrail guide, has spent much of his life in these mountains. His knowledge goes beyond recognizing species. “Some birds signal changing weather, warn of danger or carry messages between the living and spirit worlds,” he says. “Trees, streams and ridges also hold stories passed from one generation to the next.”

For the Iraya, the forest is a largely unwritten living archive.

As elders age and fewer young people learn beside them, the Center for Conservation Innovations Philippines (CCIPH) is helping Iraya knowledge holders document wildlife, medicinal plants and culturally important places under its Mindoro Forest and Biodiversity Conservation Programme (MFBCP), a REDD+ carbon finance initiative in eastern Mindoro Island.

This includes the UNESCO-designated Puerto Galera Biosphere Reserve, which overlaps with the Iraya Mangyan’s roughly 40,000-hectare (98,800-acre) ancestral domain, home to about 2,500 households, according to the CCIPH. The Iraya have used and managed its forests, settlements and culturally important places across generations.

The information will contribute to the Iraya’s Ancestral Domain Sustainable Development and Protection Plan (ADSDPP), and an ecotrail being co-developed with the community.

“The environmental information gathered from the community becomes part of their ADSDPP,” says Rey Luna, CCIPH project management adviser and former Oriental Mindoro provincial officer of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP). “From those data, the community can determine what projects are appropriate for their land.”

Luna says he envisions guides explaining why trees matter, how places were named and why some grounds are sacred.

“You’re not just walking through the forest — you learn the story of the place,” he says.

Where every bird tells a story

CCIPH surveys have recorded C517 species across the program area, including 134 animal and 154 plant species considered rare, threatened or endemic. These include 42 bird species, among them three culturally important endemics.

Pampilo began learning about birds as a child, when he and his friends playfully mimicked the siruk, or Mindoro boobook (Ninox mindorensis).

More birds answered until their calls surrounded the village. “The elders told us, ‘You’re teasing them,’” Pampilo recalls. “Then we all ran.”

Families spent the night elsewhere in the mountains, fearing malevolent spirits might pass through the settlement.

“We didn’t even bring our belongings,” Pampilo says. “We just left.”

Younger generations respond differently, he says, but the lesson remains: Do not provoke the bird. “We simply let it sing,” he says.

The sulit, or Mindoro scops owl (Otus mindorensis), carries another spiritual meaning. Some Iraya associate it with departed relatives, Pampilo says, and release any accidentally trapped bird.

For Pampilo, these customs teach restraint toward other forest beings.

The turis, or Mindoro racket-tail (Prioniturus mindorensis), provides practical guidance. Lenito’s cousin, Bernito Pampilo, an Iraya forest patroller recalls the parrots gathering noisily in one tree when he was about 9.

His father interpreted their behavior as a storm warning. That night, a powerful typhoon struck, forcing the family to shelter beneath the buttress roots of a large tree as their house was damaged.

“When I see them gather like that, I prepare,” Bernito tells Mongabay.

Such observations guided travel, farming and storm preparations before forecasts reached mountain communities.

Today, Christianity has also become part of Iraya religious life. Pampilo, who also volunteers in Catholic catechism for children, says Christianity has not entirely displaced Iraya spiritual traditions. He describes the two as coexisting.

“We now combine our beliefs with Catholicism, but not all our traditions have disappeared,” he says. “We keep what is most important to us.”

All three bird species are endemic to Mindoro and are declining due to deforestation and infrastructure development. The IUCN Red List classifies the Mindoro boobook and Mindoro racket-tail as vulnerable and the Mindoro scops owl as near threatened.

Currently, CCIPH-supported Indigenous patrollers monitor forests and report logging, hunting and other threats, while government personnel inspect ports and municipal borders for trafficked wildlife. The local government also conducts annual terrestrial biodiversity assessments, supplemented by CCIPH monitoring and targeted surveys of threatened and Mindoro-endemic species.

Ronet Santos, a bird photographer and senior program operations manager of the D’Aboville Foundation, a nonprofit environmental organization working in Mindoro, says the three birds also indicate forest health. The Mindoro racket-tail helps disperse seeds while the Mindoro boobook and Mindoro scops owl provide natural pest control by keeping prey populations in check.

“Long-term Indigenous observations can complement scientific knowledge and conservation initiatives by providing a complete temporal picture of these species’ behavior,” Santos tells Mongabay. “It’s not easy for scientists to observe species over the long term, and when they do, they need local Indigenous guides. Indigenous peoples are in the area throughout the year, while scientists only ‘bungee jump’ into the area for short periods.”

Santos adds that many of Mindoro’s remaining endemic species occur within Indigenous ancestral domains, making community collaboration vital for long-term monitoring. In the foundation’s tamaraw (Bubalus mindorensis) work, Indigenous observations have helped researchers assess age classes and reproduction.

Plants carry knowledge, too

The documentation extends beyond birds.

Lilay Ronquillo, an Iraya woman and program administrative assistant, recalls turning to an ambuyan, or traditional healer, when her young daughter developed fever and disturbing episodes at night.

The healer performed a marayaw, a ritual of prayer and chanting, while preparing remedies gathered from the forest.

“That was where my daughter recovered,” Ronquillo tells Mongabay. “The forest is our pharmacy. Everything we need is there.”

Rickson Panganiban, 29, wants to become a healer after a similar childhood experience. At about 9, he developed fever and persistent vomiting. With the nearest hospital then hours away on foot, his family brought him to a healer who performed a marayaw and gave him boiled guava leaves and kamadeya, a medicinal herb. He says he recovered after three days.

“I want to become a healer,” he tells Mongabay. “But I don’t want to rely on the orasyon [talismanic prayer]. What I want are the herbal medicines.”

He now learns about medicinal plants from elders.

“If the forest disappears, the plants will also disappear,” he says. “The young people should study the forest so we will know how to preserve its plants and trees.”

For Pederico Garcia, a 90-year-old ambuyan, plants are only one part of healing. He says unseen beings also inhabit the forest. “The forest is where our companions are,” Garcia tells Mongabay. “We cannot see them, but they can see us.”

He says illness may follow when people unknowingly disturb them, requiring prayer and ritual to restore harmony. Though many youths remain reticent to these beliefs, conservationists say they can yield tangible conservation benefits.

Culture as conservation

“When I hear that a tree cannot be cut because it is sacred to them, that is already one less tree for me to guard,” says Joan Yap, manager of the Puerto Galera Biosphere Reserve and head of the municipal environment office. “They are the ones protecting it. They will not allow the place to be destroyed, entered or disturbed.”

During CCIPH-led focus groups, Iraya men and women reinforced shared further teachings: They described the turis as a storm warning, the sulit as a bird whose call may halt house construction or farm clearing, and the siruk as a beneficial owl that controls rats around farms.

“Our consultations found that livelihoods, cultural practice and spiritual life are all rooted in the same relationship with forest, river and land,” says Lisa Hartmann, a researcher with the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) who conducted consultations with Iraya community members for the REDD+ program. “Freshwater, food, medicinal plants and building materials come from these ecosystems, but so do intergenerational knowledge systems, spiritual connections to sacred forest sites, and a place to rest and recover.”

Hartmann says participants also described declining food, medicinal plants and especially freshwater, echoing Indigenous accounts of drying springs and streams.

“What stood out was how directly ecological loss translates into cultural and social loss,” she says.

Yet much of the Iraya knowledge surrounding these species remains undocumented.

“There are so many stories. There is so much culture. There is so much history that we haven’t captured yet,” Yap says.

She cautions that documentation must not become another form of extraction. Knowledge from an ancestral domain belongs to the community and must pass through customary leaders and approval processes.

Luna says CCIPH secured free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) before the project began. Community members decide what may be shared publicly and what remains private.

One approved use is the planned ecotrail. Luna says Iraya guides could connect wildlife and sacred places with forest-grown coffee, handicrafts and other products, creating livelihoods beyond future carbon revenue. He cautions that carbon finance should remain only one option because markets and returns are uncertain.

Back on the trail, Pampilo pauses beneath the towering trees as birds call from deep within the forest. “When the turis, siruk and sulit are still here, it means our forest is still beautiful,” he says.

“If they disappear, our forest will disappear with them.”

Banner image:The siruk, or Mindoro boobook (Ninox mindorensis), in Puerto Galera. Image by John Bibar | Center for Conservation Innovations PH Inc.

• The jaguarundi needs more attention, researchers say. This small cat, ranging from Mexico to Argentina, was recently recategorized from least concern to near threatened on the IUCN Red List.

• Despite the species’ large territory, monitoring data suggests it’s rare, now among the least abundant felids across its range. Conservationists also warn some populations are in decline due to human-wildlife conflict, dangerous roadways, attacks by dogs and infectious disease.

• With relatively little field study or funding for research, there are huge gaps in researchers’ understanding of this cat, but conservationists hope this change in conservation status will spark greater attention.

• This article was originally written by Sean Mowbray appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

Distinct for their rather uncat-like appearance, jaguarundis have long flown under the research and conservation radar. However, its latest uplisting to near threatened on the IUCN Red List could change that.

These small cats — weighing up to around 7 kilograms (15 pounds) — roam savannah and forest landscapes across a massive range stretching from Mexico through Central America and all the way to southern Brazil and Argentina.

Tadeu de Oliveira, co-chair of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group, who led the latest review, said the assessment had to battle against the perception that jaguarundis are common and, thus, not threatened.

That’s partly because, as a diurnal species, they roam and hunt in open spaces during the day, making them more visible than many other feline species, he said. They also inhabit degraded, less-than-pristine landscapes.

“If you have a forest and that becomes savannah-like, it will mimic the ideal habitat for the species,” de Oliveira said. “It’s not [the jaguarundi’s] favorable habitat, but it will allow it to be there.”

As this cat moves through open spaces, it is more frequently seen than other feline species that live in dense forest.

“It’s easier to be seen and because of that, people perceived it as common,” de Oliveira said. “But when you quantify it data-wise, it shows to be otherwise.”

After gathering available data from researchers along the length and breadth of the jaguarundi’s range — and canvassing experts’ views — de Oliveira and his team found that the species is not only rare, it’s among the least abundant felids in most of its range, save for a couple of locations in Mexico and Brazil. The population of mature jaguarundis is estimated at 13,000.

Another decisive factor is that the Amazon was previously considered a possible safe haven for this small cat, but that’s no longer the case. That’s partly due to its large home range, with males roaming up 100 square kilometers (38.6 square miles) in some locations.

“The absence of the Amazon as a safe haven for the species allowed it to fit into the [near threatened] criteria,” de Oliveira said. “The cat is really not abundant anywhere.”

Flávia Tirelli led Brazil’s last assessment of the jaguarundi, when it was classified as vulnerable, and currently coordinates the Geoffroy’s Cat Working Group. She noted that, “this change highlights the need to pay closer attention to species that, despite wide distributions, can have highly varying abundances across different locations.”

“Wide ranges face a broader variety of threats at different intensities, which means we might be losing genetic variability in certain areas,” Tirelli said.

Moving beyond ‘bycatch’ data

That shift in status could mean greater research and conservation attention for a species that’s long moved in the shadows, said Mariam Weston-Flores, who co-authored the assessment and serves as chair of the Ocelot Working Group, said.

Even among small cat species that are understudied, the jaguarundi is an outlier, with few dedicated studies. Most available data have been gathered during research focused on other species, known as “bycatch” data, often with images of this cat walking through camera traps set to census other animals.

“It’s hard to get records of it because nobody’s targeting the species,” Weston-Flores said in an interview with Mongabay.

Part of the challenge is that typical conservation strategies — such as protecting forests or promoting habitat restoration — aren’t necessarily suitable for this species. Though the assessment highlights the need for protection of key habitats, such as Brazil’s Cerrado — tropical savanna — and the semi-arid forests of the Caatinga, it emphasizes the need for strengthening connectivity, experts say.

“It’s a very opportunistic species,” Weston-Flores said. “If you have conservation strategies that … focus only on protecting habitat, maybe you’re not targeting the right threats for this cat.”

