Green & indigenous News

Within the next few decades, intensifying heat waves could expose a significant share of Europe's cattle to dangerous levels of heat stress. New research maps where and how millions of animals may be affected by mid-century.

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Lipstick vines get their name from their bright red, tube-shaped flowers. But one member of this group of plants has lost its lipstick-like appearance—its flowers are shorter, wider, and yellowish green in color. It also attracts shorter-beaked birds than its crimson cousins do, and it's found in different places.

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Extreme heat is forcing Western Australia's critically endangered western ringtail possum (Ngwayir) to cut back on vital activity and feeding, new research shows.

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RIO DE JANEIRO — The government of the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro has banned shark meat for meals in most of the schools it manages, citing health and environmental concerns. The move puts the state in line to become the first in Brazil to do so, and has drawn accolades from shark conservation and health advocates, on the one hand, and criticism from the seafood industry, on the other. “The suspension was based on technical, scientific, health, and environmental grounds … complying with the principle of precaution and comprehensive protection of children” as required under the Constitution and the guidelines of the National School Feeding Program, the state department of education told Mongabay in an emailed statement on Jan. 8. It said the decision to ban shark meat in school meals rested on evidence from the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a research institute affiliated with Brazil’s health ministry. Effective since Oct. 23, 2025, the shark meat ban was enacted through an administrative guideline emailed that day to the 1,200 schools run by the Rio de Janeiro state education department. These schools account for 95% of all schools managed by the state. The ban doesn’t apply to the roughly 10,400 other schools in the state that are managed by municipalities or private institutions. The guideline, seen by Mongabay, was signed by the education department’s food safety coordinator, Lívia Ribera Souza. It cited a technical note from marine…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Kalle Benallie
ICT

Harvey Pratt made art that was in service to others.

They made a lasting impact on many people within the Indigenous community and more. Pratt died on Dec. 31 at the age of 84.

Pratt, of Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux descent, was born in El Reno, Oklahoma and was later given the key to the city.

He is survived by his wife of 30 years, Gina Posey Pratt, his four children and five grandchildren.

Pratt served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War from 1962 to 1965 and was part of the special recon unit, rescuing pilots who had been shot down. Decades later he created the National Native American Veterans Memorial outside of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C., for those from any tribe who wanted to perform ceremonies to honor their relatives who fought in the U.S. military.

Credit: The National Native American Veterans Memorial, November 2020 on the grounds of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Designed by Harvey Pratt, Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe. (Photo: Alan Karchmer for the National Museum of the American Indian)

“No matter how you feel about how our country has treated Native people, it’s important to honor all our Native warriors,” Pratt said in an ICT interview in 2019. “They fought to protect the land we live on. That’s what warriors do.

His design, called the “Warriors Circle of Honor,” was chosen out of 120 submissions.

After his military service he worked for the Midwest City Police Department for seven years, graduated from the FBI Academy and worked for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation for 45 years. He was an investigator, division director, interim director and most notably a forensic artist. He helped identify victims of high-profile murder cases like the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy, and the I-5 Killer.

“His award-winning art was sought-after by collectors around the world. He understood the importance of finding creative outlets that allowed him to process the grief that he experienced during difficult investigations. He was both warrior and artist. He was a rare embodiment of the warrior artist,” his obituary reads.

Pratt also worked alongside the United States Secret Service, protecting multiple presidents, according to his obituary.

Other commissions Pratt has completed include a bronze sculpture in Denver to memorialize the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre. His paintings are part of the permanent collections of the National Park Service, one depicts the 1868 Washita Massacre at the historic site in Cheyenne, Oklahoma.

Harvey Pratt’s mural at the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation office. (Photo courtesy of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation) Credit: (Photo courtesy of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation)

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said on Facebook that his artwork is throughout the headquarters building and their mural.

“We appreciate all that Harvey did for this agency and his legacy will live on forever,” the statement said.

Pratt is in the Oklahoma State Bureau Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Law Enforcement Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

Cheyenne and Arapaho Governor Reggie Wassana and Lieutenant Governor Hershel Gorham of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes said on Facebook Pratt was a trusted friend and mentor in the community

“Harvey’s legacy of service, integrity, and cultural pride will continue to inspire generations to come,” they said.

The post Harvey Pratt was ‘both warrior and artist’ appeared first on ICT.

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The Nature Conservancy in Nevada (TNC in Nevada), DRI, and the University of Wisconsin—Madison (UW-Madison) have developed the Nevada GDE Water Needs Explorer Tool. This new online resource helps land and water managers understand how groundwater supports groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) and how changes in water levels can affect them.

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Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal to revise the Clean Water Act, specifically a section of the law that regulates water quality and limits states’ and tribes’ authority over federal projects, as well as how tribes can gain the authority to conduct those reviews. Experts say the move would dissolve one of the few tools tribes have to enforce treaty rights and hamper their ability to protect tribal citizens.

