Green & indigenous News

On clear days in Hartbeespoort, South Africa, satellite images often reveal a reservoir with shades of deep blue interrupted by drifting patches of vivid green. These shifting features indicate algae blooms, which can affect water quality, ecosystems, and nearby human communities.

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In December 2022, nearly 200 nations committed to protecting 30% of Earth’s lands and waters by 2030. As of 2025, about 9.6% of the world’s oceans are now covered by marine protected areas, according to the latest global tracking data by the World Database on Protected Areas. This marks a 1.2% increase in 2025, up from 8.4% coverage in 2024. There are now 16,608 marine protected areas (MPAs) globally, covering nearly 35 million square kilometers (13.5 million square miles) of the ocean — an area more than twice the size of Russia. However, only 3.2% of these areas are considered highly or fully protected, according to the Marine Conservation Institute’s MPAtlas. This raises concerns about areas that are protected on paper only, including ones that allow bottom trawling and other highly destructive activities. Mongabay chronicled some of the progress made toward protecting the oceans in 2025: French Polynesia announces world’s largest marine protected area In June, French Polynesia (Mā’ohi Nui), an autonomous territory in the Pacific that’s a part of the French Republic, announced it would protect the territory’s entire exclusive economic zone, amounting to 4.8 million km2 (1.9 million mi2) of its waters. Of this, more than 1 million km2 (nearly 420,000 mi2) is set to be highly and fully protected, where no extractive fishing or mining is allowed. The announcement has not yet been written into law. Coral hotspot off Philippines’ Panaon Island In August, the Philippines created the Panaon Island Protected Seascape, protecting 612 km2 (236 mi2) within the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Rob Gillies
Associated Press

TORONTO — Canada’s Indigenous governor general and its foreign minister will visit Greenland in early February, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday.

The visit comes as U.S. President Donald Trump renewed his call for the U.S. to take control of Greenland, the Inuit self-governing territory of the kingdom of Denmark. Trump has also previously talked about making Canada the 51st state.

Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand and Governor General Mary Simon, who is of Inuk descent, are expected to open a consulate in Nuuk, Greenland.

“The future of Greenland and Denmark are decided solely by the people of Denmark,” Carney said while meeting with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen at Canada’s embassy in Paris.

Anand posted a video of Carney meeting with Frederiksen on social media and said she will be in Nuuk in the coming weeks to officially open Canada’s consulate and “mark a concrete step in strengthening our engagement in support of Denmark’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including Greenland.”

The island of Greenland, 80 percent of which lies above the Arctic Circle, is home to about 56,000 mostly Inuit people.

Simon became Canada’s first Indigenous governor general in 2021 and previously served as Canada’s ambassador to Denmark. The governor general is the representative of Britain’s King Charles III, who is the head of state in Canada, which is a member of the Commonwealth of former colonies.

The leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom joined Denmark’s Frederiksen on Tuesday in defending Greenland’s sovereignty in the wake of Trump’s comments about Greenland, which is part of the NATO military alliance. The leaders issued a statement reaffirming the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island “belongs to its people.”

Frederiksen and Carney are in Paris for the “coalition of the willing” talks on Ukraine, but Carney made a point of meeting with Frederiksen and NATO’s secretary-general ahead of those meetings.

“You have been very clear in your statement when it comes to the respect for national sovereignty,” Frederiksen said to Carney. “We are both into securing the Arctic region and together with all our NATO allies we can secure the region, so hopefully everybody is willing to work together.”

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, said Monday that Greenland should be part of the United States in spite of a warning by Frederiksen that a U.S. takeover of Greenland would amount to the end of NATO.

Trump has argued the U.S. needs to control Greenland to ensure the security of the NATO territory in the face of rising threats from China and Russia in the Arctic. “It’s so strategic right now,” he told reporters Sunday.

Carney said he’s made Arctic security a priority.

“We are making progress within NATO but we have to do more,” Carney said at an earlier press conference in Paris.

Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal, said it’s important at this point for Canada to show solidarity with the people of Greenland.

“It is vital for Canada partly because we are a major Arctic country and that Greenland is our neighbor, and partly because we have a strong incentive to stand for international law and against Trump-style bullying and aggression,” Béland said.

But Béland said Carney wants to avoid upsetting Trump as the free trade agreement between the two major trading partners is renegotiated this year.

“It’s a tough balancing act for the prime minister,” Béland said.