These include wildlife conflict with farmers and chicken owners, retaliatory killings when cats kill poultry, as well as dangers they face on roadways and disease, such as mange spread by domestic and feral dogs and rabies.

The report included a host of recommended conservation interventions, such as constructing predator-proof chicken coops and “jaguarundi-friendly infrastructure” to protect wildlife corridors with underpasses beneath busy roadways in prime habitat. Dog vaccination campaigns organized across the Americas are also helping to stem the spread of disease.

Weston-Flores hopes that this near threatened listing will help garner greater interest in the species from funding organizations. Tirelli echoed this: “I hope it encourages more targeted studies using different methodologies tailored for a rare, diurnal open-area species,” she said.

With declines observed in some locations, the assessment authors recommend ongoing, targeted monitoring, as this cat could move closer to vulnerable status.

“I would say the take-home message is for people to rely on data, on information. Not on perceptions when trying to assess a species’ status,” de Oliveira said.

“Let’s rely on information. Let’s try to get data on populations. Let’s monitor populations. Because without this, we wouldn’t have been able to switch the jaguarundi to a proper criteria of threat.”

Banner image: A jaguarundi at a zoo in Germany. Image by Cloudtail the Snow Leopard via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

I had been struck by photographs of the Cerros de Mavicure rising above the forest and the Inírida River in eastern Colombia. The dark rock, exposed against an almost unbroken expanse of green, seemed unlike anywhere else I had visited in the Amazon.

Last month, ahead of Mongabay Latam’s PUMA FEST in Bogotá, I finally had the chance to visit. I traveled with Daniela Quintero Díaz, Mongabay Latam’s investigations editor, and Oilber Díaz, a member of the Puinave people who guided us through the region.

The three main hills, Mavicure, Mono and Pajarito, are outcrops of the Guiana Shield. They span two Indigenous territories. Mavicure, the hill visitors climb, lies within El Venado, while Mono and Pajarito are within El Remanso. Each territory has a nearby community of the same name. The hills are regarded as sacred by Indigenous peoples in the region. In Puinave tradition, they are connected to stories of creation, animals, family, and the rules governing relations between people and the natural world.

Dreyk, a member of the Cubeo people from the Venado community, led us up Mavicure. The trail crossed steep granite, with forest growing in narrow seams and pockets of soil. From higher ground, the scale of the landscape became clearer. The hills rose abruptly from the canopy, while the Inírida curved around them. We reached a viewpoint in time for a beautiful sunset. On the descent after dark, frogs and geckos appeared along the trail.

The following morning offered a completely different scene. Wisps of cloud moved across the hills, at times obscuring their summits. Eventually, low clouds settled between them, creating the appearance of islands rising above a white sea.

Much of the trip was spent on rivers. They are the main routes through the region, connecting Inírida with communities, forests, fishing grounds, and places of cultural importance. Visitors depend on local residents for boats, lodging, food, and guidance. Travel by water makes clear how closely life here is organized around seasonal changes in river levels.

The rivers were unusually high. Although this is normally the peak flood season, local residents said the water was near the upper end of what they could remember. During the dry season, Oilber told us, parts of the Inírida can narrow to about six meters, revealing white-sand beaches that draw visitors. These waterways are also increasingly exposed to illegal gold mining and the mercury contamination that comes with it.

The area’s conservation history also reflects the importance of Indigenous authority. When the nearby Estrella Fluvial de Inírida Ramsar site was being planned, some Indigenous communities opposed proposed boundaries that overlapped their territories, concerned that an outside designation could weaken their control over land they had long managed. The Cerros were ultimately left outside the final Ramsar boundary. Their protection now depends largely on Indigenous territorial governance, national forest-reserve rules, and community efforts to manage tourism. The central issue was who would define conservation and govern the territory.

The photographs had not conveyed the human and cultural context of the place. The Cerros are visually extraordinary, but their significance comes from the communities that have lived with these rivers and rocks for generations. Their knowledge continues to shape how the landscape is understood and cared for.

I’m grateful to Oilber, Dreyk, and the people of El Remanso for sharing part of their territories with us.

Banner image: Cerros de Mavicure at sunset. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

• An AI-powered tool is helping keep an eye on the world’s most remote forests.

• Named SPARROW, the biodiversity monitoring tool continuously gathers and analyzes images and audio from forests over a long time period without human intervention.

• Developed by Microsoft, it aims to make data gathering and analysis from remote forests easier for scientists and conservationists.

• SPARROW has been deployed in five continents and, according to Microsoft, tests on location show it can function for more than a year without interruption.

• This article was originally written by Abhishyant Kidangoor appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

At a meeting with conservationists a couple of years back, Juan Lavista Ferres had a eureka moment.

As the director of Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, Lavista Ferres has extensively worked on projects that use artificial intelligence technology to process and analyze biodiversity data. At that particular meeting, however, he realized that a glaring gap persisted.

“It takes a huge amount of effort to collect data,” Lavista Ferres, who is also Microsoft’s chief data scientist, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We never realized how bad it was until we worked closely with them [the conservationists] to see the whole workflow.”

On returning to his lab, Lavista Ferres put together a team to find a solution. The result was Project SPARROW.

Short for solar-powered acoustic and remote recording observation watch, SPARROW combines edge computing and AI to monitor biodiversity in real time and continuously. Powered by solar energy, the tool has been developed to function autonomously in remote forests to gather and process visual and audio data.

“The whole idea of SPARROW is to make it trivial for conservationists to be able to collect data,” Lavista Ferres said.

SPARROW has been deployed in 11 countries across five continents and has demonstrated that it can function continuously without human intervention for more than a year. Deployments in remote forests come with their own set of challenges, however, as devices are difficult to access.

“Our most important challenge is to make sure that these devices are completely bulletproof,” Lavista Ferres said, in order to withstand demanding conditions. One of his team members, he said, likened it to working with NASA rovers because “you know you have the device, but you cannot go there to recover it.”

Lavista Ferres spoke with Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor about how SPARROW works, the motivation behind developing it and the impact it has had.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: How would you describe Project SPARROW to someone who hasn’t heard about it yet?

Juan Lavista Ferres: SPARROW is our biodiversity effort to make it easy for conservationists to collect and analyze data. SPARROW means solar-powered acoustic and remote recording observation watch. Conservationists around the world share one thing in common: To do their job, they need data. In many ways, conservation moves at the speed of that data. However, the challenge that these conservationists have today is that it takes a huge amount of effort for them to collect data.

We’ve been working in this space for a long time. For the past seven years, we were focused mainly on applying AI to analyze images. We never realized how bad it [data collection] was until we worked closely with them to see the whole workflow. Suddenly, we really understood the hassle they needed to go through to go to the middle of the Amazon and put a camera, then go back three weeks after that to change batteries and collect the camera chip. It’s actually dangerous in many ways. Also, getting and analyzing the data would take months. Sometimes, from the day they put the camera to the day they actually collect and finally analyze the data, it could be a year.

We wanted to walk through the process with conservationists and say, “Hey, let’s build a system that does everything for you.” They’ll just need to deploy the camera once. The camera will have solar panels and a GPU [graphics processing unit] inside. It collects data and sends it back to the cloud using a low-orbit satellite or a GSM connection [a digital cellular network]. The conservationists will have all the tools in a website to analyze the data. This way, they can focus not on the workflow, but instead on collecting and analyzing the data. The whole idea of SPARROW is to make it trivial for conservationists to be able to collect data.

Mongabay: What’s the status of Project SPARROW now?

Juan Lavista Ferres: These systems have been working now for over a year in some areas. We have it running in five continents. Our first objective was to see if we can actually have one device collecting data for over a year without human intervention. That was our first line of success.

A lot of people were skeptical about it. They said that if you have a camera in the middle of the Amazon, it’s too humid and it is not going to be able to last for a year especially if you have solar panels and a GPU. But we were able to do it. That was our first objective.

Mongabay: What was the immediate motivation to get this moving?

Juan Lavista Ferres: The project started almost two years ago. In May 2024, there was a biodiversity meeting that I was invited to. This was a group of people that Planet Labs, the satellite data company, brought together with a significant number of conservationists. We spent three days working with conservationists to try to understand their hurdles. That’s when I had my “aha” moment. I realized we were not solving a real problem for these people; we were solving only a tiny problem for them. So we started talking about how we can solve the bigger problem and there were a lot of discussions with people who are actually conservationists on the ground.

Mongabay: What happened next? What did the journey of bringing this into fruition look like?

Juan Lavista Ferres: I started walking through the process with conservationists there. We talked about collecting data by using solar panels. Then there were some people who were concerned that having a device in the middle of the Amazon, with all that humidity, was not going to work. Some of them told us that we would need huge solar panels to manage the low-orbit satellites.

I came back to the lab and put a team together. We started working around June 2024 and it took us seven months to put together a prototype. But a lot of things failed, and we worked through it and eventually, we finished a prototype. It was around May 2025 when we actually did the first deployments. We deployed in the Magdalena Medio region in central Colombia, and in Los Amigos [a research station] in the Peruvian Amazon. A few failed there too and we learned a little bit more from that. We went back and changed some of the components. Eventually, we deployed it with some of those updates around July. We haven’t touched those devices for a year.

We now have SPARROW deployed in many places. The first generation of SPARROW required people to solder it to use the devices but, since then, we have made it relatively simple. You can assemble the latest version in minutes. It’s just like a Lego.

Mongabay: Say I am a conservationist, how can I use SPARROW? What kind of data will I get?

Juan Lavista Ferres: SPARROW is always recording. There are cameras, so basically anytime something moves, it takes a picture and then you run an AI model that takes the picture and analyzes whether there is an animal in it. If there is an animal, it will send the information back to the cloud.

It does the same with acoustic data. For example, we have a project where they are targeting spider monkeys [Ateles hybridus]. The monkeys have a certain type of acoustic fingerprint, so SPARROW collects that data and sends it back to the server. Another example is our work with giraffes [Giraffa camelopardalis] and bongos [Tragelaphus eurycerus]. Whenever you detect a bongo or a giraffe, it will automatically reidentify that particular animal later. For now, we are doing reidentification only for these two species, but the plan is to expand the reidentification algorithms for other species.

Mongabay: Could you highlight two case studies as to how SPARROW is being used and the impact it has had?

Juan Lavista Ferres: There’s only a very small number of bongos left in the wild in Uganda. We have a significant number of devices there and the conservationists use the data to understand what is happening with that population of bongos. Thanks to SPARROW, they were able to detect one more bongo that they were not aware of.

SPARROW also helped Chester Zoo and the Uganda Wildlife Authority to find an endangered giant pangolin. There’s only a very small number of giant pangolins left in Uganda and we were able to record one in a video.

Mongabay: What have been the challenges in doing this?

Juan Lavista Ferres: The biggest challenge for us is that, once you do the deployment, if something fails you need to go back. Sometimes it can take three days to do that. A few weeks ago, we saw one elephant completely take down one of the devices, but the positive side is that as soon as the elephant took down the camera, the team knew and were able to go back and fix it.

Our most important challenge is to make sure these devices are completely bulletproof. One of the people on my team says that, in many ways, it’s like working in a NASA rover team: You know you have the device, but you cannot go there to recover it.

Mongabay: What are your future plans for SPARROW? What do you hope you’ll be telling me about the project in two years?

Juan Lavista Ferres: We are expanding. We have something now called SPARROW Studio. It’s a platform that not only allows you to use the data that you collected through SPARROW, but if you have your own data collection system in place, you can upload the data. We are excited to have a whole platform that makes it easier for conservationists to analyze data.

Two years from now, I would love to tell you that we have thousands of conservationists using SPARROW and that they have used it to discover new species. or that it has helped conservationists be more efficient to make sure species don’t go extinct. That’s our dream. Our success happens when it is easy for conservationists to collect, process and analyze data. The faster we move data, the better we are.