“What the Trump administration is proposing to modify here is a really important tool for states and tribes, because it gets at their ability to put conditions on or, in extreme cases, block projects that are either proposed by the federal government or under the jurisdiction of the federal government,” said Miles Johnson, legal director at Columbia Riverkeeper, an organization that works on issues affecting the Columbia River.

Developers seeking to build dams, mines, data centers, or pipelines must navigate a permitting process to do so. One requirement in the process is obtaining certification from a tribe or state confirming that the project meets federal water quality standards. Currently, tribes and states conduct holistic reviews of projects, known as “activity as a whole”, evaluating all potential impacts on water quality, including spill risks, threats to cultural resources, and impacts on wildlife. This approach was established under the Biden administration in 2023.

However, the newly proposed rule would limit reviews to “discharge only,” where both states and tribes are able to review projects solely based on how much pollution they would release, narrowing the scope of oversight.

The proposed rule also changes how tribes can gain regulatory authority to assess water quality under the Treatment in a Similar Manner as a State program, or TAS. Under that program, tribes are able to act as regulators, one of the few tools available to them, and directly set conditions to limit factors that would pollute waters near tribal lands. To date, only 84 tribal nations have received TAS status, allowing them to review federal projects. Currently, Section 401 of the Clean Water Act allows tribes that can demonstrate the capacity and resources the ability to review water quality standards, expanding regulatory powers beyond tribes with larger resources. The proposed change would shrink those powers, allowing only TAS tribes to perform evaluations through a separate, more rigorous authorization program.

“Treaty rights are one of the strongest mechanisms to enforce against the federal government, against the state, against third-party actors, and in litigation,” said Heather Tanana, a law professor at the University of Colorado. “It takes years, it takes money, it’s complicated to do, and so you want these other mechanisms.”

A reversion to pre-2023 rules, Tanana said, would put higher demands on tribes to show larger-scale capacity, often in the form of dedicated water departments.

“There’s such a wide variance in tribes of what resources are available to them. Do they have other sources of revenue, right? How many staff do they have? Do they have their own environmental departments? Is it one person, or is it 10?” said Tanana.

During the Biden administration, tribes advocated for a baseline rule allowing all tribes some input in federal projects while seeking TAS status, but industry pushback during the comment period and a Trump win during the general election in 2024 led to its withdrawal from the EPA in December.

Patrick Hunter, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, noted that of 7,500 projects submitted during the Biden administration, fewer than 1 percent were denied. Most were approved with conditions such as mitigation measures and sediment traps to prevent water pollution during construction. Tanana said tribal review outcomes were similar.

The EPA’s 2025 report on tribal consultations highlighted widespread opposition to changes. “The clear feedback from the tribes was, ‘Don’t change it,'” said Tanana. “‘You’re going to make it harder for us to exercise our sovereignty to protect our waters and protect our community.’”

A 30-day public comment period on the proposed rule is currently underway. The rule is expected to face litigation after finalization.

“Tribes have an obligation to care for the rivers and waterways that have sustained their communities since before the existence of the United States and are weighing every option to protect their way of life,” said Gussie Lord, head of tribal partnerships at Earthjustice.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA wants to eliminate one of the few ways that tribes can protect their water on Jan 27, 2026.

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The adverse health impacts associated with emissions across the full life cycle of plastics could double by 2040 unless immediate action is taken, new research suggests. The study identified health harms at every stage of the life cycle of the plastics we use: from the extraction of fossil fuels, the feedstocks for more than 90% of plastics, and material production to their eventual disposal or release to the environment.

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It might be less visible than dwindling lion populations or vanishing pandas, but the quiet crisis of small mammal extinction is arguably worse for biodiversity. These species are crucial indicators of environmental health, but they can be very hard to monitor, and many species with very different ecological niches look almost identical.

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The Department of Environmental Conservation said it has been unable to get close to the wreckage, due to worries that metal from Rig 26 might fall on response team members.

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Last week, Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture (YCNCC) Scientific Leadership Team member and Earth & Planetary Sciences Professor Noah Planavsky co-authored a peer-reviewed comment in npj Climate Action titled "The importance of radical transparency for responsible carbon dioxide removal." YCNCC News spoke with Planavsky about why greater transparency is necessary, and how transparency is an important theme across the Center's work to advance carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

