More than 500 people have invaded Brazil’s Ituna/Itatá Indigenous Land in recent weeks, opening illegal roads, setting deliberate fires and threatening federal agents. The area is home to the Igarapé Ipiaçava Indigenous people who live in voluntary isolation with no contact with outsiders.

On Aug. 26, a federal court ordered the government to deploy the National Public Security Force within 48 hours to contain the invasion. As of Sept 11, the forces hadn’t yet arrived.

The recent invasion followed the creation of the Bacajaí Environmental Protection Area (APA Bacajaí) under a new state law, which allows private landowners to build homes and raise livestock. However, APA Bacajaí completely overlaps the federally protected Indigenous land in Pará state, creating legal confusion that authorities say has been weaponized by land-grabbers to justify occupation for cattle ranching and other agricultural activities.

The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) has asked a federal court to fine the government 50,000 Brazilian reais (about $9,000) daily for failing to deploy enough security forces to contain the invasion. The area is currently under a temporary land-use restriction order to protect the isolated people living there.

The government has argued it needs authorization from Pará’s government, which hasn’t cooperated. However, federal prosecutors say the federal government can be deployed on federal land without state authorization.

Both the federal government and the state of Pará did not reply to Mongabay’s requests for comment by the time of publication.

In its press statement, the MPF said the Indigenous Affairs Agency (Funai) and Federal Police overflights have detected the use of heavy machinery and chainsaws to clear more than 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) of forest trails and clandestine roads to mark illegal plots in the Indigenous land. It also said fires were started shortly after inspections, in what the MPF described as “clear retaliation and an attempt at intimidation.”

“What worries us most right now is the fire situation,” Helena Palmquist, deputy coordinator of the Observatory of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples (OPI), who has been monitoring the situation via satellite imagery and field reports, told Mongabay over WhatsApp voice messages. “We are experiencing an Amazonian dry season with the prospect of an El Niño event far more severe than previous ones; this makes the forest more volatile and prone to catching fire.”

Evidence attached to the MPF’s case file includes audio recordings that circulated among invaders, in which a man rallies around 100-200 people to surround the Funai team, burn their vehicles and force them out on foot. Officials also found a state government cargo vehicle being used to support the illegal settlement’s infrastructure during inspection activities, the MPF statement said.

Palmquist told Mongabay that after IBAMA, Brazil’s environment agency, carried out inspections and destroyed some machinery and trucks the week of Aug. 31, invaders set fire to the forest.

Banner image: Cattle graze in a deforested area near Novo Progresso in the state of Para, Brazil. Image by Andre Penner/AP Photo.

Several years of severe drought are forcing people to leave their homes in Angola to search for water and food in neighboring Namibia.

“There is real hunger and thirst here; that’s why the village has become depopulated,” Nghikembua (not his real name), who lives in Cunene Province in southern Angola, told Amnesty International in 2021. Nghikembua said nearly all the able-bodied people of his village have left, leaving behind only the elderly, like himself, “Those who still had some strength left felt forced to leave the village for Namibia.”

More than 1.8 million people live in Cunene and nearly 75% of the population is rural and depends on pastoralism and subsistence farming.

“Southern Angola has experienced repeated severe droughts, extreme heat and environmental degradation for quite a number of years, leaving families without water, crops, or livestock,” said Victor Nyamori, an Amnesty International researcher and migration lawyer who collected the testimonies for the recently published report featuring Nghikembua.

Approximately 30% of the area has been degraded by desertification, according to the Amnesty International report, leaving many subsistence communities without livelihoods.

“Namibia has also suffered from drought, but the state has responded much better and has put solutions in place to prevent the population from falling into food insecurity and to ensure access to water,” Nyamori told Mongabay in a phone call.

Between 2023 and 2024, a strong El Niño event brought the most severe drought in more than a century to the region. Namibia responded to the drought by expanding food and water assistance, supporting livestock owners and investing in social protection.

“Angola did not respond as well, which means that for Angolans, crossing the border has become a matter of survival,” Nyamori said. “For Angolans, displacement also means living in extremely scarce and sometimes dangerous conditions. For women and children, this means risking sexual and gender-based violence and trafficking.”

Historically, seasonal mobility formed an important part of social, economic and customary life in the region, enabling communities to access grazing land and water during droughts. But when colonization and arbitrary borders separated communities, such migration disappeared, Nyamori said.

“The border is the Cunene River,” he said. “On both sides, people speak the same language, have the same way of life, and are sometimes members of the same family. During the pre-colonial era, these communities crossed the river during periods of drought to find water.

“Perhaps, when responding to droughts, states should take this Indigenous knowledge into account, as it once helped prevent food crises, and allow these population movements to take place safely.”

