In a landmark judgment on Aug. 14, South Africa’s Constitutional Court set aside exploration rights held by oil giant Shell and Impact Africa, a South African oil and gas company. The ruling prevents the companies from exploring for fossil fuels off South Africa’s Wild Coast. The case was brought by Wild Coast communities and environmental organizations after Shell announced plans in 2021 to conduct a 3D seismic survey off the country’s Eastern Cape province coastline. They argued that authorities had failed to meaningfully consult affected communities or consider harms to their spiritual and cultural rights and livelihoods. Authorities also failed to consider the potential harm to marine life and climate change, the plaintiffs argued. In the judgement, Justice Jody Kollapen wrote the majority opinion and said consulting communities isn't just a procedural requirement, but “a process which affirms human dignity by affording a seat at the table to those whose lives are impacted by decisions.” Acknowledging the “cornerstone role that dispossession played in the apartheid regime,” the court noted that South Africa’s natural resources are highly contested and that the case is embedded in “well-documented struggles by coastal communities to protect their land, marine resources and ways of life in the face of extractive activities.” The judges also considered last year’s International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on countries’ obligations in the context of climate change: “Decisions must be taken within a framework of heightened diligence, informed by scientific knowledge, international commitments and the foreseeable impacts of emissions on present and future generations,” Kollapen wrote. The question of oil exploration rights in the area began in 2014, when the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy granted Impact Africa Limited the right to undertake a seismic survey to look for oil and gas reserves on the Wild Coast. Impact Africa Limited is a subsidiary of Impact Oil & Gas Limited, which in 2021 transferred a 50% stake of its exploration rights in the area to Shell. The case has appeared before several South African courts over the past decade before reaching the Constitutional Court, the highest in the country. Carmen Mannarino from the South African nonprofit Masifundise Development Trust, which works with communities in the area, told Mongabay that the court’s decision is a victory for fishing communities. “The court recognized that exploring for resources in light of potential future financial benefits does not compare to the constitutionally recognized rights of fishing communities,” Mannarino said. “This is the apex court and the first time that it has dealt with issues relating to the community and environmental rights in relation to oil and gas exploitation,” Melissa Groenink, an attorney with one of the applicants, civil society organization Natural Justice, told Mongabay, adding that the ruling might influence similar cases currently in process. Shell did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment by the time of publication. Banner image: Fisherpeople in Port St. Johns, Eastern Cape. Image courtesy of Aletta Harrison CC BY 4.0.

For wildlife moving between Lake Manyara and Tarangire, a line on a map was never enough. Elephants, wildebeest, and other animals crossed land used by pastoralists and farmers, where roads, cultivation, and settlements were expanding. Keeping such routes open meant persuading people who lived there that wildlife had a place in their future. It meant dealing with livestock killed by predators, arguments over revenue, and the tedious business of local institutions. John Gospel Yonazi Salehe, who died on June 19th aged 71, spent much of his working life on such problems. A Tanzanian forester by training, he worked for the government, FAO, UNDP, WWF, and, eventually, the African Wildlife Foundation, where he became Tanzania country director. His career stretched for more than four decades and across forests, wildlife areas, and development projects in East Africa. Salehe’s conservation was practical and strongly social. In the Maasai Steppe he worked to protect wildlife corridors and strengthen community-run Wildlife Management Areas. He wanted the benefits from conservation to reach households, and supported measures such as predator-proof livestock enclosures and compensation for losses to wildlife. Communities were not an audience for conservation after the important decisions had been made. They were part of how it was supposed to work. The same thinking shaped his work on forests. In central Tanzania, where charcoal production and farming put pressure on woodland, he argued that restrictions had to be accompanied by viable livelihoods. Higher agricultural productivity, land-use planning, and secure tenure could reduce pressure on forests, he believed. Researchers who later examined one REDD project in Kondoa challenged some of its claims of success. Salehe’s underlying proposition was clear enough: conservation would endure only if it made economic and institutional sense to the people living with it. This required patience. Wildlife Management Areas brought disagreements over money, investors, expectations, and authority. The work was administrative as much as ecological, and progress could depend on arrangements few outsiders ever saw. Salehe seems to have been unusually comfortable in that territory. His approach rested on partnerships among communities, government, businesses, NGOs, and donors. A filmmaker who interviewed him in 2014 found him “incredibly accommodating” and “quite the character.” Colleagues later recalled his integrity, humor, humility, and willingness to mentor younger conservationists. [caption id="attachment_326315" align="alignnone" width="1200"] John Salehe. Photo © Nature Tanzania[/caption] He had begun working in conservation in the 1970s. Long after formal employment ended, he kept chairing organizations and advising others. He had joined the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group in 1994 and chaired it from 2012. He also chaired the Tanzania Association of Foresters and the Community Wildlife Management Area Consortium, and helped found Nature Tanzania. There, birds became another route into the same larger question: how to protect habitats while giving Tanzanians a reason and a means to protect them themselves. Salehe believed, Nature Tanzania recalled, that conservation belonged to the people. The phrase could sound grander than the man’s working methods. Those were meetings, land-use plans, budgets, negotiations, and years spent keeping alliances together. In the landscapes where he worked, that was often what conservation required. Header image: Courtesy of AWF