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Marine scientists compiling the most holistic “snapshot” of Thailand’s coral reefs to date have uncovered evidence of a long-suspected reality: Thailand’s coral reefs are losing structural complexity. Home to more than 300 species of reef-building corals, Thailand’s reefs have been hit repeatedly by mass coral bleaching triggered by extreme marine heat waves. The stress of these events has likely prompted shifts in the species that make up coral communities, with knock-on effects across entire marine ecosystems, experts say. The new study, based on underwater surveys carried out between 2022 and early 2024, just before the effects of the fourth global coral bleaching event were widely reported in Thailand, documents fringing reefs and offshore pinnacles across eight provinces on the Gulf of Thailand and Andaman Sea coasts. The 2024 bleaching event will have inevitably taken an as-yet-unquantified toll on the region’s reefs, the authors note. “Having this map of what corals are represented across the region gives us a starting point for conservation,” said Rahul Mehrotra, research director at the Aow Thai Marine Ecology Center (ATMEC) and a co-author of the study. “We hope that this baseline will [motivate] more nuanced assessments.” While nationwide studies have previously attempted to assess coral health at long-term monitoring sites in Thai waters, the majority of evaluations have been “highly localised and sporadic in nature,” the study says. The new coast-to-coast data represent a fresh baseline against which reef managers, researchers and policymakers can measure future change, Mehrotra said. A diversity of coral growth forms…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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African lions are increasingly targeted for trade in their bones, skin, teeth and claws, according to a newly published study. Without urgent action, the authors warn, poaching may pose an existential threat to Panthera leo, which once numbered in the hundreds of thousands across Africa. Today, about 25,000 are relegated to just 6% of their historic range. They’re classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Poaching is especially rising in Mozambique and South Africa, said Peter Lindsey, the study’s lead author who directs the Wildlife Conservation Network’s  Lion Recovery Fund. Officials seized more than 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of lion parts in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, in 2023. That year, an Endangered Wildlife Trust  survey found just 122 lions in an area of South Africa’s Kruger National Park that had held 283 in 2005 — a drop of nearly 60% Threats are pervasive. Prey is depleted by intensive bushmeat hunting. Lions are targeted for trophy hunting and poisoned in retaliatory killings by pastoralists when the cats hunt livestock. However, deliberate, organized poaching for body parts now “represents an intensifying challenge to lion conservation, compounding other threats, many of which are also growing in intensity,” the authors wrote. Luke Hunter, who heads the Wildlife Conservation Society’s big cats program, called trade-driven poaching “a defining threat to the future of Africa’s lions.” Demand is growing. The study notes that cats are killed for their bones — used in tiger bone wine, an expensive traditional medicine coveted in China. Some 37 African countries use…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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In lush South Florida, trees and bushes grow all year round. And that means yard waste and dead trees never stop piling up. But leaving them in a landfill is a climate-warming issue. Two South Florida governments think they have a new solution—light it on fire, but in a planet-friendly way.

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On Jan. 23, the Trump administration gave its approval for plans to build Sites Reservoir, a vast 13-mile-long off-stream lake north of Sacramento that would provide water to 500,000 acres of Central Valley farmland and 24 million people, including residents of Santa Clara County, parts of the East Bay and Los Angeles.

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Water is everywhere, from the snowpack in the mountains to the tap in our kitchens. But while we often think about rainfall and snow as the main drivers of our water supply, it turns out that something we rarely see has just as much influence: the underground structure of the landscape itself.

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Accurate measurements of surface currents are crucial for coastal monitoring, rip current detection, and predicting the path of pollutants. Several methods exist to measure surface currents, some of which are costly and time-consuming. In a recent paper, researchers from Texas A&M University have compared three methods for measuring surface currents over large areas, identifying an ideal method that uses drones and wave-based current mapping.

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Cities are expected to track sustainability progress with data that are often incomplete, outdated, or available only at national level. New research led by IIASA in collaboration with UN-Habitat finds that citizen science could address these gaps and support nearly 70% of global sustainability indicators, yet is currently used in only 4% of cases.

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Human health risks from direct consumption of toxic nanoplastics are already scary, but researchers have confirmed that nanoplastics in water give rise to an additional threat: They strengthen bacteria.

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Iron (Fe) is a vital micronutrient for plants, which is required for processes such as photosynthesis and enzyme activity. Plants must carefully manage iron levels to maintain health and productivity. They activate iron uptake genes when deficient and suppress them when iron is excessive to prevent toxicity. This careful balance is known as iron homeostasis.

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Every second, millions of cells in your body divide in two. In the space of an hour, they duplicate their DNA and grow a web of protein fibers around it called a spindle. The spindle extends its many fibers from the chromosomes in the center to the edges of the cell. Then, with extraordinary force, it pulls the chromosomes apart.

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As organisms develop from embryos, groups of cells migrate and reshape themselves to form all manner of complex tissues. There are no anatomical molds shaped like lungs, livers or other tissues for cells to grow into. Rather, these structures form through the coordinated activity of different types of cells as they move and multiply.

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Unraveling the mysteries of how biological organisms function begins with understanding the molecular interactions within and across large cell populations. A revolutionary new tool, developed at the University of Michigan, acts as a sort of tape recorder produced and maintained by the cell itself, enabling scientists to rewind back in time and view interactions on a large scale and over long periods of time.

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Researchers at the Regional Service for Agri-Food Research and Development (SERIDA) have developed a new large-scale remote sensing model that will enable comprehensive, high-resolution monitoring of fossorial water vole populations in areas where they cause agricultural damage. The system combines data collected in the field with satellite-derived information, facilitating detailed and continuous control of the appearance and spread of these rodents across extensive agricultural areas.

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Microbes across Earth's coldest regions are becoming more active as glaciers, permafrost and sea ice thaw, accelerating carbon release and potentially amplifying climate change, according to a new international review from McGill University.

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