What is critical to understand is that the majority of the threatened ecosystems in the world are in very remote places, so it is impossible to collect data to begin with. Not only that, we also don’t want people to go there every three weeks to change batteries. Firstly, it would be impossible, but also we don’t want any humans in those ecosystems. At the same time, we need to understand what is happening there. This is why tools like SPARROW are so critical.

Banner image:A scarlet macaw (Ara macao) in the Amazon. Image by Pierre Perraut via Unsplash.

Abhishyant Kidangoor is a staff writer at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @AbhishyantPK.

• In an unprecedented participatory ethnobotany approach, Hemerson Dantas dos Santos Pataxó HãHãHãi, the world’s first published Indigenous ethnobotanist, documented alongside his people their traditional medicinal practices: cataloging 175 medicinal plants, many of which had their use reaffirmed in scientific literature.

• Mongabay visited Hemerson and spoke with several Indigenous elders who survived violent land conflicts about their medicinal knowledge and their efforts to protect it in the Caramuru/Paraguassu Indigenous Territory, a land illegally occupied by cattle farmers for decades in Brazil’s Bahia state.

• Samples of plants collected by Hemerson are being kept at an internationally registered herbarium, and he’s finalizing a book in the hope of keeping the knowledge of the species and ancestral healing practices alive for his people’s future generations.

• The work carried out with his people was essential to make “immortal” the knowledge of the elders, Hemerson said, describing them as “living libraries” and “Guardians of Memories.”

• This article was originally written by Karla Mendes appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

CARAMURU/PARAGUASSU INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil — Looking at the landscape of dry and cleared mountains around her house, Marta Xavier de Oliveira remembered when it was a forest.

“When we got sick, that’s where we got our medicine from,” Oliveira, known as Dona Marta, 87, told Mongabay. An Indigenous elder of the Kariri-Sapuyá people, she stands amid her ancestral land in Brazil’s northeastern Bahia state and her vegetable garden where she’s kept several medicinal plants going.

Beside her is an embaúba tree (Cecropia pachystachya), used to treat diabetes and prostate issues, in the backyard of her house in the village of Caramuru. “It was all over there. They knocked everything down. Everything was cleared and they destroyed the forest.”

Some native species, including embaúba, were planted here 44 years ago. Others, however, disappeared from the territory over the past decades, when outsiders invaded the area and cleared the forests for cattle pastures, Dona Marta said. She cited a specific plant: puaia, used to treat snake bites, plague — an illness elders said includes fever, headaches, and leaves the body all twisted — and various other diseases. “It was there in the woods,” she said, pointing to the cleared mountains. “It’s gone.”

On Dec. 27, 2025, Dona Marta passed away.

Her knowledge, however, is alive today in a study published in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethomedicine, which cited her. The paper is authored by Indigenous ethnobotanist Hemerson Dantas dos Santos Pataxó HãHãHãi and Eliana Rodrigues, a professor and coordinator of ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological studies at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp).

“Hemerson is the first [published] Indigenous ethnobotanist in the world. There is no other — look for it, there isn’t!” Rodrigues told Mongabay in a video call, a fact also acknowledged by the journal. “We couldn’t find anyone, a person who lived in a village, who was Indigenous, and recorded their own people’s knowledge.”

Through a participatory ethnobotany approach, Hemerson carried out a collective work with his people for his Ph.D. thesis and study, from outlining the objectives to fieldwork. Dona Marta was one of the 19 Indigenous people, including elders and healing practitioners, who worked with him to catalog 175 medicinal plants and their ancestral healing practices in the Caramuru/Paraguassu Indigenous Territory. Of this total, 87 plants could be identified down to the species level.

Hemerson called Dona Marta and all the elders a “living library.”

“We have a duty to strengthen our culture and honor the memory of our elders by taking a little of our precious time to listen to them and learn from them all the things they can to teach us,” Hemerson told Mongabay while showing medicinal plants at his house in Caramuru village.

When she was alive, Dona Marta served for decades as a midwife in Caramuru/Paraguassu. “There was no doctor to care for women,” she told Mongabay back in October 2025, adding that there wasn’t really any Western medical care for anyone here. She said she treated many residents with plants from the territory, using traditional medical practices she learned from her ancestors.

“Back then, the Indigenous people worshiped nature, the sun, the moon, the stars, which they believed to be the force of the spirit [of the forest],” Maura Rosa Titiah Vieira, known as Dona Maura, 74, told Mongabay when we visited her house in the village of Água Vermelha. “They had their prayers, their incense burners, their chants, the leaves they knew they could use that day.”

For Hemerson, the collective work was also “an encounter with my own history,” referring especially to his grandfather Edísio Pataxó, a prominent Indigenous leader who died while he was still very young.

“I never got to meet my grandfather, but I knew he was a chief and that everyone admired him,” Hemerson said. “During the interviews, everyone shared with me a little of their memories of my grandfather.”

When he decided to do a Ph.D., Hemerson said he wanted to pursue a project that could benefit his community and leave a legacy for his people. It was only after consulting with his people, he said, that they collectively decided to focus on medicinal plants used in the territory.

He said they decided to initially target the plants used for treatment of the most common complaints in the territory: diabetes, worms, and hypertension. Of the total plants recovered and recorded, 43 species were indicated for those complaints, and 79% of them had their use supported in the scientific literature, the study found.

The data also pointed out that exotic or naturalized species accounted for 67% of plants used by the Pataxó HãHãHãi people in their daily lives, primarily due to their displacement from their land decades ago — and the destruction of native forest. According to the study, this fact “not only forced many people to learn how to use plants from outside their villages but also fragmented their cultural knowledge, led to the loss of native plants, and even resulted in the loss of indigenous lives.”

This was reflected in the composition of Dona Marta’s garden when Mongabay visited last year.

At her vegetable garden, she showed Mongabay a wide variety of plants. She pointed to lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus) used to treat various types of pain, like stomachaches and headaches; Mexican mint (Coleus amboinicus) and lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) used to treat high blood pressure; and artimijo (Artemisia vulgaris) used to treat neurological problems like seizures — and also one of the pleasantly scented leaves from the forest used in a ritual bath and prayers asking for protection before land reclamations.

Guardians of herbs and memory

Spanning over about 54,000 hectares (about 133,000 acres) — an area equivalent to the island of Guam — the Caramuru/Paraguassu Indigenous Territory was demarcated in 1926 by the Indian Protection Service (SPI), the country’s first federal agency dedicated to Indigenous affairs (active until 1967, when it was replaced by the National Indigenous Peoples Foundation, Funai). However, throughout the 1940s the state government of Bahia issued leasehold titles to farmers, who occupied the territory and displaced the majority of Indigenous residents, triggering countless violent land conflicts and killings in the area, Hemerson noted in his thesis.

In 1982, the Pataxó HãHãHãi people carried out their first land reclamation process, in the Caramuru Indigenous land, he added. And in 2012, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court nullified the leasehold titles and awarded the land ownership to the Pataxó HãHãHãi people, who comprise diverse ethnic peoples with subtly distinct cultures, including the Baenã, Pataxó, Hãhãhãi, Kamakã, Tupinambá, Kariri-Sapuyá, and Gueren peoples. Currently, there are approximately 3,600 individuals spread across 10 villages in the territory.

When they came back to the territory, the elders said, most of it was destroyed. They said they had to start from scratch, from planting their vegetable garden for subsistence and replanting medicinal plants. Decades of occupation by cattle ranching drastically changed the territory’s Atlantic Forest vegetation and its soil, elders interviewed in the territory told Mongabay.

Nevertheless, this physical destruction didn’t erase the Pataxó HãHãHãi’s history of the territory and their ancestral medicinal knowledge, which is alive in the memory of the elders, Hemerson said. He called them “Guardians of Ancestral Medicine,” “Guardians of the Herbs,” and “Guardians of Memories.”

He said their expertise was key not only to cataloguing all the medicinal plants used by his people — including those not even found in the territory anymore — but also to rescue information about what the territory was like before much of it was taken by farmers.

Many of the elders Mongabay interviewed in the territory said taking Western medicine wasn’t effective and traditional practices were the only healing method that worked.

How did they know which plants to use? Beyond learning with their ancestors, the guardians said they received guidance through prayers (influenced by some aspects of Catholicism), dreams, and spirits of light, the so-called Encantados (enchanted).

“Sometimes I remember: ‘Oh, that plant that mom used to make our tea; grandma used to give me that medicine.’ And other times that understanding of a plant comes in a dream … It always happens to me,” said Dona Maura from the Baenã people at her house while birds like the guaxe (Cacicus haemorrhous) chirped in the background.

“I keep thinking: ‘I have this, my son is feeling this, what do I do? Only You [God] can give me strength.’ I have that thought in my prayers, and when it’s night I dream and see the plant. The next day I make the medicine and everything works out fine.”

Prayers and faith in healing are traditionally present in the entire process of ancestral medicinal practices with plants, from harvesting the plants to making a tea, a syrup, a lotion or a bath with them, said Maria Creuza Fernandes Rodrigues Kariri-Sapuyá, 70, known as Dona Creuza.

“When it’s time to harvest, we harvest and say: ‘My God, I’m going to harvest these medicines so that God will bless us and cure that illness,’” Dona Creuza told Mongabay at the garden at her home in Caramuru village where she cultivates several dozen species of medicinal plants.

When she didn’t know which plant to use, she said, the revelation came in a dream. “I dreamed of my grandmother, who passed away a long time ago. I dreamed about her talking to me: ‘Make this medicine like this, it’s good.’ Then I would wake up early in the morning and the first thing I would do was to go and make it. And it worked.”

For Hemerson, faith “provides conditions that certainly contribute to the healing process, combined with the chemical composition of the plant itself in many recipes,” while religion “helps to understand a little more about faith in this process.”

Older women in the territory, Dona Maura said, have “a spiritual strength from nature” that allows them to carry out medicinal healing practices. However, not everything can be revealed, she added, because many who revealed things about their ancestors died, many were persecuted, many were massacred.

“There are many things I didn’t learn because my mother didn’t teach us; she was afraid that if we learned to do things in the forest, we would be repressed like they did to her.”

Hemerson noted that prayers have been always present in healing rituals, although in a different way after Catholic influence. However, today, few Indigenous people use prayers as part of the procedure for a treatment, and these practices are more common among elders, according to his thesis.

Gardens for free treatment, research and sharing

Even the most serious illnesses — severe fever, respiratory conditions, snake bites, and cancer — are treated with plants in the Caramuru/Paraguassu territory using ancestral healing practices.

Dona Marta’s brother, Aniraldo Xavier Kariri-Sapuyá, 73, known as Seu Aniraldo, said he used graviola (Annona muricata) leaves to make a juice and heal a snake bite suffered by his son-in-law. He said he also added a dose of a medicinal activated charcoal powder to counteract the snake venom.

“When he arrived here, he already had a big cut on his leg, he was in pain, and his head was aching,” Seu Aniraldo told Mongabay, surrounded by several dozen plants in a medicinal garden nursery in his backyard in Caramuru village. “He had a headache, dizziness, and his vision was getting blurry. As soon as he took it, all the symptoms went away. He didn’t even need to see a doctor. Thank God nature heals — second only to God.”

Called “Horta Medicinal,” the medicinal garden sits in the south of the territory, amid bushes and a few trees in Caramuru village. It’s a reference nursery set up in the village in June 2023 by the Brazilian federal government’s Secretariat for Indigenous Health (SESAI), a unit of the Ministry of Health, in response to the community’s requests.

The nursery is tended by Seu Aniraldo, who survived land conflicts, including two bullets in his left lung. He has already cultivated more than 150 plants. This played a key role in the use of medicinal plants for the research project, Hemerson said. The pioneering work, he added, makes seedlings available to the Indigenous community and has also been presented by Seu Aniraldo to students at nearby universities.

The medicinal garden at Dona Creuza’s house is also available for those who need the plants, she said.