For now, there is a bilateral agreement allowing Angolans to move freely in Namibia within 60 km (37 miles) of the border. Amnesty International is calling for Namibia to make its bilateral border agreement more permanent, particularly as climate scientists warn that a “supersized” El Niño is developing and will likely bring more devastating drought to the region.

Banner image: The Cunene River that divides Angola, left, and Namibia, right. Image © Amnesty International.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a defeat for the Trump administration, a federal court on Friday ruled that the Energy Department exceeded its authority when it forced a Michigan coal-fired power to stay open past its scheduled retirement date last year.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright had said the 64-year-old J.H. Campbell plant was needed to ensure reliable electricity in the region and used emergency powers to keep it operating. Environmental groups and three states — Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota — went to court to try to overturn orders keeping the plant online.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the states and the groups, saying there was no real emergency under the law.

The section of the Federal Power Act that allows emergency orders “is essentially a narrow, last-resort backstop,” Appeals Court Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.

By reversing the Campbell plant’s “long and carefully planned retirement … the results are disruptive,” Pillard wrote. There was “no ‘emergency’ within the meaning” of the statute, she added.

The Michigan case is one several legal disputes that have emerged across the country as the Trump administration uses emergency powers to force a half-dozen coal-fired plants from closing. The orders are raising ratepayer bills, critics say, and adding air and water pollution that could otherwise have been avoided.

Keeping the Michigan plant open cost at least $135 million in 2025 alone, officials said.

Ted Kelly, U.S. clean energy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the court ruling rejected the Trump administration’s nationwide effort to force “unreliable, aging coal plants that are bleeding money and polluting communities to stay online.”

The Energy Department’s “unlawful actions attempted to make families and businesses in the Midwest wastefully pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a coal plant that should have been shut down over a year ago,” Kelly said Friday. The Campbell plant and other aging sites are “incredibly expensive, dangerous to our health and break down frequently,” he said.

The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

By Matthew Daly, Associated Press

Banner image: J.H. Campbell, a coal-burning power plant, operates in West Olive, Mich., Tuesday, May 19, 2026. Julián Trejo Bax, Associated Press

Mozambique has formally protected Mount Mabu, a hotspot of endemic wildlife and home to more than 200 species of butterflies, located in the Lugela district of northern Mozambique.

The decree, published on Aug. 24 by the Ministry of Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries, created the 9,341-hectare (23,082-acre) Mount Mabu Community Conservation Area, with stewardship of the land granted to the local communities that have preserved the forest for generations.

“It’s a great relief,” Julian Bayliss, an ecologist who led several surveys over 20 years that helped build the case for protecting Mount Mabu, told Mongabay by phone. “These forests are very important because they’ve got high levels of endemism.”

Every year in October and November, hundreds of butterflies gather in the morning on the 1,700-meter (5,577-foot) summit of Mount Mabu, a mating behavior scientists call hilltopping. In 2013, the phenomenon was documented by naturalist David Attenborough who lent Mount Mabu the nickname “butterfly forest.”

Scientists have recorded more than 200 butterfly taxa at Mabu but say the real number could reach 250 with further surveys. Since 2005, more than 30 species, including frogs, chameleons, bats and insects, have been discovered in the forests of Mabu.

Bayliss and colleagues most recently described a new-to-science cobalt-blue butterfly, Iolaus mabuensis, found by a research team he led in Mabu in 2008. Only one specimen of the species has been collected to date, Bayliss said.

Bayliss was also the first scientist to encounter the Mount Mabu forest viper, Atheris mabuensis, described in 2009, after he accidentally stepped on one under a pile of leaf litter.

According to the decree, the land is dedicated to the protection, conservation and sustainable use of natural resources by local communities. Any specific restrictions on activities are expected to be defined under the community management plan that has not yet been finalized.

Mount Mabu hosts “the largest continuous block” of medium-altitude forest left in southern Africa. The terrain has steep ridges and valleys, which create microclimates and isolated flora and fauna that evolved over millions of years into a plethora of species found in few other places, and in some cases nowhere else in the world, Bayliss said.

Today, the forest’s main threats are from encroachment of small-scale agriculture and logging, but overall, the area is well-conserved and treated as sacred by locals, according to the 2024 conservation area proposal reviewed by Mongabay.

“All of this effort is a recognition of the community that protected the forest,” José Monteiro, executive director of ReGeCom, one of the organizations working with the local communities at Mabu, told Mongabay by phone. “The community, over a long time, kept the forest standing.”

Banner image: Butterflies on Mount Mabu. Image courtesy of Julian Bayliss.

Nine dolphin species, and several more subspecies and local populations, are currently critically endangered or endangered, according to the most recent assessment by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.

September 12 marks World Dolphin Day, an awareness day created in 2022 by marine conservation nonprofit Sea Shepherd to bring attention to the threats that these highly intelligent mammals face.

