Beaches in San Vicente municipality in the Philippines’ Palawan province are crucial nesting grounds for olive ridley sea turtles. But the turtles and their babies face perilous journeys on those beaches — from dogs, tourism, and increasingly severe storms and high tides. To counter these threats, the NGO Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines (LAMAVE) has partnered with residents to patrol the beaches and rescue turtle eggs, reports contributor Rachel Duckett for Mongabay. In Santo Niño village, volunteers and patrollers conduct intensive night patrols covering more than 8 kilometers (5 mile) of the beach in five shifts. When the patrollers find a nesting turtle, they protect her from dogs. When she’s done nesting, they measure her and take photographs of her before she reenters the water. These help them identify her in the future. Then they relocate the eggs to protected hatcheries, a move researchers say is vital because nests left on the beach are almost always lost to stray dogs or flooding. Sometimes, they encounter dead nesting mothers or turtles mortally wounded by dogs. They remove eggs from those nests as well. “In the end, even though she’s dead, at least her babies survive,” said researcher Klara Simon at LAMAVE. In the hatcheries, the eggs are placed in nests in the sand, which the researchers check on every few hours. Baby olive ridleys (Lepidochelys olivacea) start emerging two months after the eggs are laid. According to LAMAVE data from last season and preliminary data from this season, their hatcheries…This article was originally published on Mongabay

In April 2026, Malaysia enacted an absolute ban on the import of electronic waste, moving to end its role as a primary destination for the world’s hazardous electrical and electronic scrap. The regulation aims to shutter a black market of illegal recycling yards that use falsified paperwork to smuggle toxic materials into the country, reports contributor Ashley Yeong for Mongabay. Investigators and NGOs have long raised concerns about containers with falsely declared documents frequently slipping into Malaysia’s illegal recycling sites. To get through customs, smugglers often declare electronic waste, or e-waste, as legitimate raw materials. The large volume of shipping containers that pass through Malaysian ports makes the detection of the illegal waste challenging, Nik Ezanee Mohd Faisal, the commander of the Malaysian Border Control and Protection Agency (AKPS) in Port Klang, told reporters in February. In the first five months of 2026 alone, Port Klang, located in the west coast of Malaysia, processed approximately 3.2 million standard shipping containers. Despite the challenge, a specialized joint task force known as Op Green Shield has started to see results. Between January and July 2026, the task force inspected 685 containers and successfully repatriated more than 3,000 metric tons of e-waste to their countries of origin. Jim Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network (BAN), told Mongabay that a major hurdle is the U.S., a top e-waste exporter that is not a party to the Basel Convention on hazardous waste, which regulates the movement and trade of hazardous waste. “The US…This article was originally published on Mongabay

There’s a thriving illegal wildlife trade in Cambodia that caters to high-ranking government officials and wealthy Chinese nationals, according to a report on a yearlong undercover investigation by the U.S.-based NGO Earth League International (ELI). The report, titled “Sandokan,” identified five kingpins allegedly running transnational criminal networks involved in wildlife smuggling, human and drug trafficking, and sophisticated scam centers, reports Mongabay’s Spoorthy Raman. The investigation found that products made from parts of endangered species, including tigers, rhinos and elephants, are openly sold in shops and exclusive restaurants across the country. ELI investigators documented tiger bone wine sold in ornate tiger-shaped bottles as a prestige item; tiger cub meat served as a culinary delicacy; and rooms filled with rhino horns and elephant ivory. “The big surprise was the incredible quantity of wildlife in the hands of these people,” said Andrea Crosta, executive director of ELI. The report highlights a convergence of environmental crime and organized syndicate activity. Wildlife products were often stored in warehouses located in special economic zones (SEZs) — designated industrial and commercial areas that offer tax incentives. The same buildings also housed illicit drugs and illegally logged timber, the investigation found. Wildlife trafficking often coexisted with money laundering through casinos in the SEZs, a model also present in Laos for more than a decade, as exposed by the U.K.-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) in its 2015 report about Kings Romans Casino in Laos’s Golden Triangle SEZ. One individual who said they worked in logistics told ELI investigators he…This article was originally published on Mongabay