Mongabay Newscast

Nearly three years ago, Newscast guest, author and journalist Ben Goldfarb discussed his book Crossings , which is about wildlife crossings and road ecology. Wildlife crossings help reconnect habitats fragmented by road networks, reducing collisions, helping protect threatened wildlife, and improving genetic diversity. Since that conversation, Goldfarb has documented the growing popularity of wild...

A group of more than 40 researchers spent 20 months devising a plan for the world to achieve ecological sustainability within planetary boundaries , all while seeing incomes rise for 98% of the global population and reducing working hours for everybody by half to two and a half days a week. The plan to achieve this by 2100 is laid out in the recent " Global Justice Report ." If it sounds utopian,...

Theonila Roka Matbob grew up next to what was — at the time — the world's largest open-pit mine in Bougainville, an autonomous island in Papua New Guinea, operated by a subsidiary of Rio Tinto. This mine wrought environmental and social devastation on the community of Panguna for decades. And many of these impacts carry on today, says Roka Matbob, who is an Indigenous Nasioi woman and politician....

Katharine Wilkinson has a Ph. D. in geography and the environment, is well known for being a co-author of the book Drawdown and co-founder of The All We Can Save Project . She joins the Newscast this week to discuss her latest book Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home . As a journalist, it's unhelpful for me to divorce myself from the topic of this interview, as I have...

A group of 57 nations mostly from the Global South, describing themselves as "coalition of the willing" intent on making the Transition Away From Fossil Fuels, or TAFF, convened in the Colombian city of Santa Marta, from April 24-29, 2026, for the inaugural TAFF summit . Also referred to as the "Santa Marta Coalition," this group of countries met to discuss and develop frameworks and pathways for...

Australia is one of 17 "megadiverse" countries that account for 70% of Earth's biodiversity. However, Australia is unique in having the highest mammalian extinction rate in the world . That makes conservation on the island continent, where most of the wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth, all the more urgent. Conservation and environmental scientists have come out against the Australian federal...

"[The]cruel irony here [is] that the world cannot get its act together to address these threats … people are dying, animals are suffering, we're losing rainforest … these are all interconnected threats," Neil Vora tells me on this week's episode of the Mongabay Newscast, just a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 80 deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo from an ou...

"We are experiencing what some people call sort of a shutdown of the public square in the United States and around the world," says veteran environmental activist André Carothers. Along with the former executive director of Greenpeace US, Annie Leonard, the two have co-authored a new book about the history of protest, why it works, and why it's under attack. Protest: Respect It. Defend It. Use It....

"That might be something that you see in a decade, not in two years of filming," Tara Stoinksi, CEO of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, tells me. The behavior she's referring to occurs in mountain gorilla groups, such as a "dominance transfer," where a younger male silverback takes over leadership from an older male, and infanticide, where an outsider or ostracized gorilla kills the offspring of a ne...

Forester and scientist Suzanne Simard is well known for her landmark 1997 paper , which demonstrated that two distinct species of trees could share resources. At the time, it turned traditional Western forestry thinking on its head. Instead of the Darwinian view of trees as being in competition with each other, it introduced the idea that these trees may actually help each other, and that industri...

The routes taken by migratory birds, known as flyways, often cross vast expanses of ocean. Six of these marine flyways have now been formally recognized by the U.N.'s Convention on Migratory Species, at the suggestion of scientists who published their findings on these flyways in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology . Tammy Davies, a co-author of the paper and marine science...

Coyotes are now present in almost every major urban-metropolitan area in the United States, yet conflicts between the canines and humans are exceptionally low . Between 1960 and 2006, only 146 documented coyote attacks on humans occurred in the U.S. and Canada. Yet there are 4.5 million dog attacks on humans annually in the U.S. alone. Despite the low number of conflicts with coyotes, nearly one c...

Jessie Panazzolo was given a stuffed gorilla when she was 3, and from then on, she always wanted to be a conservationist. But a reasonable career track of being gainfully employed or on a livable wage almost doesn't exist in the sector, she explains to me this week on the Mongabay Newscast. She details the dwindling career prospects, the grueling conditions conservationists must endure, and the me...

The people and policies that control how humans treat the natural world are increasingly dominated by a small class of elite political entities and corporations, argues our guest, political ecologist Bram Buscher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, on this week's Newscast. This power, he says, is concentrated on platforms that have no allegiance to fact or truth, but rather serve only wha...

When then-U.S. president John F . Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development in 1961, it was meant primarily to administer health and food aid around the world. In the decades since, USAID expanded to become one of the world's largest financial contributors to conservation, providing nearly $400 million annually before the end of 2024. However, that money is now complet...

Tiger populations have risen in some countries, such as Bhutan, Nepal and India, but the global population of the big cat species remains critically endangered, says Debbie Banks, campaign lead for tigers and wildlife crime at the Environmental Investigation Agency . The global tiger population was recorded at roughly 5,574 in 2022, with the species having disappeared from roughly 95% of its histo...

Khatijah Rahmat , a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany, says she's trying to build legitimacy around the concept of animal temporality — the ability to experience time — specifically in elephants. Doing so could have implications for conservation and beyond. "How we envision an animal's relationship to time influences whether we see them as fe...

Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta (Apalech clan (Wik) Lostmob Nungar) joins the Mongabay Newscast to detail the Aboriginal perspectives behind his latest book, Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking . The book explains how stories shape society, how they can harm us and the environment, and how they may save our species and the natural world. Yunkaporta explains how Indigeno...

Mongabay Latam 's multiyear, *award-winning ** investigation that uncovered 67 clandestine airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon used for drug trafficking sent waves across the local media landscape. It drew attention to the Indigenous communities impacted by these illegal airstrips and the 15 Indigenous leaders who were killed defending their territory. To communicate this story to a wider audience, M...

National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yuyän returns to the Mongabay Newscast to share his experience creating his new book, Guardians of Life: Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Science, and Restoring the Planet from specialty publisher Braided River. This book documents the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of nine Indigenous communities worldwide, featuring contributions and essays from man...

A year ago, U.S. President Donald Trump shut down public access to the Development Experience Clearinghouse, a $30 billion database holding 60 years' worth of institutional knowledge from more than 150,000 projects administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development. But before the closure, former USAID employee and artificial intelligence scientist Lindsey Moore used a large language mo...

It's been more than half a century since the publication of Silent Spring by the scientist and creative writer Rachel Carson. The seminal volume caught the attention of U.S. presidents, artists and musicians, spurring the environmental movement and leading to the eventual ban of the toxic pesticide DDT. Joining the Mongabay Newscast is environmental writer and director of the creative writing prog...

Across Mediterranean Europe, olive groves are in decline from a range of factors, from disease to depopulation. In Italy alone, there are roughly 440 million abandoned olive trees, and the ecological, cultural and socioeconomic impacts from the loss are devastating, explains the latest guest on the Mongabay Newscast. Still, solutions exist to help turn the tide of this under-discussed problem. Fed...

Professional drag artist and environmental activist Pattie Gonia has more than 2 million followers on Instagram and has raised $1.2 million for environmental nonprofits by hiking 100 miles, or 160 kilometers, in full drag into San Francisco. She has gained international recognition for using drag artistry to advocate for the environment, in acknowledgment and celebration of hundreds of researchers...

Judith Enck is a former regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, appointed by President Barack Obama, and the founder of Beyond Plastics , an organization dedicated to eradicating plastic pollution worldwide. She joins Mongabay's podcast to discuss how governments can implement policies to turn off the tap on plastic pollution, which harms human health and devastates our...