Interesting look at India’s agroecology programme (the world's largest) that brings farmers much higher profits, deliver similar crop yields and supports higher levels of biodiversity, esp for farmland #birds doi.org/10.1038/s415... Seen in @mikeshanahan.bsky.social's Nature Beat newsletter 🙏🌏

Do you work in conservation science, particularly outside the U.S.? Did you lose your job or funding for your job because of cuts to U.S. federal agencies? Do you want to talk about it? DM me please. (This is for a @biographic.bsky.social story) [Iceland photo for attention only]

Conservation's road ahead by @rhettayersbutler.bsky.social from Mongabay www.butlernature.com/2025/09/17/n...

After the Geneva round of the #PlasticsTreaty talks ended without a deal, troubling questions are being raised about the role played by @unep.org Executive Director Inger Andersen — and an apparent bid to topple the Committee’s elected Chair medium.com/points-of-or...

The meat & dairy industry adopting mafia tactics against environmental and animal rights activists

The EU is considering white-listing animals that can be kept as pets, on the basis of welfare in captivity, biodiversity, public health and feasibility of trade monitoring - as opposed to a CITES-like species by species blacklisting. Hope this will survive the lobbies' attacks 🌏 #pettrade

How many people can the wildlife trade really support? A critical examination of the 'livelihoods' argument. therevelator.org/wildlife-tra...

What does the global war on NGOs mean for development? And with their decline, can private aid to NGOs fill the gaps for the world’s poor? Suparna Chaudhry explains the current environment for NGOs:

Benefits of reforestation to fight climate change wildly overestimated. "reducing the climate benefit to only 12.5 billion tonnes of carbon by 2050.... only slightly more than a single year of global fossil fuel emissions." theconversation.com/trees-alone-...

Nice write-up on the loss of natural sounds in nature, linked to the decline of insects and birds, with a terrifying recording of bird calls before and after selective logging. www.lukasguides.com/stone-cold-s... 🌏 #birds

Under the -positive- pressure of the garment industry, Cambodia is pushing for more wind energy to decarbonise its electricity. Yet with lack of proper consultations, this leads to more land conflicts in indigenous territories. By @daniellek-o.bsky.social @vantha.bsky.social 🌏

The Buy, Borrow, Die strategy "has basically killed the entire concept of an income tax for the wealthiest individuals." www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

Global warming causes decline of tropical birds. www.carbonbrief.org/fossil-fuell... 🌏 #birds Other 'drivers' studies meanwhile found: - hunting a bigger threat to wildlife than deforestation, - hunting and agriculture (habitat loss) both larger drivers of biodiversity loss than climate change.

Cambodia's new environmental code ignores the rights and specificity of indigenous people, as much as their potential role in protecting nature. The new code "has excluded terminology that specifically mentioned Indigenous peoples and replaced it with more general terms like “local community.”"

为何柬埔寨“打鸟”屡禁不止？ Just found out my story on bird hunting in Cambodia was translated in Chinese by @dialogueearth.bsky.social All to the point as China is leading the way in dealing with threats to birds in the region. dialogue.earth/zh/6/60080927/

Joint investigation by @mongabay.com & GI-TOC exposes a huge illegal wildlife trade network in Laos. Secretive shops guarded by armed men cater exclusively to Chinese tourists selling ivory, rhino horn, pangolins & more at inflated prices. We took a look inside.. news.mongabay.com/2025/07/larg...

✊ 2 pétitions citoyennes contre la loi Duplomb ont été déposées à l'Assemblée nationale. Une fois le seuil de 500 000 signatures atteint, un débat sera imposé aux député·es ! petitions.assemblee-nationale.fr/initiatives/... petitions.assemblee-nationale.fr/initiatives/... #LoiPoison #Duplomb

"Communities don’t need poetry. They need policy. Wildlife doesn’t need abstraction. It needs security." Without concrete and effective measures, human-wildlife coexistence, like 'sustainability', risks becoming a watered, catch-all term covering inaction. undark.org/2025/07/17/o... @undark.org

Cutting edge CSI methods are increasingly used in wildlife trade investigations but mass adoption and effectiveness is a long way off. Good overview of the field by NatGeo. www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

Nice mapping animation and storytelling of the Whooping cranes migration in North America. #birds

Because everyone always wonders about the China data, yes, as of 2019 (the final year of data in our analysis), China was responsible for only 1% of global emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. globalinequality.org/responsibili...

"We argue that common species ... are too often neglected and that their conservation is urgent." This applies well for bird hunting in Southeast Asia, especially as estimates of both populations and hunting rates of common species vary wildly. doi.org/10.1111/conl... #birds 🌏

African hornbills pay the price of the protection of their Asian cousins - @nautil.us Market leakage occurs whatever the commodity or the impact (hornbills, carbon, deforestation, meat, fish, you name it). We can't afford to cherry-pick individual species for protection. nautil.us/the-hornbill...

Just published: The new edition of my newsletter for journalists (and anyone else) interested in biodiversity, the ecological crisis and nature-based solutions to climate change. It has news, resources, jobs, great stories, and more. 🌏🧪 thenaturebeat.substack.com/p/nature-bea...