The post Canada’s Indigenous governor general to visit Greenland as Trump renews talk of annexing it appeared first on ICT.

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The Namib desert of south-western Africa can be extremely hot—the surface temperature can be over 50°C. But a surprising number of around 200 beetle species live on its bare, inhospitable-looking sand dunes.

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Germany's greenhouse gas emission cuts slowed sharply in 2025 as the North Sea experienced its warmest year on record, piling pressure Wednesday on the conservative-led government to boost climate protection efforts.

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CAPE TOWN — Western leopard toads have been listed as endangered since 2016. Andrew Turner, scientific manager for CapeNature, the government body that manages protected areas and conservation in South Africa’s Western Cape province, says the species was once more widely found across the Cape Peninsula as well as Kleinmond, Betty’s Bay and the Agulhas Plain. But over the last 20 years, much of its habitat has been lost to urban development, though no quantitative data exist. Leopard toads spend most of their time away from water, but during the breeding season, from late July until September, the amphibians need to reach ponds where they mate and lay their eggs. In an urban environment, this now requires them to cross busy roads. “Roads and toads are not a great combination,” Turner told Mongabay. “A lot of people don’t see them, or are traveling too fast to avoid them, and then you end up with squished toads.” Turner spoke to Mongabay in Cape Town. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Western leopard toad. Image by Barry Christianson. Mongabay: Western leopard toads are threatened because of extensive habitat loss in the past two decades. Has that stabilized now? Andrew Turner: So, I wouldn’t say it’s stabilized. Habitat loss has continued, but it has obviously decelerated a lot, because over time, the opportunities for further development have declined. There’s not that much natural habitat left that can be developed, so applications for development that do happen within the western leopard toad’s…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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When people walk or drive past urban gardens, they often just see what’s on the surface. Raised beds on a small plot. Seedlings poking through the dirt. Perhaps bright pops of colorful produce, like tomatoes or peppers.

But when Kate Brown, an environmental historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), looks at urban gardens, she sees a deep-rooted history of activism and sustainability—one that spans centuries, continents, and communities.

Throughout, Brown reveals a common thread: Unused urban spaces disparaged by the powerful as “wastelands” were, in reality, areas where working-class and poor communities used gardening to build self-sustaining livelihoods.

Brown distilled her research on the subject into her forthcoming book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City. The chapters cover feudal England, 19th-century Berlin, and early 20th-century Washington, D.C., as well as modern-day Chicago; Mansfield, Ohio; and Montgomery, Alabama, traversing time and space to illuminate their connected stories.

Throughout, Brown reveals a common thread: Unused urban spaces disparaged by the powerful as “wastelands” were, in reality, areas where working-class and poor communities used gardening to build self-sustaining livelihoods.

Civil Eats spoke with Brown about her book, the histories of urban gardens, and why she thinks urban gardeners can transform people and society.

You’re known for your writings about nuclear disasters, particularly Chernobyl. This book seems to be a slightly different turn in your work. What made you focus on urban gardens?

When I was in the Chernobyl zone, I came across all these people who were picking berries in the radioactive swamps and selling them to people [there]. So that really got me thinking about plants—because plants can be sources of pollution [and toxins].

Or you could think of these plants as our allies, doing what an army of soldiers had not managed to do: They were cleaning up the environment. They were taking radioactive isotopes and bringing them in neat little round purple packages. If we’d taken those berries and deposited them as radioactive waste, it would [have been] a really affordable and fantastic form of cleanup.

So then I started to think, “How else do people in tough circumstances use plants as their allies?” I started looking at cities. [In the] 1850s, people were getting pushed out of their peasant villages, where they farmed the land and foraged and raised animals, and they went to big cities for industrial jobs.

What I noticed is that they go to the edges of the cities, and they find [underdeveloped] areas they call “wastes.” They can use the wastes around them to procure food, fuel, and shelter. Around Berlin in 1850, these urban gardeners took whatever they could find—garbage, beer mash, pulp from sugar beet factories, kitchen scraps, animal manure, human manure—and they built human-engineered soils and created a green shantytown.

They started to build the sinews of the social welfare network that we so rely on today. My sense is they were doing what plants and microbes and fungi do in soils: They’re sharing, creating mutual aid societies, supporting each other. And what comes of that is not a realm of scarcity, but one of abundance.

People thrived in these infrastructure-less, green shantytowns, and then wherever I started to look, I found places like this.