Women preparing meals for more than 1,000 students at Tiyani Secondary School in South Africa’s Limpopo province no longer rely only on firewood. Instead, much of the cooking is powered by biogas generated from cattle dung collected from Tiyani village. This community-led project could reduce pressure on forests while cutting greenhouse gas emissions, experts say. The pilot project was established in 2022 with support from the University of Venda. Every weekday, four community volunteers from Tiyani use an ox-drawn cart to collect cattle dung from nearby households. The manure is then mixed with water and fed into a biogas converter digester, an airtight, oxygen-free container where microbes convert it into methane-rich biogas. The gas is then piped directly to the school kitchen, where it powers the cooking of breakfast and lunch for the school's 1,054 learners. When there isn’t enough cow dung, the school still supplements with firewood. "We never imagined that something we regarded as waste could become a source of energy," Fosta Chavalala, the community project manager of the biogas project, told Mongabay in an interview. "In future, we hope to expand the project” to rely more on gas than firewood. In a March 2025 article published in the industry magazine ReSource, David Tinarwo, head of the Biogas Research team at the University of Venda, said the project was designed to reduce dependence on firewood while making productive use of livestock waste. "The demand for firewood was placing pressure on local trees, and the way trees were being cut was not sustainable,” he told Mongabay in an interview. “We wanted to develop a solution that would reduce dependence on firewood while making use of livestock waste that was readily available in the community.” Bornface Siliya Kenan Zulu, a Zambia-based engineer specializing in renewable and low-carbon energy systems, told Mongabay by email that community-scale biogas projects can significantly reduce methane emissions by capturing gas that would otherwise escape from decomposing manure while providing cleaner cooking fuel. However, Zulu said their long-term success depends on a reliable supply of livestock manure, regular maintenance of digesters and strong community ownership. "Without a consistent supply of feedstock and local capacity to maintain the system, gas production can decline and communities may lose confidence in the technology," he said. While it’s had a promising start, the Tiyani project faces challenges. Volunteers spend hours collecting manure because some cattle owners live too far away or are unwilling to participate, Chavalala said. The school also has only one three-plate gas stove, limiting how much of the available biogas can be used, and additional cooking equipment and better transport would increase the system's impact, he added. The digester occupies a 4-by-12-meter (13-by-39-foot) site and is maintained jointly by community volunteers and the school, with funding from the University of Venda. Banner image: Volunteers work in a vegetable field belonging to Tiyani Secondary School where the manure is thrown after gas is extracted. Image by Bernard Chiguvare.

A growing human population, expanding croplands, and drier conditions driven by climate change within protected areas could significantly intensify human-elephant conflict in Southern Africa, a recent study finds. Southern Africa is home to almost 300,000 African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana), with many populations rebounding after decades of poaching. The region is also seeing rapidly expanding farms and human populations, leading to instances of crop raiding by elephants. To understand what drives the problem in the region, they used data on crop raiding recorded within 38 community-managed communal conservancies in Namibia from 2004 to 2020, and used statistical methods and machine-learning models to assess the drivers across the broader region, including northern Botswana, Angola, and Zambia. Their analysis showed that human population growth and expansion of farms, settlements and other built-up areas led to higher rates of crop raiding. Conflict was also higher during the wet season, from November to April. Moreover, drier conditions within protected areas were associated with higher human-elephant conflict in nearby conservancies during the wet season, suggesting that poorer habitat conditions within the protected areas may be pushing the animals out, increasing the potential for conflict, the authors say. The researchers also found that projected changes in land use, human population, and climate change would expand the area at risk of crop raiding in Southern Africa by 2085. Evan Patrick, the study’s lead author, told Mongabay by email that local land use and development patterns are the clearest signals driving increases in conflict. “That means the projected increases in conflict are not fully inevitable, but that local planning can move human land use expansion away from conflict hotspots.” Patrick added the study’s findings “can help guide proactive land use decision-making and mitigation efforts, as these are often cheaper and preferable to payment programs that cover some of the losses” from human-elephant conflict. Solving conflict should be informed by science, Patrick said, adding that local conservation leaders and partners are the people best positioned to find solutions to problems like crop raiding.  “While we are interested in expanding our analysis, we want to make sure any work is grounded with partners to ensure that the work can guide and be guided by local knowledge and needs,” he said. Elephant ecologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University in the U.S., who wasn’t part of the study, told Mongabay by email that the study highlights how the dual pressures of human population growth and climate change will rachet up pressure on remaining wildlands in sub-Saharan Africa. “This type of work is really valuable to identify areas where problems are occurring and likely to expand. This provides the foundation for proactive mitigation, such as government schemes to incentivize agricultural zones of non-palatable crops in conflict risk areas,” Wittemyer said. Banner image: African savanna elephants in Namibia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Three more African countries have joined calls for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining until the environmental, social and economic impacts of such mining are better understood. This brings the number of African countries supporting a moratorium to six. Mauritius, Mozambique and the Republic of the Congo announced support for the precautionary pause during the annual meeting of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica, in July, joining Malawi, Kenya and Madagascar. The government of Mauritius said in its statement during the ISA meeting that “the sustainable development of Mauritius is inextricably dependent on a healthy and resilient ocean.” Mauritius officials stressed that decisions regarding deep-seabed mining must be made based on “best available scientific evidence and by the precautionary approach, as enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” Malawi was the first African country to support a precautionary pause in May 2026. Kenya and Madagascar followed in June. “The basis for all of these countries, while taking into account their individual contexts, is the lack of sufficient science and the governance gaps that persist,” David Willima from the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), a group of more than 140 NGOs and organizations, told Mongabay via email. The six African nations are among 46 countries globally that support a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-seabed mining. The ocean floor in the deep sea has small, hard rocks called polymetallic nodules that contain minerals like nickel, cobalt and manganese. Countries and companies want to mine these minerals for renewable energy and defense technologies. The push for a moratorium or precautionary pause emerged in 2019 from gaps in scientific knowledge about the larger environmental impacts of mining for the nodules in international waters. Joel Matonga, senior legal officer at the Malawian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Mongabay in a phone interview that Malawi decided to be the first African country to announce its stand as, like other developing nations, it is bearing the brunt of a warming ocean and a changing climate. “We have had an increase in cyclones originating from the Madagascan area, the worst one being Cyclone Freddy in 2023 which caused devastating effects that led to a lot of fatalities and the displacement of people,” Matonga said. During the two-week ISA meeting, Kenya, which is pro-moratorium, was allocated a seat for the first time on the 36-member ISA Council where rules governing the exploitation of deep-seabed mining are negotiated. Willima of the DSCC said that with 10 seats on the ISA Council, Africa has a strong voice in shaping the rules, including developing environmental safeguards and benefit-sharing. “The challenge will be turning that numerical strength into a common negotiating position despite divisions between mining interests and the growing precautionary-pause camp,” he said. Banner image: Manganese nodules on the seafloor in the Clarion-Clipperton zone that's been considered for deep-sea mining. Image by ROV KIEL 6000, GEOMAR - Geomar Bilddatenbank via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

A cocoa boom in southeast Liberia is wiping out native forests and encroaching into a proposed national park. The would-be Kwa National Park, a dense tropical rainforest, is home to chimpanzees, forest elephants, pygmy hippos and pangolins. Kwa is partly located in Grand Gedeh county, one of the most densely forested regions in southeast Liberia. Commercial agriculture is banned across the 1,720 square-kilometer (664 square-mile) area set aside for the national park, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo. Yet, during patrols, forest rangers from Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority (FDA) and community eco-guards, such as George Bowey with the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation, have discovered illegal cocoa plantations inside the park’s boundaries. Much of the forest around Kwa has already been cleared for cacao by people who live nearby. “At the end of 2023, we started seeing cocoa going closer to the park, but to enter the park it was last year,” Bowey said. Mukpo accompanied Bowey through the dense canopy of Kwa to reach a massive 100-hectare (250-acre) cacao plantation full of leafless, rotting trees and waist-high cacao saplings. On their way back to a ranger camp, Mukpo and Bowey passed other cacao plantations within Kwa, all showing signs of burns on trees. Cacao can be grown in one of two ways: Saplings can be intercropped with other tree species to form a diverse ecosystem; or gasoline can be poured at the base of trees and their roots set on fire, effectively killing trees to make way for cacao. It’s the second method that migrant cacao workers from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire have brought to Kwa. Since these plantations have appeared in Kwa, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) seem to have fled deeper into the park, Bowey said. Grand Gedeh county borders Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s biggest exporter of cacao beans. As recently as 2020, 99% of the county was covered by natural forests. Since then, forest cover has been in decline as Liberian landowners have cashed in on the cocoa fever, offering their forest land to migrant workers from Côte d’Ivoire in exchange for a share in the earnings. Forests in southeastern Liberia are communally owned, and laws regulate how they can be leased for commercial agriculture. Yei Neagor, in-charge of the FDA’s regional headquarters in Zwedru, Grand Gedeh’s capital, told Mongabay the enforcement mandate of the agency is limited. FDA rangers can mostly operate within forests where commercial cacao farming is banned under the terms of co-management agreements between the FDA and local communities. In those forests, they arrest the migrant workers, but not the Liberians who hired them. Neagor added she’s been instructed not to destroy any mature cacao trees, even those planted illegally in protected areas like Kwa. “We sit and fold our hands and watch the forest going,” she said. “Generations will judge us tomorrow.” Read the full story by Ashoka Mukpo here. Banner image: Community eco-guard George Bowey in an illegal cacao farm in the proposed Kwa National Park. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.