Landowner Carlos Roberto Simonetti gets three harvests per year from the corn, soy and cotton plantations on his 17,000-hectare (about 42,000 acres) farm called Fazenda Natureza Feliz, or Happy Nature, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. Over the course of four years, he would also get what he calls a fourth harvest, this time from the forested areas of his property, located where the Cerrado savanna meets the Amazon Rainforest. That’s because Simonetti would receive regular payments for protecting native vegetation beyond what the law requires, as part of a pilot project for payment for ecosystem services (PES) run by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), an NGO, in the states of Mato Grosso and Pará. The program, called CONSERV, gives landowners financial incentives to keep the forest standing even in areas which they are legally allowed to clear. The pilot project, which initially ran between 2020 and 2024 on 23 different properties, protected 20,707 hectares (about 51,170 acres) of land in the Cerrado and Amazon biomes with funding from the governments of Norway and The Netherlands. Ongoing contracts funded by Soft Commodities Forum members – agribusiness companies committed to preserving the Cerrado – are protecting a further 7,000 hectares (about 17,300 acres) in the states of Mato Grosso and Maranhão. IPAM is now seeking to scale up the program without relying on donations. The risk of legal deforestation The idea for CONSERV goes back to 2016, when an internal IPAM report calculated that around 1.5 million hectares (3.7…This article was originally published on Mongabay

CONCEPCIÓN DE SOLUTECA, Honduras — In the 1970s, the Honduran government granted a piece of land in the mountains of Concepción de Soluteca to Roberto González’s parents. They duly grabbed a chainsaw and a machete to clear the forest. On the 12 hectares (30 acres) they received as part of a land reform, they planted corn, beans and bananas, the basic staple foods. It was a hard life up in the mountains, allowing the farmers and their families to just survive. There wasn’t much public infrastructure, and most children had to help with farmwork early on. This included González, who only attended elementary school for three years. When González inherited the land 20 years later, coffee cultivation was just taking off. Middlemen promised the farmers good money for the export crop, and the banks provided loans for cultivation. At first, this worked well, González, now 39, remembers. Coffee helped the farmers to generate income and improve living conditions. But it didn’t last long. They grew coffee much the same way they did other crops, without adequate soil or shade management. When harvests dwindled, they expanded their area, cutting the last standing forests and damaging water sources. Around 2012, they faced an outbreak of coffee rust, a fungal disease. It was a complete disaster: many farmers were thrown into poverty and forced to migrate. “We destroyed the foundations of our livelihoods, but it was out of ignorance; we just didn’t know better,” González tells Mongabay. Under the EUDR, coffee farmers step…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Earlier this month, state-owned oil company Petroecuador announced a new project involving “hydraulic fracturing” in an oil block in the Ecuadorian Amazon. As a result, some observers spoke out against the environmental risks of high-volume shale “fracking,” in which water and chemicals are injected at high pressures into the tight bedrock to release trapped oil and gas. Shale fracking tends to cause air pollution, uses high quantities of water, and can result in contamination that creates public health risks for surrounding communities. But while “hydraulic fracturing” and shale “fracking” involve similar processes, they’re carried out at entirely different intensities, with different designs, the observers later said. The two terms are often used interchangeably, and the government didn’t explain the distinction or follow up when the groups asked for clarification, they said. “It’s striking because, for us, one of the concerns is the lack of information associated with this announcement,” Sebastián Valdivieso, Ecuador country director for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), told Mongabay. The announcement concerned oil in Block 57, also known as the Shushufindi Libertador block, located in Sucumbíos province, which is largely covered by Amazonian rainforest. New drilling there would yield 930 barrels a day, extracted with the help of service provider Chuanqing Drilling Engineering Corporation (CCDC), a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation. In its announcement, Petroecuador said it was the first time in the country’s history that hydraulic fracturing would be used on subsurface limestone, where those kinds of operations aren’t usually carried out. A group of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Avian vampire flies (Philornis downsi) were not discovered in the Galápagos Islands for almost three decades after they were thought to have arrived from mainland Ecuador in the 1960s. Even then, the first were found by accident. Birgit Fessl, a landbird ecologist, was surveying for native species on the island of Santa Cruz in 1997 when she reached into the branches of a tree to take down the huge, domed nest of a woodpecker finch. Inside was a surprise. “We found one dying chick, another dead one which just looked sucked dry and 20 large maggots full of blood,” said Fessl, who now leads the Charles Darwin Foundation’s Landbird Conservation program. “I was stunned — the first dead baby in my hands. Then I realized it wasn’t an accident: It was everywhere,” she told Mongabay over a WhatsApp call. Across each of the Galapagos’ human-inhabited islands, vampire flies had already wrought havoc, killing some chicks in nests they infiltrated and leaving others maimed for life. “But it went unseen because people didn’t really know what to look for.” Around the world, more than 37,000 invasive species have been introduced to new environments. Many of these cause suffering, from vampire flies maiming finches to yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) spraying acid at the eyes of shrikes (Laniidae) on Minami-Daitō Island, Japan, and Australian quolls (Dasyurus) bleeding from the nose after eating toxic cane toads (Rhinella marina). But none of these are measured by the current global standard for assessing the impact…This article was originally published on Mongabay

JAKARTA — More than a decade after the palm oil industry embraced a pledge to not deforest, clear tropical peatlands, or use exploitative practices, policies to that end now cover most of the global palm oil trade, as major traders, refiners and consumer brands have pledged to keep deforestation-linked palm oil out of their supply chains. However, deforestation linked to palm oil continues, particularly in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of the commodity. Satellite analysis by forest-mapping initiative TheTreeMap shows 31,073 hectares (76,783 acres) of forest were cleared for palm oil in Indonesia in 2025, slightly higher than the 30,956 hectares (76,494 acres) recorded in 2024 — highlighting persistent gaps in how the industry enforces its zero-deforestation pledges. In some cases, palm oil from newly cleared land still enters supply chains that companies describe as deforestation-free. “No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation” (NDPE) policies aim to eliminate three major sources of harm in palm oil production: clearing natural forests, developing plantations on carbon-rich peatlands, and exploiting workers or local communities. By 2020, these commitments covered roughly 83% of palm oil refinery capacity in Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s main producing region. In recent years, companies have also built systems to enforce these pledges. Many now publish grievance mechanisms where violations can be reported, while third-party monitoring groups use satellite imagery to track forest loss and flag suspicious activity. Large-scale corporate deforestation in Indonesia has fallen compared to the mid-2010s, when some plantation companies were clearing vast areas of rainforest. Deforestation for…This article was originally published on Mongabay