Your book reveals how urban gardens nurture health, despite a prevailing stereotype of cities as dirty or unclean, particularly during the industrial era. Can you describe a bit about what you found at the intersection of public health and urban gardening?

Take Washington, D.C., for example. . . . People know the Potomac River, but very few are aware that there’s a second river called the Anacostia River. If you cross it, there’s a part of town that has been historically Black, where Black people could buy lots of land.

What we found east of the Anacostia is that in these communities that got going around 1910 to 1920, people bought not one lot but two to six. And when they did that, they put a tiny house in the middle and then used all the rest of the land around it to garden.

Where sanitation comes in is that these neighborhoods were ignored by the congressmen in charge of D.C. at the time. These were mostly Dixie Democrats, they were racist, and they just didn’t put any infrastructure in that part of town. . . . So there’s no sewer systems, there’s no garbage pickup, there’s no paved surfaces. And it’s pretty densely populated.

So if you’re following the germ theory, you would expect to have all kinds of outbreaks of disease, especially fecal-borne diseases. But there doesn’t seem to be any sign of this. In fact, people had outdoor privies, and then they would either compost what was in the privy themselves, or nightsoil workers would come and bring [that compost] to the dump, which was run by a company called the Washington Fertilizer company. And the Washington Fertilizer company had hundreds of pigs running around this area. Composted nightsoil, digested by the pigs, would be brought to local farms but also to these gardens, and people would use it with their other household compost.

They’d [also] take water that came down from their roofs and kitchen water, run it through gravel, and then have pretty clean water that they could use to water their plants. They were doing all the things that would be considered green architecture today, that they had invented themselves in the 1920s and ’30s.

Your book emphasizes that working-class people are often at the forefront of urban gardening. What is it about urban gardening that makes it an effective or necessary tool for marginalized groups?

People are drawing from the bounty of their gardens [and] they’re creating these kinds of societies that then start to solve other problems. These are communities that are not getting the benefit of state largesse. They’re often either overtly discriminated against or they’re just simply ignored. So they’re using their spontaneously created mutual aid societies, which includes plants and microbes and animals, to share this bounty as a kind of public wealth.

You feature stories of people who have started up urban gardens to feed themselves and their communities, but faced interference from bureaucratic forces. Municipal laws prevented a couple living in the Chicago suburbs from building a hoop house to grow food during the winter, for example. Can or should urban farming be advanced by policymakers, or do you see it as mostly an alternative to our political and food systems?

This family had a hoop house safely in the backyard. They grew a lot of food in the summer, and then they were always sad in November when it was starting to get cold. So they put up this hoop house, and they could be in there with T-shirts and grow the cold-weather greens that they really enjoyed all winter long.

A neighbor complained, the city told them to take it down, and they kept fighting it. They pursued this for seven years. The city leaders would say things like, “What are you growing there? Why don’t you just go to Whole Foods? We’re a suburb, not an agricultural region.”

And so [they] pursued this all the way down to the state legislature and passed the Right to Garden law. Just a couple of states in the country have this right, [that] says no matter the municipality, no matter [the] homeowner association rules, people have the right to grow food on their private property and on other property that’s not being used.

That’s one of the motivations for writing this book. We’re facing major environmental and ecological problems that are going to lead to all kinds of other problems, like wars and economic distress. I think a lot of people feel like we can’t do anything about it. We can’t get anything changed at the U.N. level. We certainly can’t get an act of Congress passed. But we can get our municipalities to change code.

What if every time you build a new condo, you have to have a garden spot the size of a parking space? Suddenly everything can start to change. There’s more green space, which means there’s more places for rain to fall that prevent flooding. There’s more green space, which means the cities are cooler and people are outside on the streets [more]. In this time, when so many people feel lost and alienated and lonely, this simple change in zoning on a municipal level could change the whole nature of American democracy.

You described your book as part manifesto. What do you hope people take away from it?

What I’m hoping people take away is that we still have commons that we devote to moving and parking cars, and we should ask for those back. For humans—not machines—and for plants, animals, insects, and microbes.

Part of this manifesto is that these commons are not a free-for-all. What the commons provide is common bounty, a common wealth, that is off the market. My hope is that we start with these commons in cities, where by 2050, the majority of people in the world will live, and from there, that understanding of transactions starts to spread.