“It’s not for sale, it’s for us to use,” she told Mongabay. “The community can use whatever they need.” Although her medicinal garden has several dozen plant species, she said she wants to plant even more and dreams of having plants that she can’t find in the territory anymore.

Hemerson said one of his dreams is to expand the medicinal garden and have Indigenous medical practices incorporated within Brazil’s federal health system’s (SUS) traditional medical protocols.

“More than 70% of the medicine in a drugstore either come from plants or are plant-based. Through the SUS you can legally use certain plants for treatment,” he told Mongabay. “However, Anvisa [the country’s health surveillance agency] has only authorized [the use of] 68 medicinal plants” — a fraction of the 150 plants “just in our own backyard,” he pointed out.

To disseminate the knowledge of his 80-page Ph.D. thesis within his people, Hemerson is finalizing a book.

“People are not going to pick up the thesis to read it — it’s unlikely,” he said. “But the book will have lots of images of the plants, photographs, and recipes. Many people already know the plants and these recipes, so it will be a way of spreading the knowledge, as well as bringing these plants closer to people in some way.”

Hemerson said he’ll distribute copies not only to the interviewees and his community overall, but also to “strategic sectors,” especially schools, aiming to help disseminate among young people the history of his people, keeping it alive through future generations.

Hemerson said he’s also considering the possibility of publishing a book for a broader audience, but this must be a collective decision of his people.

Ethical documentation of Indigenous knowledge

On Jan. 28, 2026, Hemerson finally got his Ph.D. degree from Unifesp.

“Today, Brazil gains much more than a new Indigenous Ph.D. It gains the first [published] Brazilian Indigenous ethnobotanist, who possesses a unique ability to move between two worlds: the ‘academic’ and the ‘forest,’” said Rodrigues, his doctoral adviser. “Hemerson’s defense of ‘his’ work, which is also the work of the Pataxó Hãhãhãi people, will certainly inspire many other Indigenous people to record their own traditional knowledge.”

The doctoral committee, she added, highlighted the amount of knowledge recorded, the book produced, the nursery to make seedlings available in the territory, “and his brilliance in navigating the fields of chemistry, pharmacology, and now, anthropology and botany.”

The unprecedented participatory ethnobotany approach used by Hemerson was created by Rodrigues. Academic researchers “train” researchers from traditional communities to allow them to be “the actor recording their knowledge themselves,”giving them autonomy and exclusivity over what to do with their traditional knowledge, she said.

“The approach stems from [an issue that causes] a lump in my throat, because I was unfairly accused of biopiracy in my country,” she said, referring to a controversial case involving the Indigenous Krahô people of Tocantins state, where Rodrigues had been conducting research with Unifesp in 1999 to collect and identify 400 plants and berries used by the Krahô. “I thought: ‘Now, instead, we are going to create a method, an approach where Indigenous people will not depend on anyone.’”

Rodrigues narrated the controversial case in the book Invisible Psychoactives: An ethnographic journey through the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples and Quilombolas.

Published in 2025, the book’s foreword is signed by Hemerson, who is also cited in the last chapter.

“Tomorrow, he will surely write a book telling us whether or not this approach can be transformative for traditional peoples,” Rodrigues wrote. “Meanwhile, I find myself wondering if we are in this dimension to learn, and perhaps to sow good seeds. When I am gone, I hope to have left at least one!”

The participatory ethnobotany approach used in the research ensured the Pataxó HãHãHãi leadership were involved in recording their medicinal knowledge, Hemerson told Mongabay, calling the defense of his doctoral thesis “memorable.”

For him, Dona Marta’s death before the completion of his work and the doctoral thesis presentation was “very painful.” But she was there, he said, in a video he streamed during the presentation, where she talked about her memories and how much she missed the forest.

“It was so emotional that I couldn’t even make the comment I intended to make. Then I just left the video playing because I couldn’t do it.”

When Mongabay interviewed Dona Marta in October 2025, she said she “felt sad” for no longer having puaia, one of many plants lost to the community, and that she missed it and dreamed of having it back in her ancestral land someday.

The samples of plants collected by Hemerson are kept at the herbarium of the State University of Santa Cruz (UESC), which is registered internationally and considered by Brazil’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change to be a faithful depository, said Luiz Alberto Mattos Silva, a professor and former curator of UESC’s herbarium at the time.

“It was the first time we incorporated the work of an Indigenous researcher here,” Silva told Mongabay at the herbarium, located in the city of Ilhéus in Bahia.

Hemerson collected three samples of each plant: one is stored in the herbarium and the other two are made available to anyone in the world he wants to send it to, Silva said. Since the data for the samples of his research were entered into the herbarium system, he added, anyone anywhere in the world can consult it.

Hemerson said he dreamed of his work helping to bring these species back and honor Dona Marta’s memory and all Pataxó HãHãHãi elders. Despite not being aware of scientific names for puaia and other plants lost from the territory, Hemerson said he’s hopeful the herbarium can “help a lot in their rescue process.”

“I believe that herbaria are an important link for these plant encounters, because if the herbarium has any exsiccatae [dried samples], it also has the location of the collection, which could allow finding more individuals of the lost species.”

For Hemerson, the work carried out with his people was essential to make “immortal” not only Dona Marta’s knowledge, but that of all the elders and interviewees who made this collective work with him and available for future generations.

“To me, the medicinal garden represents life and self-sufficiency. My mother had always looked after our health using medicinal plants,” Seu Aniraldo said. “My dream is to one day see my community free from relying so heavily on chemical medications, which only worsen our health and destroy our body’s protective cells.”

This piece was translated in Portuguese and published on Mongabay Brasil. Read here.

Karla Mendes is a staff investigative and feature reporter for Mongabay in Brazil and the first Brazilian to win the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism. A member of the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network, she is also the first Brazilian and Latin American ever elected to the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ); she was also nominated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Co-chair. Read her stories published on Mongabay here. Find her on LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and 𝕏.

• An emerging narrative is that elephant poaching has declined, yet evidence shows that the illegal trade in ivory persists, and that the involvement of organized crime in it keeps growing.

• Despite big and news-making seizures of illegal ivory recently, criminal networks continue operating, and southern Africa appears to be back at the illegal global trade’s center.

• “The current narrative that the situation is under control should not be accepted without question,” a new op-ed for World Elephant Day 2026 argues.

• Mary Rice is executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency.

• This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

In early March 2026, acting on intelligence shared by my organization, the Environmental Investigation Agency UK, Zambian authorities seized a consignment of more than 500 kg (over 1,100 pounds) of ivory and arrested a suspect with long-standing links to regional ivory trafficking operations. One of the suspects involved in the case was convicted in 2019 for possession of more than 200 kg (almost 441 lbs) of ivory and was sentenced to five years in prison in 2020. He was released after a matter of months and has continued trading ivory ever since.

So, Zambia, which has been exploited by criminal networks operating with relative impunity since at least 2002, is under the spotlight once again. Of particular concern is the involvement of Congolese criminal groups, which continue to operate across Zambia and the wider region, sourcing and moving wildlife products including elephant ivory, rhino horn, pangolin scales and big cats along complex transnational routes toward Asia, with Vietnam often serving as a key transit hub to other destinations.

Exploiting the lack of political will, weak enforcement, corrupt officials and marginalized communities to facilitate their trade, these networks have been orchestrating poaching expeditions into neighboring countries, using Zambian intermediaries to supply their illicit trade chains. This recent interception in Zambia — alongside two other large-scale seizures made in Tanzania and Botswana in April and May respectively — brings the minimum total of ivory seized globally since 2023 to approximately 29 tons, nearly 64,000 pounds. That’s the equivalent of at least 4,000 dead elephants.

Of this, about 60% was intercepted in consignments exceeding 500 kg, or about 1,100 pounds, — the threshold used by the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and enforcement agencies to define large-scale trafficking incidents, which indicate organized criminal activity.

Taken together, these cases show that ivory trafficking remains a systemic and organized crime problem, rather than a series of isolated incidents, and it continues to impact multiple countries and jurisdictions.

Southern Africa back at the center

From approximately 2015, the regions of West and Central Africa — and particularly Nigeria — emerged as a major hub for illegal wildlife products. Multiple large shipments of ivory, often mixed with pangolin scales, were intercepted as they moved through export points such as Apapa Port. Between 2015-2022, the West and Central African regions had been implicated in at least 31 large-scale ivory seizures, totaling approximately 72 tons, nearly 160,000 pounds.

But since 2023, the picture has shifted. Countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) now account for more than 80% of the total volume recorded in large-scale ivory seizures. Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mozambique, Tanzania, Namibia and Zambia are among those linked to these consignments.

This renewed concentration of trafficking activity in southern Africa is particularly concerning given continual political advocacy from some SADC states for a resumption of the legal commercial ivory trade. Namibia’s proposal at CITES CoP20 in November 2025 — ultimately rejected by a majority of Parties — illustrates this tension between emerging enforcement realities and ongoing policy ambitions.

Why seizures alone are insufficient

Seizures are frequently presented as enforcement successes, but taken alone they do not disrupt, deter or prevent poachers and traffickers from striking again. Instead, they reflect detection capacity and offer insight into trafficking volumes, but reveal little about whether criminal networks are actually being dismantled.

Real disruption comes from targeted, intelligence-led investigations, which expose the wider structures behind illegal trade. These investigations enable prosecutions and convictions, which provide a far more reliable measure of deterrence and enforcement impact.

Crucially, follow-up investigations are essential for mapping trafficking networks, identifying key facilitators and exposing the financial crimes that sustain the trade. They also provide the basis for determining the origin of seized ivory — information that’s critical for understanding supply dynamics and informing conservation responses.

Recent CITES data indicating a decline in poaching has, however, raised questions about the source of ivory in recent seizures. If poaching is indeed decreasing, then alternative supply sources must be considered.

One such source may be leakage from government-held stockpiles. The 2024 UNODC World Wildlife Crime Report highlights concerns that stockpiles are being diverted into illegal markets, suggesting that illicit supply may not depend solely on ‘fresh’ poaching. This is not a new phenomenon, with multiple documented cases of stockpile leakage over the years. According to CITES data, as of 2025, more than 797 tons (almost 1.8 million lbs) of ivory were held in stockpiles globally, and at least 820 tons (more than 1.8 million lbs) in Africa. Given inconsistent reporting on stockpiles, the true volume is likely to be significantly higher.

Forensic analysis is widely recognized as essential for tracing elephant specimens in trade and, in turn, for improving understanding of the actors and modus operandi behind the ivory trade. CITES provisions explicitly urge countries to collect samples from large-scale ivory seizures (defined as 500 kg or more), ideally within 90 days or as soon as judicial processes allow, and to submit them to forensic and research institutions capable of determining the origin, species and age of the ivory in support of investigations and prosecutions.

Despite this, DNA testing of recent large-scale seizures remains limited or under-reported. In the case of the 2025 Zambia seizure, there is no publicly available evidence that forensic analysis has been conducted.

The politics of enforcement collaboration

In the face of ongoing challenges, an increasing number of partnerships have been forged between governments and civil society organizations (CSOs) with a view to facilitating opportunities for intelligence exchange and strategic targeting to tackle illegal wildlife trade.

These collaborations take many shapes, including formal agreements such as memorandums of understanding and the provision of significant financial and technical support to law enforcement agencies. Evidence suggests such partnerships are now operationally central to counter wildlife trafficking efforts.

However, these relationships are not always straightforward. They can be costly and often difficult to navigate in terms of power dynamics. There is also pressure for their successes to be lauded in the public domain in order to secure further financial support.

In some cases, such partnerships have been undermined or compromised by political factors, particularly when the release of information does not align with the prevailing government narrative, leading to under-reporting. This is especially evident in contexts where state complicity or corruption is involved.

For this reason, some organizations do not have in-country offices in their project countries. This approach allows for the exposure of trafficking dynamics without being constrained by political sensitivities, which can delay, dilute or obscure pressing problems. In short, it enables the organizations to speak truth to power without fear or favor.

