This is part 2 of a two-part series examining the U.S.’s efforts to begin deep-sea mining in federal waters. Part 2 examines the regulations that would govern the industry. Part 1 explored the process behind proposed lease sales in U.S. federal waters and reactions to those plans. The deep-sea mining industry could launch in the near future in U.S. federal waters. Yet legal experts and former government officials warn that the regulations that would govern this industry are outdated and lack important oversight provisions. In April 2025, the Trump administration signaled its intention to enter the global race to mine the deep sea when it released an executive order calling for the development of the industry. Following the administration’s direction, in April 2026 the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) announced its plans to hold a series of seabed lease sales over the course of this year and into early next. The first one is slated for August in American Samoa, with subsequent lease sales planned for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) and Alaska. If these go forward, they could mark the first commercial lease processes for deep-sea mining anywhere in the world. Critics say deep-sea mining could cause large-scale and irreversible damage to the marine environment, and some governments in areas slated for leasing have even taken steps to ban deep-sea mining. In 2024, the governor of American Samoa enacted a moratorium on seabed mining from its territorial waters, which extend 3 nautical miles (5.6 kilometers)…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Colombia passed a landmark law June 4 aimed at improving traceability of its cattle supply chain to ensure beef isn’t sourced from deforested land. The law hopes to enhance existing traceability systems and make it easier to identify when cattle have grazed in protected areas and forests that were illegally cleared for pasture. “This is the most powerful tool for determining whether the meat people consume comes from deforested areas,” said representative Juan Carlos Losada, one of the law’s sponsors, in a post on X. About 54% of Colombia’s total land area is covered by forest, that’s roughly 60 million hectares (148 million acres). Deforestation has ebbed and flowed in recent years, declining in 2023, spiking in 2024 and then declining again in 2025. Cattle are always one of the main drivers. The country has over 29.7 million heads of cattle, according to last year’s estimates from the Colombian Federation of Cattle Ranchers. To better regulate the industry, lawmakers tried to pass traceability legislation in 2021 and 2022 but failed to move it through Congress. Another version took too long to reach a final debate in the senate, and expired in 2024. The effort began around the same time that the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) was passed. Once implemented, the law will require that companies trading with the EU demonstrate their cattle and other commodities weren’t sourced from deforested land. The law allows officials to establish “high surveillance zones” in deforestation hotspots. It includes the ability to implement special…This article was originally published on Mongabay

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Kenya’s former Chief Justice David Maraga said he was arrested Monday alongside other activists protesting planned construction inside Nairobi National Park. Police fired tear gas canisters at the protesters who were marching outside the park while carrying banners with messages denouncing land grabs. Maraga was detained and later released while staging a sit-in on a major road outside the national park’s main gate. He was wearing a green T-shirt similar to those worn by other activists. The police have yet to comment on the reason for his arrest. Maraga wrote on X that he was arrested while heading to present a petition to the Kenya Wildlife Service. “Our national heritage and environment must be safeguarded from greed and unnecessary destruction without public participation,” he said. Hundreds of activists joined the protest against the planned construction inside the park and the relocation of an orphanage, calling it an attempt to grab public land. Kenya has experienced incidents of land grabbing in the past, and environmentalists have often spoken out when parks and other green spaces are encroached upon. Amnesty International in Kenya expressed solidarity with the protesters and called for members of the public to be included in decisions affecting the country’s environmental heritage. “We want to categorically state that Nairobi National Park is not for sale; our public spaces, our environment, and our rights cannot be traded away behind closed doors,” the rights group said. The Kenya Wildlife Service on Sunday defended the construction as part of a plan to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Cities are expanding faster than at any point in human history, and wildlife is adapting in remarkable ways. We often talk about visible changes like animals becoming bolder, shifting their diets, or altering their daily rhythms to avoid people. But there is a deeper transformation happening inside their bodies, one that conservation science has barely begun to address: The reshaping of the gut microbiome. Urban ecosystems expose animals to a completely different set of pressures than their natural habitats. Artificial light, chronic noise, pollution, and human-derived food sources all interact to shape the physiology of wildlife rapidly. These pressures don’t just influence behavior from the outside, they alter the microbial communities that regulate digestion, immunity, stress responses, and even cognition, making key components of how animals evolve and adapt as “pressure cookers,” reducing diversity and decreasing overall health. When the microbiome becomes disrupted, a state known as dysbiosis, animals may become more anxious, more risk-taking, or more susceptible to disease. Urbanization is forcing this rapid adjustment of species not just through habitat loss, but by fundamentally changing their microbiota, and with that, things like foraging patterns and predator avoidance. In other words, urbanization may be shaping wildlife behavior from the inside out. Mule deer in Banff, Alberta. Image by Sharon Hahn Darlin via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). Yet conservation strategies rarely consider this internal dimension. We focus on green spaces and habitat restoration, which are essential, but overlook how environmental stressors affect the microbial health of the animals we…This article was originally published on Mongabay

In the mountain villages of Guatemala’s Western Highlands, farmers are combining ancient Maya knowledge with modern sustainable farming techniques to protect their crops from pests and disease. Smallholders are creating homemade biopesticides using plants with strong smells and flavors to deter pests on their family plots. This is helping to cut back on the use of increasingly expensive agrochemicals, many of which have been labeled as dangerous to human health and linked to soil degradation. About 60 Guatemalan communities in the Western Highland departments of Sololá and Huehuetenango, as well as Chiquimula in the east, are working to revive these traditional techniques with support from the international development organization World Neighbors. Their focus is to restore and strengthen traditional knowledge, combining it with agroecological practices that help families produce surplus food they can sell to boost household incomes. “Traditional farming techniques are becoming popular because they are simple practices to apply, use local resources, and have proven to be effective,” Dayani Roche, a program associate at World Neighbors, told Mongabay via email. Rather than a single ancient recipe, farmers are using “a living combination of ancestral knowledge, local experimentation and more recent agroecological practices,” he said, which are “safer for families, soil, water and biodiversity than many chemical alternatives.” The Maya civilization, which once stretched across modern-day Central America, had a rich history of farming dating back to 2000 B.C.E. Its most celebrated agriculture system is the milpa, a form of intercropping that involves a mix of maize, beans and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

