A version of this story was originally published by the Pulitzer Center, which supported Elizabeth Claire Alberts as an Ocean Reporting Network fellow. We didn’t set out to investigate China’s deep-sea mining fleet, but as our research into the burgeoning industry developed over our yearlong partnership, it became clear that an investigation into the fleet’s alleged military dual use was emerging as an important, untold story. Shortly after we embarked on our joint project, geopolitics around the deep-sea mining landscape began to shift dramatically. In February 2025, China signed an agreement with the Cook Islands government to collaborate on deep-sea mining research and exploration. At the same time, it was pursuing a similar deal with the archipelago nation of Kiribati, marking a notable expansion of Chinese influence in the Pacific. China holds the largest number of exploration contracts issued by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the U.N.-affiliated deep-sea mining regulator, and is also its biggest financial contributor. It also operates the world’s largest oceanographic research fleet. Against this backdrop, we kept returning to a central question: was China’s pursuit of deep-sea mining driven solely for accessing mineral resources, or was it also shaped by broader geopolitical strategy? Through extensive reporting, we learned that China’s interest in seabed mining was motivated by both of these things, and that some of its vessels were engaged in both deep-sea mining work and militarily strategic surveillance. Meanwhile, deep-sea mining efforts have been gathering pace in the United States. In March 2025, The Metals Company,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

La Moskitia, on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, is often treated in Managua as a frontier: timber, gold, cattle, rivers, votes, and military concern. To the Miskitu, Sumu-Mayangna, Rama, Garífuna, and Creole peoples who live there, it is older than the Nicaraguan state. Its forests, savannas, rivers, and marine life are part of a political claim as well as a homeland. The demand has long been plain enough: land, autonomy, and a say over what happens there. Brooklyn Rivera Bryan spent most of his life carrying that demand into war, negotiation, electoral politics, exile, and prison. Known in Miskitu communities as Taupla Brooklyn, he died on May 30th, aged 73, in the custody of Daniel Ortega’s government. He had been detained since September 2023. For months the government denied holding him. It later acknowledged his imprisonment. No public trial was held. His family was denied visits. His public life began after the Sandinista revolution of 1979, when the new government sought to draw the Atlantic Coast into a national project directed from the Pacific. The Miskitu experience of that project was marked by surveillance, arrests, violence, and forced displacement. In 1981 Rivera was arrested while leading Misurasata, an Indigenous organization whose name linked the Miskitu, Sumu, Rama, and Sandinistas. By 1982, thousands of Miskitu had been moved from villages along the Río Coco. Many fled to Honduras. Rivera’s cause was narrower and more durable than the Cold War frame around him: an autonomous Indigenous territory in Yapti Tasba, the aboriginal homeland. That…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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

Smuggled in cars, aboard airplanes, or on sailboats crossing the Atlantic Ocean, tiny golden-furred monkeys are being wrenched from their Brazilian forest homes and trafficked overseas by sophisticated criminal networks. These golden lion tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia) are moved through Latin America and Africa, with strong indications that they are bound for the Asian black market. Collectors are willing to pay as much as $100,000 for this friendly animal, which is one of Brazil’s conservation symbols. Some of the tamarins die before reaching their destination. Those that survive may end their journey emaciated, sick and sometimes, mutilated. “It is frightening in the sense that [tamarin trafficking] is a threat we believed was relatively under control,” said Luis Paulo Ferraz, executive secretary of the Golden Lion Tamarin Association (AMLD), which has led an international effort to preserve the species since the 1990s. In recent years, his team has increasingly encountered people venturing deep into the forests of Rio de Janeiro state to capture these animals. “Our field team started coming face to face with these guys, to the point that I became deeply concerned about having my staff working in areas where criminals were operating.” The golden lion tamarin, featured on Brazil’s 20-real banknote, drew the attention of the Brazilian Federal Police in 2023 after seven of these monkeys and 29 Lear’s macaws (Anodorhynchus leari), another species native to Brazil, were seized at a captive facility in neighboring Suriname. In February 2024, authorities in Togo were startled to find the same two…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Thomas Crowther’s career has been shaped by large claims about small things. A seed, a patch of soil, a soundscape, a moment of fear, a local restoration project: each, in his telling, can become part of a larger system of cause and effect. His new book, Nature’s Echo, is built around that idea. Feedback loops, he argues, are not just a feature of ecology. They are among the forces that formed stars, spread life across Earth, drive climate change, and may yet help repair damaged ecosystems. Crowther, a British ecologist, became one of the best-known figures in global ecology while at ETH Zurich, where he founded the Crowther Lab and built a large interdisciplinary research group. His work helped popularize the idea that ecosystem restoration could play a major role in addressing climate change, especially after a 2019 Science paper on the potential for additional tree cover drew worldwide attention, as well as criticism from scientists who warned against simplistic tree-planting narratives. His work also helped give rise to the World Economic Forum’s Trillion Trees initiative, and he has served as co-chair of the advisory board to the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. He is also the founder of Restor, an open-data platform that connects conservation and restoration initiatives around the world. Screenshot of the Restor interface. That public profile has made Crowther both influential and contested. In 2024 he was also at the center of a dispute over his departure from ETH Zurich. The university said its decision followed…This article was originally published on Mongabay