So that’s my manifesto, to think back to common right: the right to food, fuel, and shelter. More useful, I argue, than the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody can eat those. Very few people can attain those without having access to money and power. But common law rights provided food, fuel, and shelter for everyone. And that’s, I think, where we need to start again.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post How Urban Gardens Can Bolster American Democracy appeared first on Civil Eats.

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For decades, flooding has remained one of the most destructive and deadly natural disasters in the United States, causing an average of $8 billion in damages and nearly 90 deaths each year.

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Australian researchers have uncovered how a particular strain of a diarrhea-causing parasite managed to infect more animal species, offering new insights into how parasitic infections emerge and spread to people.

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The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday said it would propose a drinking water limit for perchlorate, a harmful chemical in rockets and other explosives, but also said doing so wouldn't significantly benefit public health and that it was acting only because a court ordered it.

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This story was originally published by the Northern Journal.

This story is co-published by theWrangell Sentineland Northern Journal.

Max Graham
Northern Journal

An Indigenous community is locked in a debate about the pros and cons of a major new mine on their traditional lands — and a big cash payment promised by the developer.

There is strong support, and fierce opposition. A lot of money to be made, and a wild river to protect. The community faces a pivotal choice.

Though this story sounds like it could be unfolding in rural Alaska, a version of it has actually been playing out just across the border with Canada, in northwest British Columbia. Still, it has implications for the Alaskans who live downstream from the proposed mine site.

In a referendum after weeks of heated debate, members of the Tahltan Nation voted in December to overwhelmingly approve a deal with a Canadian mining company that hopes to revive a huge gold and silver mine, called Eskay Creek, which stopped producing in 2008. The project is located above the Unuk River, which flows into Alaska near Ketchikan.

The Tahltans’ backing is a major step forward for the project, and it comes as the Canada and B.C. governments intensify efforts to build more mines in the name of national security and economic growth. Several of the projects are near the border with Alaska, where state and federal elected officials are separately pushing mines that could help wean the U.S. off a foreign supply of minerals used in energy, electronics and weapons.

Just one day after the Tahltan vote, Canada’s federal government announced that it had approved a merger between two multinational mining firms with a condition that calls for advancing two other proposed mines in Tahltan territory. Both projects sit above tributaries of the Stikine River, a major, salmon-bearing waterway that straddles Canada and the U.S. and empties into the ocean nearthe small Southeast Alaska town of Wrangell.

Louie Wagner Jr., a Tsimshian and Tlingit resident of Metlakatla, a Native community at the southern tip of Alaska’s panhandle, said he’s concerned about the health of the Unuk River and its future with mines in its watershed.

Wagner and his family have fished and hunted moose along the Unuk for generations.

“That little river cannot handle it,” Wagner said in a recent phone interview. The Unuk is notable, he added, for its abundance of eulachon, a small, oily fish also known as hooligan that’s a staple for Indigenous communities in Southeast Alaska.

Though rarely discussed in Alaska circles, the Tahltan Nation’s approach to mining has major implications for the industry’s future in the transboundary region. A top U.S. Department of Interior official visited the region last year to learn more about models for how Indigenous nations can partner with mining companies.

There are more than a dozen early-stage mining projects in Tahltan territory, many above rivers that flow into Alaska. And the Eskay Creek vote could serve as a preview of future deals between the Tahltan government and the for-profit mining companies promoting development.

For months, members of the First Nation debated whether to approve a deal, known as an impact benefit agreement, that Tahltan elected leaders had negotiated with Vancouver-based Skeena Resources, the company pushing Eskay Creek.

The specifics of the agreement have not been made public. But Tahltan officials have said it guarantees benefits worth more than $1 billion over the life of the mine, mostly in cash but also in contracts and wages.

The deal also calls for an upfront payment from Skeena, intended to be distributed to individual Tahltan members — to the tune of $7,250 each, according to Tahltan officials. And the agreement reportedly gives the First Nation government some environmental oversight over the mine.

The nation backed the deal with support from more than 77 percent of the roughly 1,750 Tahltans who voted, according to the Tahltan Central Government. Payments are expected to go out to members in 2026.

“Tahltan Central Government is not standing on the sidelines,” Tahltan president Kerry Carlick said in a statement after the vote.  “We are embedding ourselves directly into the governance of environmental protection.”

Tahltan leaders have long worked to navigate political tensions between an expanding mining industry and efforts to protect traditional lands and wildlife.