While the recent seizure in Zambia demonstrates what can be achieved through intelligence-led investigations and effective cooperation between CSOs and government agencies, momentum must be sustained to ensure accountability, particularly for known repeat offenders.

These developments also serve as a stark reminder that ivory trafficking remains a highly organized and adaptable threat. Sustained, intelligence-driven enforcement across the supply chain is therefore essential to protect elephants and disrupt criminal networks.

The current narrative that the situation is under control should not be accepted without question.

Banner image: African savanna elephants, the biggest land animals on the planet, are socially advanced and highly intelligent mammals. Image by O’Connell’s & Rodwell.

• To mark the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples on Aug. 9, Mongabay has interviewed nine Indigenous representatives from around the world about the subtleties in biodiversity conservation and climate solutions implemented by people at a local level.

• Solutions discussed ranged from strategies for reforestation and halting deforestation by extractives to conserving endemic plant species and strengthening Indigenous governance and traditional knowledge.

• But conversations also included solutions that are not currently working and why, and the nuances of implementation in particular Indigenous communities.

• Little input from Indigenous communities or a lack of understanding of local realities and cultural nuances are common reasons why such solutions fail, interviewees said.

• This article was originally written by Latoya Abulu appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

Eriberto throws his head back with a laugh and shakes it as he tills his plot of land in the Peruvian Amazon, near the Cordillera Azul National Park in central Peru.

“That does not work here,” he says with a chuckle, responding to a question about why he doesn’t call his diverse forest garden “agroforestry”.

In the past, government officials promoted planting coffee or cacao in agroforestry systems near his community. But Eriberto Guerra and other Indigenous farmers in the town of Lamas say it hasn’t been effective enough and some have rejected the sustainable farming label.

“They promoted growing just one or two other food crops with some trees,” Guerra tells Mongabay. “But you need to plant dozens of species along with traditional plants. When one crop fails or doesn’t perform well in the local market, you need to have others to make up for it. And those others need to be the right crops, planted the right way, near the right plants.”

His forest garden attracts endemic bird species and wildlife researchers, and has sustained his family for a decade, he says.

“This is what is working,” Eriberto says.

To mark the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples and better understand the subtleties in biodiversity conservation and climate solutions implemented by people living at the frontlines, Mongabay interviewed nine Indigenous representatives from around the world.

In order, we spoke with:

• Jenifer Lasimbang, an executive director of Indigenous Peoples of Asia Solidarity (IPAS) from Malaysia

• Juan Carlos Jintiach, an executive secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC) from Ecuador

• Olo Villalaz, a representative for the Guna General Congress from Panama

• João Victor Pankararu, a youth coordinator for a regional Indigenous organization (APOINME) from Brazil

• Abdi Akbar, a director of political participation expansion at the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) from Indonesia

• Sara Omi Casama, a president of a women leaders group under under the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests (AMPB) from Panama

• Joseph Itongwa Mukumo, a coordinator of an Indigenous forest management NGO (REPALEF) from the Democratic Republic of Congo

• Toya Manchineri, a general coordinator of the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) on the Brazil-Peru border

• Valéria Paye, an executive director of the Podáali Fund from Brazil

They discussed the community-led environment and climate solutions they see are working — and not — at a local level. We also discussed the factors that make a solution more likely to succeed and the nuances of implementing certain efforts.

These interviews have been translated into English and edited for length and clarity.

Jenifer Lasimbang, executive director of Indigenous Peoples of Asia Solidarity (IPAS) Fund and former assembly member in Malaysia’s Sabah State Legislative Assembly (North Borneo, Malaysia)

Mongabay: What solutions are currently working in your community, or in others, that don’t receive much attention?

Jenifer Lasimbang: In my community, we already have a natural resource management system practiced by Indigenous people called the Tagal system. It is a way of conserving resources and ensuring they are used sustainably. It is practiced along rivers, where we have red zones, orange zones and green zones.

The green zone is where you can harvest resources. The orange or yellow zone is where there are certain conditions under which you can harvest fish. The red zone is the breeding area, where you cannot take any resources because it is completely protected.

We are fortunate that, after more than 10 years of advocacy, this system has now been adapted and enacted into law in my area [Sabah].

Community forestry is another example and, of course, rotational or shifting cultivation is another practice that is often misunderstood. These practices are actually very sustainable, but have not been studied enough or promoted properly. Most of the time, in many countries, Indigenous peoples are prohibited from practicing shifting cultivation.

Customary approaches to natural resource management are also directly related to how we sustainably harvest and maintain resources, whether they are river resources, marine resources or resources within our territories, because we’ve established a long-term relationship with nature.

Mongabay: What are some factors that make a particular conservation or climate solution more likely to succeed in your community or in others?

Jenifer Lasimbang: One of the biggest factors is recognition.

If our basic rights, identity and our way of life are not recognized, are overlooked, then we will not have security of tenure over our territories and practices, whether it is natural resource management, our wellness programs or anything else.

I think finance is also changing now. Many of us are part of Indigenous-led funding mechanisms that allow direct access and provide real support.

We are also thinking about — we do not call it monetizing — and still developing ideas around how Indigenous bioeconomies can flourish if we create systems that generate monetary benefits. It is still about monetary gains, but the way we see it is that those gains should directly benefit our communities.

Mongabay: What solutions are currently not working? Why do you think they are falling short?

Jenifer Lasimbang: All those conservation concepts that have been imposed on us that disregard what we have already been doing and that do not fit local realities.

In many parts of the world, Indigenous peoples are still being driven away from their territories, while top-down conservation concepts continue to be imposed on us and our lands. I think some of these concepts, such as carbon offsetting and monetizing nature, will not work if they are developed without properly including Indigenous peoples. I was in a panel discussion where they said that it is expensive to maintain and monitor all these schemes. But that is because they don’t consult Indigenous peoples, and they don’t acknowledge or recognize the role that Indigenous peoples have played in maintaining these areas in the first place.

Mongabay: You very briefly mentioned some carbon projects not consulting communities. Are there any particular examples that come to mind?

Jenifer Lasimbang: Mongabay was the one that uncovered the Nature Conservation Agreement [NCA] in Sabah, created out of nowhere by our state government, that locked communities into a carbon deal. The NCA process was not done properly. There was no consultation with Indigenous communities. They did not even identify where the area was located. They simply said, “Okay, we’re going to sell this 2 million hectares of rainforest for trading.”

But we also have examples of carbon deals that work. The one that did work [with Bursa Carbon Exchange] went all the way to the Malaysia’s stock exchange for proper trading. That was the one we were involved in. The community was part of it and it can be done properly. It can work — but not the ones created by our own carbon cowboys.

Juan Carlos Jintiach, executive secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC) (Napo Province, Ecuador)

Mongabay: What solutions are currently working in your community, or in others, that don’t receive much attention?

Juan Carlos Jintiach: Many years ago, my own people’s territory (Pueblo Shuar) wanted to reduce deforestation, stop illegal logging and prevent illegal mining. These activities were coming from outside our territory.

We brought our own proposal to the table to secure the land: We proposed Nunka pénker iisar/Nunka iwiarkatniu, which means well-being or good living for the people in our territory [in the Shuar language]. It’s like a Life Plan [Plan de vida, Indigenous-led management and self-governance tools for peoples in Ecuador].

This involved understanding our own data: How much forest we have, what ecosystems exist in our territory and how we monitor them. Through this contribution to the country, we participated and collaborated in a voluntary project called the “Socio Bosque” project.

This was the first example from our territory showing how Indigenous peoples, using our own capacities and without requiring large amounts of funding, are contributing to climate solutions and protecting ecosystems. We also helped make visible concepts such as high forest and low deforestation.

If we look further south, we see similar exercises where Indigenous peoples monitor the state of rivers, how many biodiversity hotspots exist and the presence of plants, birds, animals and other elements of the ecosystem.

This type of data allows us to understand the problems happening today, how much damage is occurring in the context of climate change and how these changes are affecting our territories. We call this Tarímiat Pujutaí Nunka. Tarímiat means the territory where you live.

Mongabay: What are some factors that make a particular conservation or climate solution more likely to succeed in your community, or in others?

Juan Carlos Jintiach: It is important to recognize that when international agreements, governments and major policies are developed, they need to be translated and connected in the right way.

There are many acronyms, ideas and global projects that sound very positive. We need to make an effort to translate these global dynamics, these acronyms and ideas, and match them with Indigenous peoples’ own cosmovisions [cosmic worldviews] and perceptions. We need to develop a dialogue between different languages and ways of understanding.

Sometimes this is avoided. Sometimes people do not want to discuss these issues because there are many challenges related to political dynamics and the way situations are understood and contextualized.

We need to recognize these communities and provide legal titles and recognition under laws and constitutions. In addition, when governments develop policies or projects, they must invite us and consult with us.

Whenever I have an idea, I invite families and sit down with them. We drink tea, we share and we talk. We discuss, “Let’s do this. Let’s do that. This is the problem.” It always has to be done with us. That is the way it should be.

Finally, projects need to support the generations that are coming. It is very sad that governments and policies do not pay enough attention to future generations, to children, youth, women and elders, because it represents the destruction of families and of communities. It is very special how generations are raised and how knowledge is transmitted through language and culture.

Mongabay: What solutions are currently not working? Why do you think they are falling short?

Juan Carlos Jintiach: My job and my responsibility is as executive secretary globally for GATC, but when I return home, I work with Mother Earth.

I work with my plants, my cocoa and my teas on my land. For me, any product from the forest must have permissions and many conditions. I have to pay for certification from the government every year to show it is organic and sustainable, and this certification is very expensive.

But I already have my own certification in my culture through a chakra [an ancestral agricultural system]. It means how I manage my small portion of land, with medicine, food, economy, knowledge, wisdom, culture and spirituality. This should also be recognized and connected with policies at the national and international levels, but it’s not.

We are building Indigenous economies and global alliances, showcasing what we can do with products such as macambo [Theobroma bicolor] and other fruits that provide food sovereignty and food health. But our processes must be better recognized. There must be equity.

Mongabay: What are the most common pitfalls that prevent conservation or climate solutions from working?

Juan Carlos Jintiach: I am very worried about the future — very worried. Many people try to divide Indigenous people, buy our support and prevent us from standing together. It is very sad to see this happening between Indigenous people themselves, with many different offers being made, similar to political situations. If we do not have solidarity, if we do not maintain our unity, the future will be very difficult for us.

Politicians come and say, “I am going to do this, I am going to do that.” Of course, they make promises, but these promises are often disconnected from reality. This has to change.

Also, when we talk about finance, it is almost treated as a taboo. There is this perception that Indigenous peoples should not touch money, that Indigenous peoples are not prepared and that everything will fail. These negative perceptions and narratives need to be reversed. We need to change the paradigm and change the narrative.

We need to continue creating opportunities. Even if I fail implementing a project I received funding for, does that mean all Indigenous peoples have failed? No. It means that a specific initiative did not succeed. Failure should not be used to judge Indigenous peoples as a whole.

Governments and wealthy countries also fail. Institutions fail. So, as human beings, we need to respect governance systems.

Olo Villalaz, representative for the Guna General Congress and co-founded TV Indígena (Guna Yala, Panama)

Mongabay: What solutions are currently working in your community, or in others, that don’t receive much attention?

Olo Villalaz: Across all our territories in Mesoamerica [which extends from modern northwestern Mexico to El Salvador], what’s really important is addressing deforestation and illegal mining that is entering our territories.

The territories we have in Mesoamerica are part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, which connects with the Amazon. This biological corridor exists within our territories, and we are the ones taking care of it.

Today, there is enormous pressure from deforestation and livestock expansion, especially in Nicaragua, as well as deforestation pressures in Panama.

We are protecting these lands through community surveillance. They also know when they can conduct fire prevention and maintenance activities. They know which periods are dry, when droughts may occur and when there is a greater risk of fires.