In late 2025, Lahille’s bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus gephyreus), a subspecies of the common bottlenose dolphin, was reclassified from vulnerable to endangered, with fewer than 400 individuals estimated to remain in the wild. Its main threat, according the IUCN, is being killed as bycatch in gillnet fisheries that operate along the coasts of southern Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

While threats to species and sub-species remain, efforts are being made to protect and better understand dolphins across the globe, from research uncovering novel behaviors, and increased formal protections, to steps to end cruel confinement practices. For this World Dolphin Day, we present three recent Mongabay stories reporting on dolphins around the world.

Illegal drift nets trap dolphins in the Mediterranean despite ban

The use of drift nets to catch swordfish is banned in the Mediterranean because the gear often traps dolphins, whales, sharks and turtles. But recent investigations by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) found it was still widely in use in the Alboran Sea between northwestern Morocco and the south coast of Spain, Mongabay’s Victoria Schneider reported in July.

“We can see that it is having an impact on precious ecosystems in a unique area, which is the Alboran Sea,” Jesús Urios Culiañez, an ocean policy officer at EJF, told Mongabay.

The EU is expected to present fisheries regulators with a proposal for stronger international rules in November 2026.

Singapore resort says it will stop breeding and sourcing wild dolphins

According to insiders, a resort in Singapore has suspended captive breeding of wild dolphins and stopped sourcing wild dolphins for its oceanarium, contributor Robin Hicks reported for Mongabay in March.

As of March, the facility held more than 20 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus), most descended from animals captured in the Solomon Islands in 2008 and 2009. The company that owns the oceanarium also said it was assembling experts to determine the future of its captive dolphins.

Anbarasi Boopal, the former co-chief executive of Singapore’s Animal Concerns Research and Education Society called the move “long overdue progress for animal welfare in Singapore” as long as the decision was motivated by welfare concerns.

Dolphins use shells to catch fish in Eastern Australia

Bottlenose dolphins off Australia’s east coast have been filmed trapping fish inside empty sea snail shells — a foraging technique previously recorded only in western Australia, thousands of kilometers away, Mongabay’s Bobby Bascomb reported in August.

“The second I saw it, I was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, this is huge,” said Alexis Levengood, the animal ecologist behind the study into the dolphins.

Researchers suspect the behavior developed independently on both coasts.

Banner image: A striped dolphin (Stenella coeruleoalba) caught in a French drift net in the North Atlantic. Image © Peter Rowlands/Greenpeace.

Nigerian conservationist Rachel Ikemeh has been named the 2026 Rolex Award laureate, for her work with communities in the Niger Delta to protect the region’s ecology and the critically endangered Niger Delta red colobus monkey.

The red colobus (Piliocolobus epieni), a monkey known as epieni by the region’s communities, is listed as one of the world’s 25 most endangered primates by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. It was first described scientifically in 1993. At the time, there were about 10,000 epieni estimated to be living across its limited range in the Niger Delta. However, by 2013, their numbers had plunged to just hundreds rather than thousands of individuals, Ikemeh noted in a study.

In 2021, Ikemeh and her colleagues helped establish a 1,010-hectare (2,496-acre) community-protected area for the epieni in Apoi, a town within the monkey’s range.

By 2024, the monkey’s population had doubled within the community-protected forest, from 180-200 individuals in 2021, Ikemeh told Mongabay by email. She added the team has since helped create community conservation areas in the neighboring communities of Garnaut and Kokoloama.

The award “feels less like a personal honour and more like validation for the community model itself,” Ikemeh said.

She added she’s optimistic about the epieni’s future because she’s seen community perception around their conservation model shift over the years. “[T]he same community who once suspected we’d come to ‘collect their forest’ for the government now talk about epieni as a source of pride, something that put their village on the map,” Ikemeh said. “That change in attitude is the real conservation infrastructure; it’s what makes this conservation story very meaningful to tell.”

Ikemeh said Apoi community members have even hosted six other communities to learn about their community conservation model.

However, epieni conservation still faces challenges. “Outside the protected areas and across the Niger Delta region, there are still threats from oil pollution, logging is rampant, overfishing, indiscriminate hunting and recently black sand mining by the seashores amongst others,” Ikemeh said. “Also, the overall population of epieni is still small and confined to a tiny area, so a disease outbreak, or spike in unrest could undo a lot of this progress quickly.”

She said most funding for their work is also still tied to specific short-term grants and projects. Furthermore, while communities have embraced conservation, Ikemeh said the underlying economic pressures, including poverty and the lack of jobs, still remain.

Ikemeh said the 100,000 Swiss franc ($123,000) Rolex Award will allow for her team to set up four new community conservation areas around Apoi. This will include the first locally managed marine community conservation area in the region. She added the money will also help them establish a mobile environmental education program to reach communities they haven’t been able to visit.

Banner image: Nigerian conservationist Rachel Ikemeh is a winner of the 2026 Rolex Awards. Image courtesy of Rolex Awards.