The Tahltan government has entered into a number of agreements with mining companies. But it also has opposed efforts to mine coal and drill for natural gas near the headwaters of major rivers in the region.

And some Tahltan members have been outspoken critics of the Eskay Creek project and the company promoting it.

In the leadup to the recent vote, arguments erupted on social media, and relationships among community members grew strained, some Eskay Creek opponents said in interviews.

“This is causing internal conflicts,” said Tamara Quock, a Tahltan member who lives in northern B.C. some 350 miles east of the mine site.

Quock said she thinks the promise of the direct payments “enticed” some people to vote in favor of the agreement. Debate over the project, she added, grew more intense after that condition was added to the deal.

Quock said she feels Skeena is “using the Tahltan people” to generate its own profits.

She and other critics have voiced concerns about a perceived lack of transparency and potential conflicts of interest within the First Nation’s government. They also say they are worried about possible environmental impacts from the project, which would involve digging two open pits and storing millions of tons of mining waste above the Unuk River.

Skeena didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Alaska Native leaders, fishermen and environmental advocates who live downstream, in Southeast Alaska, for years have expressed concerns about Eskay Creek and other proposed mines in the region, saying they don’t trust Canadian regulators to safeguard Alaskan interests.

“You can’t cut these watersheds in half and expect to adequately protect them,” said Guy Archibald, executive director of the tribally led Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission. “Right now they’re cutting the baby in half and ignoring the effects on the Alaska side of the border.”

The commission last month filed a legal challenge in B.C. court, asserting that regulators had failed to consult Alaska tribes on several proposed mines in the region, including Eskay Creek.

Meanwhile, after a major spill last year at a Canadian gold mine in the Yukon River watershed, Alaska’s congressional delegation called for more oversight of Canadian mines near transboundary rivers like the Unuk and Stikine. The statement from the delegation — which has strongly supported mine development in Alaska — called for “binding protections, financial assurances, and strong transboundary governance.”

“As British Columbia seeks to advance numerous mines just upstream from Alaska, we are still asking them to fully remediate legacy sites and firmly commit to binding protections for Alaska interests,” Joe Plesha, a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, said in a recent statement. “Senator Murkowski is actively considering new ways to make our B.C. neighbors take Alaskans’ concerns seriously.”

Ottawa and B.C.’s provincial government, meanwhile, are funding new infrastructure projects and prioritizing permitting for energy and resource development projects, including Eskay Creek and the expansion of a huge copper and gold mine in the Stikine watershed, called Red Chris.

Canadian officials say existing regulations are geared to minimize impacts in the shared watersheds. Major projects undergo thorough environmental assessments before they’re approved, a spokesperson with the B.C. agency that leads those reviews, the Environmental Assessment Office, said in an email.

 “Making sure large-scale projects are properly assessed is critical to making sure development is sustainable — to ensure good jobs and economic growth while also protecting the environment and wildlife, and keeping communities healthy and safe,” said the spokesperson, Sarah Plank.

Tahltan officials declined an interview request and did not respond to questions about Alaskans’ concerns or the First Nation’s agreement with Skeena.

Supporters of Eskay Creek say it could be transformational for the Tahltan Nation. Among proponents of the deal is Chad Norman Day, a former Tahltan president who has worked in the mining industry and now runs a consulting firm that does mining-related business.

“The benefits which flow to the Tahltan Nation from here will empower the people and territory unlike anything we have ever seen,” Day said in a statement after the vote.

Many Tahltan people work in mining, and the First Nation already generates revenue from Red Chris and another large operating mine, Brucejack, which started producing gold in 2017.

In 2019, Tahltan citizens voted in favor of an agreement with a different mining company pushing another, much bigger proposed mine partially in the Unuk watershed, called KSM. The outcome of that vote was nearly identical to the recent Eskay one, with about the same percentage in favor.

The first nation also, in the past five years, has entered into two joint decisionmaking agreements with the B.C. government for regulatory reviews of mining projects, including Eskay Creek.

Before it can start producing, Eskay Creek needs an environmental approval from the provincial government. A decision is expected early next year.

The post Indigenous nation to get $7,250-per-person payments as a contentious mine advances upstream of Alaska appeared first on ICT.

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Growing up in the 1970s, I took for granted the trash piles along the highway, tires washed up on beaches, and smog fouling city air. The famed "Crying Indian" commercial of 1971 became a symbol of widespread environmental damage across the United States.

