
Mongabay Newscast
1,399 FOLLOWERS
The Mongabay Newscast is our free, biweekly podcast delivering news and inspiration from nature's frontline. It features inspiring guests and a deeper analysis of the global environmental issues explored every day by the Mongabay.com team, from climate change to biodiversity, tropical ecology, wildlife, and more.
Mongabay Newscast
1w ago
The bobcat population has rebounded over the past century, making it North America’s most common wildcat: as of 2011, there were an estimated 3.5 million bobcats in the United States alone, a significant increase from the late 1990s.
These intelligent felids, Lynx rufus, have benefited from conservation efforts that have increased their natural habitat. The species also thrives at the edges of towns and cities, where their presence can even reduce the spread of pathogens like Lyme disease that affect people, says podcast guest Zara McDonald, founder of the Felidae Conservation Fund.
McDon ..read more
Mongabay Newscast
2w ago
Nations across the world are working to expand their protected areas to include 30% of Earth's land and water by 2030. In Africa, this would include roughly an additional 1 million square miles.
Mongabay's Ashoka Mukpo travelled to three African nations to assess the current state of conservation practices in key protected areas to get a better picture of what an expansion might look like. However, while there, he documented allegations of extrajudicial killings in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. He joins the podcast to describe the situation, which he says is commonplace in national ..read more
Mongabay Newscast
2w ago
Bryan Simmons, the vice president of communications for the Arcus Foundation, joins the Mongabay Newscast this week to share the philosophy behind the 25-year-old foundation, which funds grantees that work on LGBTQ rights and great apes and gibbons conservation.
In this conversation with co-host Mike DiGirolamo, Simmons explains the link between economic development and justice for people and how this is correlated with conservation outcomes.
“When people are not able to have their economic needs met, conservation begins to pay the price right away,” says Simmons.
He encourages listeners to re ..read more
Mongabay Newscast
3w ago
Bryan Simmons, the vice president of communications for the Arcus Foundation, joins the Mongabay Newscast this week to share the philosophy behind the 25-year-old foundation, which funds grantees that work on LGBTQ rights and great apes and gibbons conservation.
In this conversation with co-host Mike DiGirolamo, Simmons explains the link between economic development and justice for people and how this is correlated with conservation outcomes.
“When people are not able to have their economic needs met, conservation begins to pay the price right away,” says Simmons.
He encourages listeners to re ..read more
Mongabay Newscast
1M ago
This week, Anthony James, host of The RegenNarration Podcast, joins Mongabay’s podcast to share stories of community resilience and land regeneration in the Americas and Australia. James explains how donkeys (seen as invasive pests) are now being managed to benefit the land in Kachana Station in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
In this episode, James emphasizes the importance of harnessing what’s in front of us, rather than fighting it. Across the many interviews he’s conducted, it’s become clear that this concept is something Aboriginal Traditional Owners are keenly aware of.
“If yo ..read more
Mongabay Newscast
1M ago
General frustration with the result of the most recent UN climate conference (UNFCCC COP29) spurred the former UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres – under whose leadership the Paris Agreement was struck – to co-author a letter to the UN urging an overhaul to the COP process, and calling it “no longer fit for purpose.”
Figueres joins this episode to speak about why the world’s governments seemingly cannot agree to move decisively on climate action, and what can be done about it.
She shares why – despite these frustrations and disappointments – she remains optimistic about the global effort to ..read more
Mongabay Newscast
2M ago
Seventeen regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) regulate commercially valuable fish species across the world's oceans. The members of these organizations do not publicize their meetings and bar journalists from attending, presenting a barrier for public awareness.
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, Africa staff writer Malavika Vyawahare is joined by a fisheries expert, Grantly Galland, and an RFMO secretary, Darius Campbell, to explain how decisions are made in regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs), the consequences their decisions have on global fish populat ..read more
Mongabay Newscast
2M ago
A new forest finance fund known as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) will work like an investment portfolio (unlike the familiar – and often ineffective – forest conservation loan or grant funds), and if enacted as intended, it will reward 70 tropical nations billions in annual funding for keeping their forests standing.
Co-host Mike DiGirolamo speaks with three people who have analyzed the fund: Mongabay freelance reporter Justin Catanoso, Charlotte Streck – co-founder of Climate Focus – and Frédéric Hache, a lecturer in sustainable finance at the Paris Institute of Political Studie ..read more
Mongabay Newscast
2M ago
Animal aquaculture, the farming of fish, has outpaced the amount of wild-caught fish by tens of millions of metric tons each year, bringing with it negative environmental impacts and enabling abuse, says Carl Safina, an ecologist and author.
On this episode of Mongabay’s podcast, Safina speaks with co-host Rachel Donald about his recent Science Advances essay describing the “moral reckoning” that’s required for the industry, pointing to environmental laws in the United States, which put hard limits on pollution, as examples to follow.
“In the 1970s in the U.S., we had this enormous burst of en ..read more
Mongabay Newscast
2M ago
Drylands are vast and home to a wide array of biodiversity, while also hosting a large portion of the world’s farmland, but they face continued desertification, despite many of them recently experiencing increased vegetation levels.
Five million hectares (12 million acres) of drylands, an area half the size of South Korea, have been desertified due to climate change since 1980, but elevated CO2 levels are also driving a regreening of some areas, which some argue is a positive effect of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
However, our guest on this episode says this isn’t necessarily good news: re ..read more