Four NGOs recently appealed to the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) to have their concerns about a contentious oil pipeline heard on merit. The landmark case, filed four years ago, had previously been dismissed on technical grounds.

The four East African NGOs — the Center for Food and Adequate Living Rights (CEFROHT) and the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), both from Uganda, Natural Justice (Kenya), and the Centre for Strategic Litigation (Tanzania) — first filed their case with the EACJ in November 2020. They urged the court to halt the construction of the 1,443-kilometer (897-mile) East African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) that’s designed to transport oil from Uganda to Tanzania.

The NGOs argue that EACOP violates human rights and environmental laws of both countries and was moving forward without adequate compensation and public participation, while displacing local communities and harming the ecosystems they depend on.

EACOP is led by French oil giant TotalEnergies and involves state-owned companies from China, Uganda and Tanzania.

At the first hearing in November 2023, the court dismissed the EACOP case, agreeing with the governments of Tanzania and Uganda that the NGOs had exceeded the objection period by not filing their complaint within 60 days of the 2017 agreements. However, David Kabanda, a human rights lawyer from CEFROHT representing the NGOs, previously told Mongabay they learned the details about the project only after a 2020 media briefing by the Ugandan government.

The NGOs filed an appeal against the dismissal, arguing for the case to be heard on its merit. But the appeal’s first hearing in November 2024 was postponed on technical grounds.

With the appeal submissions now complete, if the judgment favors the NGOs, the case will go back to the lower EACJ court to be heard on merit, Kabanda said at a press conference after the hearing.

“The [appellate] court has told us that they would be summoning us for the judgment, which we anticipate seeing in about two months,” he added.

The lower court, while dismissing the case during the first hearing, had also imposed costs on the NGOs to be awarded to the respondents, including the governments of Uganda and Tanzania. Kabanda said they’ve also appealed for those costs to be set aside.

Dickens Kamugisha, CEO of AFIEGO, said at the press conference that neither the EACJ nor the national courts of Tanzania and Uganda have previously imposed costs on appellants in public interest cases. If the court still wants the appellants to bear the cost, Kamugisha said they’re “very confident” the communities “will organize and pay,” and that costs shouldn’t stop others from fighting injustice in the future.

“We believe that what matters the most is that this project is not complying with the laws of the region,” Kamugisha said. “If we can successfully show that there’s no compliance, we are 100% sure the project can be stopped anytime.”

Banner image: Lions are found along EACOP route. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

The government of Guinea has issued an environmental compliance certificate to an Australian company to go ahead with its plan to mine gold within an area that’s home to critically endangered western chimpanzees.

In January, Guinea’s Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development accepted the environmental and social impact assessment that Predictive Discovery had commissioned for its Bankan Gold project, located in the northeast corner of Upper Niger National Park (PNHN).

The mining company, which trades as PDI on the Australian Securities Exchange, estimates the area holds 3.05 million ounces of gold, which it says makes Bankan the largest gold discovery in West Africa in a decade. 

The 1,767-page impact assessment report, however, notes that the planned mining operations will have long-lasting impacts on wildlife such as the western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus), even beyond the life cycle of the mine. It notes that chimpanzees are widely present in the region, with a stronghold in the core conservation area of PNHN, called the Mafou Forest.

While the core is around 18 kilometers (11 miles) from the planned mining site, the report says there’s evidence the mine’s exploration operations since the start of the Bankan project in 2020 have already caused the displacement of seven to 15 individual chimps and disturbance to others.

The mining activities are expected to worsen habitat loss and disturbance to the chimps beyond the project area, and impact groundwater levels for decades to come, the assessment report says.

The initial Bankan project area extended into the park’s buffer zone, but PDI spokesperson Sandra Bates told Mongabay by email that during the discussions for the certificate of environmental compliance, the company had told the environment ministry it would “relinquish all of the portion of the Project permits that is located within the Buffer Zone of the Park.”

Mining will take place in an area marked as the “peripheral zone” on PDI‘s map.

According to PNHN’s 2006-2010 development plan, two buffer zones surround the Mafou core area. The first one, immediately adjacent to the core, has strict restrictions on human activities. It’s followed by the second buffer, or transition zone, which allows for some development activities. What PDI refers to as the “peripheral zone” appears to be this transition zone.

Aboubacar Samoura, the environment ministry official in charge of national parks and wildlife, told Mongabay there were initial concerns about the location of the operation, but the ministry pushed the company to withdraw from the buffer zone. “It is true that it is worrying when we talk about a deposit in a protected area, but on the other hand, we must be positive.”

Directly after receiving its environmental compliance certificate, PDI submitted its application for a mining license on Jan. 31; if granted, it will start operations as early as 2026.