Using traditional knowledge, women are also highly focused on protecting seeds, especially native seeds, and medicinal plants. They play an extremely important role in sustaining life within our territories and ensuring that future generations continue to be protected.

Mongabay: What are some factors that make a particular conservation or climate solution more likely to succeed in your community, or in others?

Olo Villalaz: Apart from land tenure, another factor we are looking into is new tools. For example, we are using drones and other new technologies. The idea is that we need to use these tools to our advantage.

Many territories are using these new technologies for monitoring. In the past, we had to walk for many kilometers through mountains without knowing what was happening in different areas. But today, within our territories, we can use drones and other technologies to monitor what is happening.

We can also train ourselves to ensure that we are using these technologies effectively. We can collect data to care for our territories. Today we can actually see where deforestation is occurring, which trees we are losing, what wildlife is disappearing in certain areas and what wildlife is returning. We can also monitor the quality of river water and measure changes over time.

These alternatives and tools help us create databases, strengthen monitoring systems and improve surveillance and follow-up.

However, this does not mean that every project needs to use these technologies. The important thing is that we now have better information about where the problems are and where we need to direct our efforts.

We also need to strengthen governance to help us reconnect with and relearn what elders have always transmitted to us. This is the only home we have. That is why we need to continue loving it, caring for it and protecting it.

New generations are increasingly influenced by Western systems, where the idea is that you only do work if you are paid. If you are not paid, then you may not continue doing it.

Mongabay: What solutions are currently not working? Why do you think they are falling short?

Olo Villalaz: An issue is that goals are measured differently, and perhaps for some organizations a project may not be considered a success, while for us it would be a complete success in another way.

Let me give you an example: medicinal plants. An organization supporting the planting of medicinal plants might measure success after one month or one semester. But for us, we need to look beyond that. We need to consider whether those medicinal plants will continue to exist, whether they will continue to heal different illnesses and whether future generations will still have access to them.

I believe that when projects are aligned with Indigenous ways of life, they can be a true success. But if projects are designed only from offices or from abroad, in ways that are disconnected from our realities, they will fail because organizations will not fully understand our ways of living.

Mongabay: What are the most common pitfalls that prevent conservation or climate solutions from working?

Olo Villalaz: Very few programs or projects have long-term financing. Most of them rely on short-term financing. For example, a project may be implemented for one year and everything goes well. But then the question is: What happens afterward? There are not enough long-term programs and projects.

Recently, I was part of a one-year project and communities were already asking, “What will we do in the second year if we are no longer receiving that support?” Many times, communities are left to assume these risks and figure out how to continue. Economically, they may have to invest their own resources or they may have to stop the work altogether. So short-term financing is a major problem.

Another issue is excessive bureaucracy. In previous years, we have worked hard to build trust with donors and organizations. We have invested a lot of effort into this because, from our perspective, many of the requirements being requested are not necessary or do not reflect the realities of our territories.

For example, if we are working with traditional knowledge, who should I turn to? An elder who has knowledge about medicinal plants. But what does the organization ask for? They say, “I need someone with a PhD or a master’s degree as proof of expertise.” That requirement is often at odds with our reality.

It is therefore important that organizations supporting us understand the realities of where projects are being implemented.

They also need more trust in the administrative capacities of Indigenous organizations. I believe there is still a lot of mistrust and a perception that Indigenous organizations cannot manage funds. However, in recent years in Mesoamerica, we have been working to demonstrate our capacities through activities such as supporting, monitoring, learning and collaborating.

Fortunately, we have gained more trust in this area. Almost all territories have created their own regional funds. These are territorial funds created by Indigenous peoples themselves to sustain their own capacities and capabilities.

There’s also a lack of collective decision-making in some projects. If projects are carried out by only two, three or four people, and only those individuals are responsible for protecting the territory, they will not have the same impact as when the whole community is involved. When we work collectively, our efforts go much further because we are thinking beyond ourselves and beyond the present moment.

João Victor Pankararu, youth coordinator for the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples and Organizations of the Northeast, Minas Gerais, and Espírito Santo (APOINME) (Pankararu land, Brazil)

Mongabay: What solutions are currently working in your community, or in others, that don’t receive much attention?

João Victor Pankararu: We have traditional practices related to water storage and protecting water resources, taking into account that our region has irregular rainy seasons, especially due to climate change.

In the northern part of Brazil, we have very important rivers. We have a river that connects two regions and crosses through our territory. The waterways that come into Indigenous areas are very well cared for to prevent them from being invaded or contaminated.

It is not possible to completely prohibit people from using water, but there are protections in place for certain areas where animals drink water (in order to protect people from becoming infected). There are reservoirs that communities can use for cleaning, as well as other areas that are exclusively reserved for drinking water. In addition, there are areas where water has a spiritual purpose. These areas should not be violated.

We also carry out reforestation activities by planting native species, especially in areas impacted by the presence of large enterprises nearby or drought. We choose to plant trees that grow quickly in order to support forest regeneration.

Mongabay: What are some factors that make a particular conservation or climate solution more likely to succeed in your community, or in others?

João Victor Pankararu: Community initiatives, especially initiatives that involve the whole community and the different actors within the community.

However, when initiatives are implemented in isolation from the community, they are less likely to succeed because they often lead to a lack of engagement from the population. Activities that emerge from within the community are more effective because they mobilize more partners and bring more people together.

Mongabay: What solutions are currently not working? Why do you think they are falling short?

João Victor Pankararu: There is a need to seek renewable energy solutions, for example. However, when these initiatives are implemented in our territories, they have too often caused damage. In my territory, for example, we have been heavily impacted by hydroelectric power plants and solar energy projects.

These are very large investments, and big electricity-generation projects have affected our lands. Around 90% of some areas have been privatized, with the land occupied by large electricity transmission towers that carry power to different regions.

At the same time, our communities are prevented from accessing quality electricity, and we do not even have access to drinking water in some areas. Sometimes communities cannot access certain water sources in the regions where they live.

These are very good initiatives in principle, as they were planned to generate renewable energy. However, they do not benefit communities, because some of these projects prevent Indigenous communities from accessing water and the infrastructure was built without properly consulting the communities. There was also no compensation provided to the communities living in the areas where these investments were implemented.

Mongabay: What are some other common pitfalls that prevent conservation or climate solutions from working?

João Victor Pankararu: There are many obstacles we face in Brazil. Brazil is one of the countries where there are significant attacks against Indigenous peoples who are fighting for Indigenous rights.

There are also government institutions in Brazil that have the mandate to oversee and regulate the recognition and delimitation of territories so we can govern the lands, but they are not fulfilling their responsibilities.

There are many business interests and industries along with people who directly influence the development of national policies that do not prioritize biodiversity protection. For example, there is the use of agrotoxins, as well as the exploitation of Indigenous lands, which weakens the management and protection of these territories.

I’ll share more. There’s a logic where, sometimes, people who design environmental projects do not fully understand the communities or the territories. Each community has its own particularities, which are very specific, and it is important for us to maintain this diversity.

There are different approaches that can be used to support different communities, allowing Indigenous peoples to determine for themselves the best ways to receive and implement support.

As Indigenous peoples, we have built our own Indigenous visions, which is different from the vision that was imposed during the colonial period, a period that attempted to portray Indigenous peoples as incapable or lacking skills.

We want to bring this into politics, advocacy, global engagement, academic knowledge production, communication, media, technology, management and leadership.

Abdi Akbar, director of political participation expansion at the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelagoor AMAN (South Sulawesi, Indonesia)

Mongabay: What solutions are currently working in your community, or in others, that don’t receive much attention?

Abdi Akbar: The first is participatory mapping of Indigenous territories. This is not only about creating maps. It provides the foundation for protecting our Indigenous territories and establishing zones based on the customary laws that exist in our communities, for example rules to protect certain forests. AMAN is mapping lands across the country.

Another initiative with positive outcomes is the rehabilitation of Indigenous territories, especially in critically degraded areas. We carry out this work in areas that have been damaged by mining, large-scale plantations, such as oil palm plantations, extractive industries or natural disasters. We begin by planting native tree species that are best suited to the local ecosystem. Many native plants and tree species have become rare or are close to disappearing, so one of our priorities is to replant them.

Rehabilitation is also about using participatory maps to strengthen land-use zoning based on Indigenous laws and ensuring that these customary regulations are applied. Everything is connected.

In terms of zoning, we want to reestablish spatial planning within our territories. As our communities grow and populations change, our land-use needs also evolve.

However, rehabilitation must be connected to Indigenous knowledge. Before we restore the land physically, we first need to restore the way people think. The modern era and extractive economic systems have changed how many people view and interact with nature.

So, a key initiative is Indigenous schools. We established these schools to ensure that Indigenous values, traditions, knowledge and a relationship with nature are passed on from our elders to the next generation. In today’s modern era, many young people in our communities have access to formal education. While this is important, it has also changed the way some of them see the world, influencing their perspectives and mindsets. That is why Indigenous schools are so crucial.

Mongabay: What are some factors that make a particular conservation or climate solution more likely to succeed in your community, or in others?

Abdi Akbar: First, we need to ensure that Indigenous peoples and Indigenous organizations are strengthened. In both the Indonesian and global contexts, one of the most important solutions is to establish direct financing mechanisms that are led and implemented by Indigenous peoples. It strengthens Indigenous organizations, supports Indigenous leadership, improves the governance of Indigenous territories and reinforces our customary systems and regulations.

We also ensure the meaningful participation of women and youth throughout the process [of any conservation or climate solution]. The initiatives we find successful are led and decided by Indigenous peoples themselves, so the solutions are designed around local needs, traditional knowledge, and community priorities.

Mongabay: What solutions are currently not working? Why do you think they are falling short?

Abdi Akbar: In many cases, programs are designed without being aligned with the context, priorities and needs of Indigenous communities.

For example, there are carbon projects, carbon markets and carbon offsetting initiatives not based on Indigenous rights. There are also rigid conservation models that restrict Indigenous peoples’ access to their territories, as has occurred in national parks in Kalimantan [the Indonesian portion of Borneo]. For us as Indigenous peoples, we have always practiced conservation, even if we do not use that term. We have many different names for these practices in our languages and they are embedded in our customary governance systems.

When Indigenous peoples are no longer able to access territories because they have been designated as protected areas, this disconnects people from nature, even though that relationship had existed in harmony for generations.

Mongabay: What are the most common pitfalls that prevent conservation or climate solutions from working?

Abdi Akbar: Many externally designed solutions fail because they focus primarily on bureaucratic processes, economic interests and market-based approaches, rather than recognizing and respecting Indigenous rights. As a result, they are implemented through a top-down approach instead of being developed with Indigenous communities.

That approach basically ignores the reality on the ground, especially for Indigenous peoples. It also ignores the governance systems that Indigenous communities have already established. Decisions about programs and solutions are made by donors or project implementers, rather than by Indigenous peoples themselves.

I think that is one of the biggest reasons why so many of these solutions fail.

We also do not receive enough support or attention, particularly from our government. However, we continue to receive support from international organizations that recognize the importance of these initiatives.

We cannot do this alone. We need greater support and collective action. Working together will make these efforts more impactful and strengthen their contribution to climate solutions.

Sara Omi Casama, president of the Coordinator of Territorial Women Leaders of Mesoamerica, which serves under the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests (AMPB) (Ipetí Emberá, Panama)

Mongabay: What solutions are currently working in your community, or in others, that don’t receive much attention?

Sara Omi Casama: I come from a territory where my grandparents were forcibly displaced by development projects while they were caring for and tending to their ancestral forests. Today, we find ourselves rebuilding as a community.

I say this to highlight our models of adaptation: Despite dispossession and despite violations of our rights, we have managed to reclaim the way of life of our grandparents.

We are healing a deep wound by continuing to restore our forests. When we talk about restoration, we are not only talking about planting trees; we are also talking about restoring our minds and our hearts.

There are positive examples within my community and across the Mesoamerican region that demonstrate what is possible. One of the things we have been advocating for is greater attention from academia and the scientific community toward Mesoamerica, because our region remains invisible in many ways.