CHIRADZULU, Malawi — In Chiradzulu district in southern Malawi, 60 women who are members of the Rural Women’s Assembly grow fruits and vegetables alongside their staple crop, maize. In recent years, there’s been growing demand for their organically produced crops from buyers in the nearby city of Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial capital. The assembly’s chair in Chiradzulu, Diana Sitima, runs a 3.5-hectare (8.6-acre) organic farm here. She says when she started the farm in 1993, she used to take the produce to consumers in Blantyre. “Now they are coming to us. They say our produce has a good taste,” Sitima says. According to the women, the biggest obstacles they face as farmers is that they lack land titles and capital to invest in their farming. As members of the RWA, these are the issues they discuss at their meetings and bring to their local council and central government for solutions. Ester Samuel spreads maize to dry in Balaka, Malawi. Image by CIMMYT via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) In 1998, not long after she got married, RWA member Lonely Kholowa’s parents gave her a piece of land to cultivate. But after her father passed away in 2009 — her mother had died seven years earlier — her father’s older brother grabbed the land, arguing that according to their culture, she belonged to the family of her mother who came from Machinga district in the east of the country. Today, Kholowa farms land in her husband’s village elsewhere in Chiradzulu. “I don’t have…This article was originally published on Mongabay

TANGGAMUS, Indonesia — When Sri Atmiatun arrived in the hills of the Batutegi region in southern Sumatra’s Lampung province in 2017, the coffee trees were already there, overgrown and neglected, slowly fading back into scrub. Her uncle had asked her to take over the plot. Sri agreed, trading years of labor on oil palm plantations in the central Sumatran province of Riau. Nearly a decade later, she still walks the same uphill path each morning. Now 45, Sri manages more than 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of land within the 1,400-hectare (3,460-acre) Sumber Makmur social forestry area. Sumber Makmur itself sits on the edge of the more than 80,000-hectare (198,000-acre) Batutegi forest landscape, where some areas are strictly protected while others are managed by communities through agroforestry systems. Under the social forestry program, the land remains state-owned, but local communities like Sri’s are granted the right to manage it for their livelihoods under rules designed to protect the forest and its ecological functions. “I stayed because this land feeds us,” Sri told Mongabay in early March. “If I leave, who will take care of it?” Sri’s story reflects a broader shift. Across the Batutegi landscape, land that was once cleared for coffee is now being restored and managed under Indonesia’s social forestry program. Legal recognition has given farmers access to support and training from the government and private organizations. In return, forest clearing and expansion into protected core areas have been reduced, allowing the forest to remain a safe habitat for…This article was originally published on Mongabay

In Bangladesh, poor oversight of unlawful cross-border trade in hazardous electronic waste continues, turning the country into a net importer of electronic waste. The country has rules to control e-waste. It is also a party to the Basel Convention and has introduced its own laws, like the Hazardous Waste (E-waste) Management Rules (2021). However, enforcement of these frameworks remains weak. Mongabay obtained and reviewed the document outlining Bangladesh’s import and export of e-waste, revealing key details on trade flows and regulatory gaps. The document, by the National Board of Revenue (NBR), shows that 40 companies imported e-waste under HS code 8549 — the international customs code for trading e-waste — at various times between 2022 and 2025, in apparent violation of the Basel Convention, an international treaty to reduce the movements of hazardous waste between nations. The textiles and apparel industry leads at 27%, or about one quarter, of all e-waste importers. No response from importers Mongabay reached out to Unilever Bangladesh Limited, one of the 40 e-waste importing companies and the only one that responded. Shamima Akhter, director of corporate affairs, partnerships & communications of Unilever Bangladesh Limited, said in an email on May 21, “We confirm that we have not imported any e‑waste or restricted items. The product concerned is a load cell, which is a precision measuring instrument, and the correct HS Code for this item is 90318, as declared in our import documentation. Any change to HS Code 8549 during the clearance process was made independently…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From above, an intact forest can look reassuringly complete. A satellite image may show an unbroken canopy, a block of green still standing amid plantations, roads or logged land. For many conservation programs, that view has become the starting point for measurement. If the canopy remains, the forest is often treated as if much of its ecological value remains as well. The forest itself may tell a more complicated story. Birds, insects, frogs and primates divide the day among them. Some call at dawn, others at night. Some occupy narrow frequency bands; others fill the background with a steady rasp. A forest that looks intact can still lose part of this living structure. The canopy may close after logging. Carbon may remain on a balance sheet. The animal community may not return in the same form. Garnet Pitta. Photo by Hanyrol Hanyzan Ahmad Sah A new paper in Global Change Biology, by Zuzana Buřivalová and colleagues, examines that problem through sound. The study describes the Soundscape Baselines Project, an effort to record the acoustic signatures of some of the world’s remaining intact forests before those reference points become harder to find. The idea is straightforward. To know whether a forest has changed, one needs to know what it sounded like before the change. That baseline is not only a technical convenience. It is a guard against a familiar problem in conservation: each generation tends to accept the nature it first encountered as normal. Daniel Pauly called this shifting baseline syndrome…This article was originally published on Mongabay