You can’t dictate a solution to the worldwide plastic pollution crisis, according to Julio Cordano, the new chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) for a global plastic treaty. He said consensus will be needed. Cordano was elected INC chair in February 2026. That appointment came after INC repeatedly failed to meet its own deadlines for achieving an agreement to deal with the world’s rapidly escalating plastic pollution crisis. INC began treaty negotiations in 2022 with the goal of achieving an agreement by 2024. But negotiators remain deadlocked and nowhere near an accord. That puts Cordano — a career Chilean diplomat and director of the Environment, Climate Change and Oceans Division of Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs — in a difficult position. Today, 184 nations, known as the parties, can’t even agree on whether a treaty should include binding limits on plastic production (a stance held by the roughly 70 High Ambition Coalition member nations), or focus only on voluntary plastic waste management, reuse and recycling (a position held by the Like Minded Group of a handful of petrostates). Talks continue this year, but INC doesn’t expect another formal negotiating session until March 2027 at the earliest. With Cordano in the challenging position of finding common ground between the parties, Mongabay reached out for an exclusive interview to determine his hopes and concerns for the treaty process. He doesn’t often speak to the press and declined a Mongabay interview request, but agreed to answer questions submitted in writing.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

More than a decade ago, conservationists began working to preserve a unique population of desert pampas cats that has adapted to the mangroves of Peru’s northern coast. This small, isolated population roams the San Pedro de Vice dry mangroves, a Ramsar Site and South America’s southernmost mangrove ecosystem. “This is a very unique population, because as far as we know, [it] is the only Pampas cat population that lives in a mangrove [habitat],” Alvaro Garcia, co-coordinator of the Pampas Cat Working Group and the Peruvian Desert Cat Project, told Mongabay in an email. The desert pampas cat (Leopardus garleppi), distinctive for its broad face, ranges along a relatively thin band snaking southward from Colombia through Peru and Bolivia, to northern Chile and Argentina. The species is acclimated to dry conditions, so inhabits deserts, grasslands and dry forests, and isn’t found living in mangroves anywhere else aside from this region of Peru. Dry mangrove forests, also called scrub or dwarf mangrove forests, grow in highly saline soils in upper intertidal zones, so lack regular daily flushing by ocean tides. At first, it was thought the dry mangrove-acclimated cats were faring well: “[I]n the mangrove [habitat], we put cameras out for a week, and we got tons of photos,” whereas in other parts of the felid’s range, conservationists barely capture one desert pampas cat image per month, said Cindy Hurtado, co-coordinator of the Pampas Cat Working Group and the Peruvian Desert Cat Project. Based on the photos, the research team assumed the…This article was originally published on Mongabay