We continue sharing knowledge and experiences: The factors that contribute to biodiversity conservation, climate adaptation and the strengthening of Indigenous territories.

Among the best practices I can highlight is the work carried out through the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests and through the Coordinating Committee of Mesoamerican Territorial Women. One important example is our funding mechanism, which is based on principles developed from the grassroots level and rooted in the governance structures of our territories.

Mongabay: What are some factors that make a particular conservation or climate solution more likely to succeed in your community, or in others?

Sara Omi Casama: Working hand in hand with communities while ensuring that our voices are represented. For example, every year, the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund also seeks to directly reach communities by working with their own governance bodies and with Indigenous women.

For me, these are examples that are moving in the right direction and that have the potential to be highly successful if they receive greater support. They also create opportunities for us to engage directly with decision-makers and move toward solutions that are grounded in the realities, needs, and visions of our communities.

Mongabay: What solutions are currently not working? Why do you think they are falling short?

Sara Omi Casama: There are still not enough mechanisms or tools that prioritize cultural relevance and that can truly create an impact within our territories.

Many programs and projects are carried out in the name of Indigenous peoples or in the name of protecting Mother Earth and claim to bring solutions to our territories in response to the impacts of climate change.

However, the majority of programs and projects are designed from above, from outside the territory, by people who do not understand the realities faced by our communities: the realities of women, elders, children and youth.

This is where conflicts emerge. Instead of seeking comprehensive solutions for our territories, these approaches often weaken the collective spirit and, above all, undermine the territorial vision and worldview of our communities. As a result, many of these programs and projects ultimately fail.

There are also projects that don’t guarantee our rights or that there is respect and that free, prior and informed consent from our communities is upheld in all decisions that affect us.

We also continue to raise the same concerns regarding Indigenous women, who are still being excluded from many opportunities.

Mongabay: Do you have any specific examples?

Sara Omi Casama: In Panama in 2015, there was a program called Techo de Esperanza [Roof of Hope]. The program focused on development and aimed to help families overcome poverty by providing housing solutions. However, it was a general national program that lacked cultural relevance. When it reached Indigenous territories, communities were essentially told, “Take it or leave it.”

Many families who needed housing accepted the option because it was something the government was offering, but the solutions implemented were not adapted to our realities. They overlooked proper sanitation, bathrooms and infrastructure that would ensure public health within our communities.

At the same time, these solutions disrupted the essence of our traditional homes. Our traditional houses are not simply physical structures; they represent education, learning, family relationships, community harmony and cultural identity. When those elements are removed, the result can actually create greater difficulties for families rather than improving their wellbeing.

These are examples of programs that negatively impact our territories because they often arrive without follow-up or evaluation. There are no processes to understand whether they are truly working or whether they are creating new challenges. They are simply introduced into the territory and communities are left to adapt as best they can.

Sometimes new interventions introduce elements that do not align with our worldview, without consultation and without seeking alternatives or mechanisms that would allow us to maintain our own structures.

Joseph Itongwa Mukumo, coordinator of the Network of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities for the Sustainable Management of Forest Ecosystems (REPALEF) and member of member of REPALEAC (North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo)

Mongabay: What solutions are currently working in your community, or in others, that don’t receive much attention?

Joseph Itongwa Mukumo: One example is Kisimbosa, a community forest [in eastern DRC] managed by the Indigenous people of my own community in the Congo Basin. This forest is exceptionally rich in biodiversity and has been conserved by Indigenous peoples for generations. Today, it is legally recognized under the Community Forest Law. Communities have also established forest monitoring practices to guard against external threats and to raise awareness among young people about the importance of protecting these places.

Researchers from institutions such as the University of Kisangani have demonstrated the remarkable biodiversity found in Indigenous-managed territories, particularly with respect to fruit tree species, forest flora and the traditional management practices that ensure the sustainable stewardship of forests and biodiversity. Professor Raoul, a researcher specializing in forestry, demonstrated that the deforestation rate in our territory was approximately 0.3%, significantly lower than in neighboring areas occupied by other communities.

Similar examples can be found in the Kisimbosa forest reserve [in North Kivu] and in Kiri Territory, in Maï-Ndombe Province [western DRC], where an Indigenous-conserved area known as Koto once more demonstrates the effectiveness of Indigenous stewardship.

We have devoted considerable effort to documenting and bringing back to life our traditional practices that help maintain biodiversity, protect forests and rivers, conserve plant species and sustain wildlife. And, according to our customary rules, certain destructive practices are simply forbidden.

Our fishing practices also follow ecological cycles. During the rainy season, many fish migrate from large rivers into smaller streams. We know this is the appropriate time for collective fishing. Because we understand these migration patterns, we avoid clearing forests, cultivating fields or carrying out agricultural activities along the banks of these streams. Disturbing these habitats would damage the ecosystem and reduce fish populations in the future.

Mongabay: What are some factors that make a particular conservation or climate solution more likely to succeed in your community, or in others?

Joseph Itongwa Mukumo: To ensure these traditions continue, we pass our knowledge on to younger generations. We even maintain traditional schools where young people learn these teachings directly from their elders.

A priority is strengthening the capacity of Indigenous communities themselves, especially young people, who are the future guardians of our forests. Education, training and formal schooling are essential so that they can respond effectively to the external pressures affecting their territories. They need the knowledge and skills to understand national policies, engage in decision-making and defend their rights using the same language and legal tools as those who seek to exploit these lands.

The same is true for Indigenous leaders. Across our communities, local leaders need stronger capacities so they can advocate effectively for their peoples, understand the policy landscape and respond when their territories are threatened.

Our work focuses on solutions that come from within our own communities; not imported solutions, but solutions rooted in our values, traditions and the revitalization of our cultural practices.

Mongabay: What solutions are currently not working? Why do you think they are falling short?

Joseph Itongwa Mukumo: In 2022, the DRC adopted its law on the promotion and protection of the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the right to consultation before any decision is made regarding the use, exploitation or development of lands that Indigneous peoples have occupied and relied upon for generations.

However, this is not yet the reality. The implementing measures needed to enforce the law have still not been adopted, leaving many Indigenous territories vulnerable to exploitation without consent (free, prior and informed consent) or benefit-sharing despite the legal protections.

In response, one of our priorities has been to ensure that Indigenous-community-managed conservation areas are formally recognized within Indigenous territories, particularly where there is clear evidence that these lands maintain exceptional biodiversity and remain largely undisturbed.

To date, we have identified and mapped more than 40 Indigenous-community-conserved areas —our territories of life— covering approximately 700,000 to 800,000 hectares (1.7 million to almost 2 million acres].

We were able to influence this process at the national level and today community-managed conservation areas are officially reflected among the country’s national conservation objectives and contribution to the global 30×30 target, the commitment to conserve 30% of the world’s terrestrial and marine areas by 2030.

We have also begun advocating for the integration of community-managed conservation areas into forestry governance, both within the revised Forest Code and in related forestry legislation currently under review.

Mongabay: What are the most common pitfalls that prevent conservation or climate solutions from working?

Joseph Itongwa Mukumo: Among the challenges are the discrimination, marginalization and unequal status that Indigenous peoples continue to face. These realities mean that our traditional knowledge, cultural values and customary conservation practices are often not recognized by others as important contributions to biodiversity conservation.

Another challenge is the gradual loss of cultural values among Indigenous youth. Many young people grow up experiencing discrimination and seeing their culture devalued. As a result, some begin to underestimate the importance of their own traditions that sustain these ecosystems and believe that the values of others are more important.

Our territories also face growing external threats from things like logging, mining and armed conflict, especially in eastern DRC where there is intense competition over our natural resources. These pressures force Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. Indigenous peoples can only continue practicing and transmitting their traditional knowledge if they are able to live safely on their lands and benefit from the resources they protect.

Poverty is another major obstacle. When communities lack basic resources and are already living in conditions of hardship, they become more vulnerable to letting in external pressures.

Indigenous communities continue to face significant barriers in accessing the financial support needed to sustain and strengthen their conservation efforts.

Finally, one of the greatest challenges remains the lack of legal recognition for many Indigenous territories. Many ancestral lands we are protecting still have no secure legal status, leaving them vulnerable to encroachment and exploitation.

Toya Manchineri, general coordinator of the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) (Mamoadate, Brazil-Peru border)

Mongabay: What solutions are currently working in your community, or in others, that don’t receive much attention?

Toya Manchineri: One of the key issues we are working on in the Brazilian Amazon for environmental preservation is the demarcation of Indigenous territories. Today we have more than 100 million hectares [247 million acres] of Indigenous territories.

These legal territories prevent the expansion of industrial agriculture, store carbon and help regulate temperatures, which is fundamental.

In Indigenous territories, we also have data showing that deforestation rates are very low in our lands. In some territories, deforestation accounts for only 1% to 2% of the total area.

Outside Indigenous territories, however, deforestation is much greater, particularly due to agricultural expansion and monoculture production, especially soy and other large-scale crops.

Mongabay: What are some factors that make a particular conservation or climate solution more likely to succeed in your community, or in others?

Toya Manchineri: Projects that create positive impacts are those that strengthen household economies while also strengthening community organization.

However, if a project is focused only on economic benefits, it will not produce positive results because communities also want to live well within their territories and maintain their ways of life.

We need to look at the territory, the land and the resources not as objects for trading or as things that can simply be translated into money.

The forest is a big village for many of us. We do not look at the forest as simply a forest, because it contains life, culture, plants, Indigenous knowledge and an understanding of how the world works. We need to look at life and spirituality so that we can heal our souls and take actions that truly contribute to the people who need support.

For example, if a family has $1 billion, where should those resources go? We need to learn how to share resources. We need to look back to the past and remember that there is a need to share with others.

Mongabay: What solutions are currently not working? Why do you think they are falling short?

Toya Manchineri: In the 1970s and 1980s, there were initiatives to plant coffee in Indigenous territories. Indigenous communities invested in coffee production, but many people did not have knowledge of how to cultivate coffee. These practices also reminded them of the history of slavery and, as a result, the projects did not succeed.

Another project organized by the Brazilian government was the hydroelectric power initiative, which divided communities who had different opinions and caused environmental pollution. Today, despite these impacts, the energy produced should be cheaper, but it’s not.

These examples show that projects that do not come from the community and do not involve the community in the process will never truly work.

Mongabay: What are the most common pitfalls that prevent conservation or climate solutions from working?

Toya Manchineri: Projects that are developed using a top-down approach may sometimes be received by communities as beneficial, but they are not based on the common practices or priorities of the communities themselves.

As an Indigenous movement, all the projects we carry out in Indigenous territories are implemented for and with the community. If a project is designed by the community, it will be more likely to succeed.

We should focus on what communities actually demand and prioritize activities based on those needs, so that they are not only sustainable but can also contribute to the economic stability of local communities.

Valéria Paye, executive director of the Podáali Fund(Brazil)

Mongabay: What solutions are currently working in your community, or in others, that don’t receive much attention?

Valéria Paye: There are collectives of people, such as forest guardians, who are restoring degraded lands and protecting important areas such as headwaters and regions that are essential for maintaining water systems.

These guardians also work on the protection and management of wildlife numbers. Indigenous peoples have traditional practices for managing species such as turtles, caimans and other animals. This is connected to our food systems because these animals are part of our biodiversity and food security.

There are also guardians who work to prevent and fight forest fires, which have increased in some parts of Brazil.

Even official data from IBAMA [Brazil’s environment authority] recognizes that Indigenous peoples are important allies in forest protection. We know that most fire brigades are made up of Indigenous people who are working within their territories to protect their own lands, as well as neighboring territories of other peoples.

Mongabay: What are some factors that make a particular conservation or climate solution more likely to succeed in your community, or in others?

Valéria Paye: Many conservation efforts require long-term political support and continuous state involvement. They need consistent support that can continue over time.