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Scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and their international partners, reveal today their pick of the top 10 plants and fungi named new to science in 2025. From "camouflaged" plants to spider-infecting parasites, the annual list underscores how much of the natural world has yet to be described and highlights RBG Kew's role as a conservation charity tackling the extinction crisis globally.

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How do avalanches affect pylons and other sensitive infrastructure? Using detailed simulations, SLF researcher Michael Kohler has shown that the compressibility of snow initially reduces avalanche pressure, but that at high speeds this buffer suddenly fails.

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Oxygen isotopes data enable researchers to look far back into the geologic past and reconstruct the climate of the past. In doing so, they consider several factors such as ocean temperature and ice volume in polar regions. A new publication by an international team from Bergen (Norway) and Bremen in Nature Geoscience concludes that the Antarctic ice sheet was less dynamic during the Oligocene epoch 34 to 23 million years ago than previously assumed.

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Over the past two decades, microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs) have been recognized as emerging pollutants, detected across every environmental compartment of Earth's system—the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere.

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Transverse tubules (T-tubules) play a significant role in muscle contraction. However, the underlying mechanism of their formation is yet to be elucidated. In a recent study, a research team from Japan used a Drosophila model to understand this process. The results show the involvement of LUBEL, an E3 ubiquitin ligase, in the T-tubule biogenesis. Beyond LUBEL's role in immune response, the study reveals an unexpected function of linear ubiquitination in membrane deformation, driven by BAR-domain proteins.

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Last Updated on January 7, 2026 I grew up hearing stories about the land as a living being, one who remembers the humans who are part of it. But today, my people’s lifeways are threatened by extraction. State-led mining interests clash with Akan land guardianship, revealing the unequal power dynamics behind the language of “development.” […]

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For more than 70 years, what were thought to be mammoth fossils were tucked away in the archives of the University of Alaska Museum of the North. During the museum's Adopt-a-Mammoth program, which allows the public to sponsor testing of individual fossils, these ancient remains were removed from their drawers and radiocarbon-dated.

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Adolescents are known for risky behavior, with teenagers in the U.S. more likely than younger children to die from injury. But what's responsible for this uptick in risk-taking around puberty?

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An international research team reports the analysis of new hominin fossils from the site of Thomas Quarry I (Casablanca, Morocco). The fossils are very securely dated to 773,000 +/- 4,000 years ago, thanks to a high-resolution magnetostratigraphic record capturing in detail the Brunhes/Matuyama boundary, the last main geomagnetic polarity reversal and precise temporal markers of the Quaternary.

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The origin of life on Earth becomes even more fascinating and complex as we peer into the mysterious world of viruses. Said to have existed since living cells first appeared, these microscopic entities differ greatly from other forms of life. Composed of only genetic material, they lack the ability to synthesize proteins, which are essential for carrying out cellular activity and, ultimately, for life by itself.

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Between 2000 and 2023, more than 6,000 African primates were traded internationally in 50 countries, according to a newly published report. Endangered chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and critically endangered western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) were among the 10 most-traded species, according to data from CITES, the global wildlife trade agreement. African primates are traded as trophies, for scientific research, and to be kept in zoos. Hunting monkeys and apes for food and body parts used in charms and rituals is widespread in many parts of Africa. Infants and juveniles are also captured live for the exotic pet trade. The report by U.S.-based nonprofit Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA) is the first to try to capture the scale of the trade, the geographic hotspots, and the species targeted. It draws on data from the CITES trade database, seizure records from the wildlife trade monitoring NGO TRAFFIC, media reports, and other published research to present a picture of the global legal and illegal trade in African primates. “The intention is for this report to serve as both a diagnostic tool and a call to action,” lead author and wildlife crime specialist Monique Sosnowski told Mongabay by email. A chacma baboon in South Africa. The report found that these monkeys are the most traded species legally, mostly as hunting trophies. Image by Martie Swart via Wikicommons (CC BY 2.0) Although the report captures international trade in primates from Africa, it doesn’t account for domestic trade, which is driven by food and other traditional uses. It…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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The natural sands of beaches along the Firth of Forth are being mixed with significant amounts of human-made materials like bricks, concrete, glass and industrial waste, new research has revealed.

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A low-cost, simple robotic apple picker arm developed by Washington State University researchers may someday help with fruit picking and other farm chores.

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