New set of measures in China restricting releases of non-native wildlife and sick animals. This is especially targeted at the release of captive animals to accrue merit in Buddhism, a practice that harms wildlife and ecosystems. www.sixthtone.com/news/1017220

In Nigeria, most pangolins are hunted for local meat consumption rather than for the international scales trade, with the majority of scales discarded instead of sold.

Deep dive into the many solutions to protect birds from wind turbines. Good news, technological systems deployed to monitor bird migrations can help, and so does a fresh coat of paint. (wind farms do kill less birds than cats but cats don't kill endangered raptors - wind turbines do) 🌍 #birds

Dawn recording from the Ecuadorian Amazon. #amazonrainforest #biodiversity #soundscape #fieldrecording

Deep-sea coral restoration by US Navy divers and underwater drones in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. Cool things happen when polluters pay 💸 including the first spawning of deep sea corals in a lab news.mongabay.com/2025/05/us-p... #coralrestoration

“Some of these facilities keep lions in cramped and barren enclosures without sunlight, on concrete substrate, and poor-quality food, resulting in a life of misery.” To meet demand, breeders often separate cubs early to force mothers back into oestrus. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Khmer version of our story on bird hunting & trade in Cambodia: khmer.cambojanews.com/bird-hunting... Thanks @dialogueearth.bsky.social for supporting this translation.

A survey by the Cambodian guides from SVC Tours has found only a single White-winged Duck at one of their known locations in the Kulen Promtep Wildlife Sanctuary of Cambodia's Northern Plains. They are now tragically on the edge of extinction in the country www.phnompenhpost.com/national/con...

Fascinating interview of Allison Skidmore, a wildlife crime expert, investigating tiger poaching undercover in the Russian Far East

"if Pope Francis was able to change an institution with as thick and rigid a history as the Catholic Church... it shows everybody that we should be doing a hell of a lot more to try to change our own institutions, whether it’s a uni or an NGO. What’s our excuse?" www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Thanks @mikeshanahan.bsky.social for sharing our work on the threat of bird hunting in the latest edition of Nature Beat. If you don't know this newsletter, it's a great round-up on what's happening in the biodiversity, nature and climate space.

Hunting birds is rampant throughout Cambodia. w/ Vutha Srey, we joined hunters catching birds at night and dug into the reasons behind the trade for @dialogueearth.bsky.social With support from @anticorruption.bsky.social Cambodia dialogue.earth/en/nature/bi... #birds 🌏

Solid story from @geraldrflynn.bsky.social on the smuggling of wild macaques in Southeast Asia for the benefit of biomedical research companies in Canada and the US

With a demand for exotic felines on the rise, often driven by social media, endangered and protected populations are under even more threat. Read this piece in @nytimes.com! www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/w...

It’s amazing how hardly anyone knows that fossil fuel power kills 35 times more birds than wind turbines. I rarely hear anyone talk about that! www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Female scarlet-backed flowerpecker rubbing herself against wet leaves for her morning bath in downtown Phnom Penh. #birds #birding #cambodia

A call to arms for eBirders and iNaturalists. 🚨 We want your bird photos! If you photograph feeding birds with flowers, fruit, seeds or prey, upload the image with locality details. We are data-harvesting species, size and type of food/prey to study foodwebs and species interactions. Thanks! 🧪🌐🪶

This is such an important article, about the simplistic visions now pushing aside scientific research and complex social issues. A must read. newrepublic.com/article/1933...

Chinese NGO Friends of Nature 自然之友 is suing a social media app - Kuaishou, similar to TikTok - for selling hunting equipment. They previously sued a state-owned company over a dam in Yunnan that would have flooded Endangered Green peafowl habitat, and won. www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-as... #birds

Tip : if you're an environmental journalist, don't miss "Nature Beat", an excellent #newsletter by @mikeshanahan.bsky.social that covers everything related to wildlife, forests, climate... thenaturebeat.substack.com

The first roads that slice through rainforests are widely recognized as pathways for #deforestation. However, new research reveals that secondary roads—those branching off from main roads—are responsible for significantly greater forest loss than the primary roads themselves. #tropicalforests

“These stories needed to be told and nobody else was doing them.” In-depth interview with a cofounder of @wire-wildlife.bsky.social a nonprofit media outlet focused on wildlife trade investigations.

Interesting insight into China's large-scale restoration of the Loess plateau, which used to be a pretty bleak place (if you're familiar with the films of Jia Zhangke), and the evolutions of the project over nearly 3 decades www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Lastly, I'll end on this excellent interview with @denisehruby.bsky.social that looks at where environmental journalism is going right and wrong - and why reporting the truth on the grim meat-hook realities of climate change isn't "taking a position" - it's journalists doing their damned jobs. ✊

"People see birds every day, but they don’t really think about them. But once you know the species, you know their names, you know their habitat preferences, it makes you understand how all these things are related." Hopeful trends for birds in Thailand: news.mongabay.com/2025/02/how-...