Our funding mechanisms at Podáali Fund can support initiatives for a specific period, but these broader efforts require longer-term support from governments and institutions.

I will also say: Solutions need to involve Indigenous peoples from the beginning and must be built from the realities of the people who are working in those territories. When solutions are brought by outsiders without consultation, they become increasingly inefficient.

Mongabay: What solutions are currently not working? Why do you think they are falling short?

Valéria Paye: These forest guardian and Indigenous fire brigade efforts have limitations, especially regarding access to support, equipment and protective materials.

The resources provided are often not permanent and this is something we hear directly from people working in these brigades.

For example, the government may establish a fire season and say, “We will support you from August to September.” But if fires occur outside of that period, communities often do not receive the necessary support. Some carry out these activities independently, outside the periods defined by the government.

This means there is a gap in protection at other critical times of the year. At Podáali Fund, we provide support, but we also face limitations because we can only support projects that have a defined beginning, middle and end. When those projects finish, our support also ends.

Mongabay: What are the most common pitfalls that prevent conservation or climate solutions from working?

Valéria Paye: I want to highlight something: complexity. For those of us from the Amazon where there are many borders, there are additional challenges. Indigenous peoples who protect territories, defend their lands and carry out this work are often the people who are most exposed to violence and criminalization.

We cannot talk about this without mentioning the threats related to borders, particularly drug trafficking. Drug trafficking is increasingly entering our territories, and these threats are directly affecting Indigenous peoples. The situation is getting worse. This is also weakening the work we are doing in our territories because we face direct confrontation with large organized criminal groups.

Our brothers and sisters are worried for their lives. They are witnessing new activities and new actors entering their territories, even luxury fishing tourism.

The state is not doing enough to monitor territories, enforce protections and address the threats that are occurring. As a result, responsibility has increasingly been transferred from governments to Indigenous peoples.

Banner image: Indigenous representatives interviewed by Mongabay. (From left to right, starting from the top) Olo Villalaz, Joseph Itongwa Mukumo, Toya Manchineri, Sara Omi Casama, Valéria Paye, Juan Carlos Jintiach, Jenifer Lasimbang, Abdi Akbar, João Victor Pankararu. Illustration by Nadiyah Suyatna.

Numbering fewer than 25,000, lions remain vulnerable to extinction. These big cats have suffered catastrophic declines and today occupy roughly 6% of their historical range.

Living with lions (Panthera leo) is not easy. Outside of protected areas, lions kill livestock and, infrequently, people. In response, the cats are poisoned, shot and speared. But across Africa, where the majority of lions live, communities are trialing traditional and new ways to ensure people and lions can coexist.

To mark World Lion Day on Aug. 10, 2026, here is a look at some of Mongabay’s recent coverage of those projects.

Protecting livestock saves lions

In a conflict hotspot in northern Zimbabwe, Zimbabwean lion conservationist Moreangels Mbizah and her colleagues train Batabilili (“protectors” in Tonga, the local language).

These community guardians track lions and promote the use of secure enclosures for livestock, as well as lion deterrents, reports Mongabay contributor Ryan Truscott. While not a panacea, the guardians program has significantly helped reduce conflict between lions and people, and vice versa.

In 2026, Mbizah won a prestigious Whitley Award for her work. The £50,000 ($67,500) prize money will help Mbizah’s NGO, Wildlife Conservation Action, recruit more “Batabilili.”

More evidence of success?

In northern Botswana’s Okavango Delta region, a conservation nonprofit, CLAWS Conservancy, has helped set up a real-time alert system to warn locals of approaching lions so they can take measures to protect themselves and their livestock.

Lions are fitted with GPS collars and tracked.

“If the lion gets within a 5-kilometer [3-mile] radius of a village, or 3-kilometer [1.9-mi] radius of a smaller cattle post or homestead, then it automatically triggers the dispersal of an alert directly to the people who live within that radius where that line is breached,” CLAW Conservancy’s Andrew Stein said in a Q&Awith Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor in 2025. “It’s like a virtual fence.”

In February, contributor Gloria Dickie reported that lions appear to be rebounding in the region where the lion alert-system operates. Restoration of traditional herding practices has also contributed to a large drop in cattle losses and fewer retaliatory lion poisonings.

Community engagement is key

In northern Kenya, the Samburu women’s group Mama Simba (“Mothers of Lions” in Kiswahili) has played an active role in human-lion coexistence for more than a decade, partnering with the Ewaso Lions conservation project.

In a commentary co-authored with Victoria Wanjohi, a wildlife conservation scientist, Mama Simba says that, “the inclusion of women in Africa’s lion conservation efforts is essential to not only to protect the species, but to do so sustainably with the buy-in of nearby communities — which at times can have a tense and challenging relationship with the predatory species.”

“Lions have a powerful place in Samburu culture,” Mama Simba and Wanjohi say. “Traditional beliefs hold that when a lion roars at night, it signals good fortune coming to the community.”

Banner image: A lion in Zambia. Image by Darren Obbard via iNaturalist (CC BY 4.0).

• Federal prosecutors are suing the Brazilian mining agency for failing to monitor wildcat gold mines in the Brazilian Amazon.

• Illegal miners take advantage of the agency’s lack of oversight and name small areas as the origins of tons of gold that have actually been taken from protected areas.

• Measures implemented in the past few years have contributed to a sharp decrease in gold laundering in Brazil, but illegal metal is now being smuggled out of the country.

• ANM’s top officials are also under investigation for receiving bribes to favor mining companies.

• This article was originally written by Fernanda Wenzel appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

Federal prosecutors in Amazonas state are suing the Brazilian government’s mining agency (ANM) for an alleged failure to monitor gold mining exploration in the Amazon.

The lawsuit was filed in early July. A few days later, on July 21, the federal justice ordered ANM to increase oversight over wildcat mine permissions, small-scale mines known as garimpos in Brazil, following a similar lawsuit filed in 2021 by federal prosecutors in neighboring Pará state.

The legal push also follows corruption probes into the agency’s top executives, who are accused of favoring mining companies in Brazil’s largest industrial mining state, Minas Gerais.

ANM is responsible for authorizing and monitoring mining activities in Brazil, including wildcat mining permissions (PLGs), which aren’t subject to the same rigorous environmental requirements as large-scale mines.

According to the federal prosecutors, poor monitoring and unclear rules have turned PLGs into mechanisms to launder gold taken from Indigenous lands and strictly protected conservation areas, where the activity is forbidden. The case is based on irregularities found in reports from Greenpeace and the Federal Court of Auditors.

“Mining permits no longer serve the interests of small-scale miners and, in many cases, have become a front for gold laundering carried out by criminal organizations,” the federal prosecutor André Porreca stated on the Amazonas Federal Public Ministry’s website.

ANM doesn’t require permit applicants to provide prior mineral research to estimate the amount of gold available in each area. Therefore, the permission of a single mine can be used to launder tons of illegal gold taken from elsewhere. One PLG, the size of a soccer field (1.08 hectares or 2.67 acres) and with no signs of mining activity, cited in the lawsuit, was declared as the source of 776 kilograms of gold (1,710 pounds).

“If the permit holder claims to have extracted ten kilograms from a given permit area, there is insufficient evidence to accurately assess whether the metal might have come from another source, likely an illegal one,” the federal prosecutor André Luiz Cunha wrote in the case.

The exemption of preliminary mineral survey is one of ANM’s main shortcomings, according to Gregor Daflon, the spokesperson for the Indigenous Peoples’ Front of Greenpeace Brazil. “Once the permit is issued, there is little or no on-site inspection or monitoring to verify whether the declared production volume is consistent with the potential and actual conditions of the area being mined,” Daflon told Mongabay.

According to the NGO, granting several permits to a single holder also allows industrial-scale mining operations to benefit from PLGs’ simplified rules.

Another lawsuit, filed in 2021 by Pará state’s prosecutors, addressed similar flaws in permissions located in the southwestern municipalities of Jacareacanga, Novo Progresso and Itaituba — the epicenter of illegal gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon.

On July 21, a federal judge ruled in favor of the prosecutors and ordered ANM to conclude a revision of the PLGs rules and to review all the permissions in the region. The agency should also implement a tracking system for the gold supply chain in Brazil, the ruling said.

“This decision could deal yet another blow to the illegal gold mining industry in Brazil,” Daflon said.

In an email to Mongabay, ANM stated that the agency is already addressing a significant portion of the issues raised by the prosecutors, including oversight of possible permit misuse.

ANM also said the “work involves document analysis, cross-checking production and revenue data with geospatial information, investigating production reports lacking evidence of mining operations, and verifying permits that are incompatible with the activity actually being carried out.”

No money or personnel

Since 2023, Brazilian authorities have addressed many of the gold laundering issues involving PLGs, said Larissa Rodrigues, research director at the sustainable development think tank Escolhas Institute, in an interview with Mongabay.

Steps taken include implementing electronic invoices for gold trading and a Supreme Court decision to end the “good faith” concept, which had previously exempted DTVMs, the financial companies authorized to trade gold in Brazil, from verifying the origin of the metal.

As a result, gold production officially declared by garimpos dropped by 80% in 2025 compared to 2022, according to official data analyzed by the Escolhas Institute. Brazil’s general gold exports also dropped by 24% in the same period. Raids from federal forces have also expelled illegal miners from many Amazon Indigenous territories, including the lands of the Yanomami, Munduruku and Kayapó peoples.

“What we’ve accomplished since 2023 is no small feat,” Rodrigues said. But record gold prices and gold miners’ resistance to abandoning the activity mean many of them keep illegally operating in the Amazon, even if at a smaller scale.

Now, however, illegal gold no longer leaves Brazil by the front door. It is smuggled out of the country, mainly through the Venezuela border. As a symptom of this shift, gold seizures on federal roads increased 830% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period last year, according to a report by the G1 news outlet.

“The problem has shifted elsewhere,” Rodrigues said, adding that now smuggled gold faces greater difficulties in entering the global supply chain. “It is a positive shift.”

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva current administration has not, however, addressed chronic underfunding and understaffing at ANM. In May, the agency had almost 20% of its budget blocked by the Ministry of Finance. According to Brazilian magazine Veja, the agency had to suspend inspections of tailings dams, structures used to hold mining byproducts, owing to a lack of travel budget.

“It is the ANM that handles day-to-day operations in these mining areas — including oversight, licensing, and everything else — and it has never been properly structured,” Rodrigues said.

A lack of personnel is another chronic problem. In February 2026, the agency had 607 employees, a third of the staff required for an adequate workforce (1,866), according to the union that represents Brazil’s national regulatory agencies.

“For the agency to be able to monitor thousands of securities and track the source of high-value funds, it is essential that it have the technical capacity, independence, and oversight mechanisms necessary to minimize the likelihood of decisions based on private interests,” Daflon said.

Extra troubles hit the agency in June 2026 when the federal police indicted its president, Mauro Henrique Moreira Sousa, as part of an investigation into illegal iron ore mining in the Serra do Curral protected area in Minas Gerais. According to the investigation, public employees forged environmental recovery plans to allow the mining company Empabra to continue operating in the area illegally.

When contacted by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo in late June, Sousa said he wouldn’t comment on the allegations until he had access to the full Federal Police report.

In another investigation, initiated in 2025, the federal police arrested one of ANM’s directors, Caio Mário Trivellato Seabra Filho. He was arrested on suspicion of being part of a criminal organization that forged environmental licensing documents for mining projects in Minas Gerais. In the court case, which Mongabay had access to, Seabra Filho’s lawyers stated that the federal police had no evidence that he favored or received bribes from mining companies.

Both cases are ongoing.

“That is a clear sign of what happens when you let an agency be deteriorated,” Rodrigues said. “It becomes more vulnerable to capture [by private interests] and to corruption.”

In an email to Mongabay, ANM stated it does not comment on ongoing investigations, disciplinary proceedings or legal actions.

Banner image: Illegal gold mines contaminate the Amazon rivers with mercury and affect the health of local communities. Image by Fernando Martinho for Mongabay.