Banner image of a western chimpanzee by Christoph Wurbel via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Protected areas in tropical forests may not be enough on their own to safeguard local mammal species, especially when there are human settlements nearby, a new study finds.

“Wherever human pressure is high, mammal populations suffer, even in areas meant to protect them,” Michela Pacifici, a research fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, not affiliated with the study, told Mongabay in an email.

Tropical forests are among the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth and home to many  threatened mammal species. Conventional thinking has been that setting aside stretches of forests for conservation is the best way to ensure survival of most species. The authors of this study wanted to quantify the effect human presence has on protected areas, both the variety of mammal species in an area and their abundance and distribution.

So, for this study, 31 of the 37 areas sampled (84%) were under some form of protected status.  The study authors used existing camera-trap data on the diversity and abundance of 239 ground-dwelling mammals on three continents. They then compared how the variety and abundance of mammals changed with distance to human settlements and the population density of those settlements.

“Their study beautifully illustrates the power of scale, bringing together data on mammal richness and occupancy from more than 2,000 sites within 37 forests,” Jonas Geldman, with the University of Copenhagen, not involved with the study, told Mongabay in an email.

The models revealed that for every 16 people per square kilometer (41 people per square mile) outside a protected area, species richness inside the area declined by 1%. Notably, in forests near human settlements, species that tolerate human activity thrived while more sensitive species disappeared entirely, leading to local extinctions.

Human populations are essentially “filtering away the most sensitive species and favoring the generalists,” Carlo Rondinini, a zoology professor with Sapienza University of Rome, not affiliated with the study, told Mongabay by email.

As the world works toward the global goal of protecting 30% of Earth’s land and water by 2030, Ilaria Greco, lead author of the study and research fellow at the University of Florence, told Mongabay that it’s not enough to just protect forests. To truly preserve mammal biodiversity, she said, conservation efforts should include buffer zones and collaboration with local communities to reduce hunting and agricultural expansion in protected forests.

“If you improve their living standards, maybe you provide alternatives to extraction from forest, then you’re actually putting aside some stress to the tropical forest,” Grecco said.

Banner image of a jaguar in Colombia by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

The Madras hedgehog, found only in southern India, is considered a species of least concern on the IUCN Red List of threatened species. However, this elusive spiny species is poorly understood, and its population is largely unknown, reports Mongabay India’s Arathi Menon.

India’s arid grasslands, scrublands and deserts are home to three species of hedgehogs. Two of them — the Indian hedgehog (Paraechinus micropus) and the Indian long-eared or collared hedgehog (Hemiechinus collaris) — occur in the country’s northwestern states, as well as in Pakistan.

The bare-bellied hedgehog, also known as the Madras hedgehog or South Indian hedgehog (Paraechinus nudiventris), has only ever been reported in the five states of southern India.

In a 2024 study, hedgehog researcher Brawin Kumar and his colleagues noted that the Madras hedgehog has been barely studied in the states of Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, preventing “a comprehensive population assessment of hedgehog species in these regions.”

Most sightings of the species have come from the state of Tamil Nadu, including a recent study that reported individuals from three grasslands in the state where they’d previously not been seen.

These three sites “are some of India’s southernmost grasslands and represent the final remnants of tropical grasslands across Asia,” the study notes.

R. Sankaranarayanan, a researcher at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), who led the study, told Mongabay India that Madras hedgehogs “rely on open natural ecosystems that are rapidly being converted into agricultural lands, for agroforestry practices as well as developmental projects.”

The hedgehogs are also widely hunted because of superstitious beliefs, without any scientific basis, that they have medicinal properties. Tick and parasite infestations are another big threat, Kumar told Mongabay India.

“As these external parasites feed on hedgehogs’ blood, they cause blood loss, anemia, and transmit diseases like tick-borne relapsing fever,” Kumar said. “This can weaken hedgehogs’ immune systems, making them more vulnerable to other infections and reducing their reproductive success. Severe infestations can lead to nutritional deficiencies, alter their behavior, and even increase mortality rates, ultimately contributing to declining populations.”

In their 2024 paper, Kumar and colleagues wrote that the Madras hedgehog is severely data-deficient, but has been classified as a species of least concern on the IUCN Red List “due to its apparent abundance within its small distribution,” and the belief that its habitat isn’t likely to decline quickly.

In 2021, Kumar and his colleagues sent out a conservation action plan for the species to forest officials in Tamil Nadu. The plan includes recommendations for more research to estimate the Madras hedgehog’s population, understand its threats, and the creation of a hedgehog conservation breeding program, Menon writes.

This is a summary of “Bare-bellied and barely seen, Madras hedgehog needs a headcount” by Arathi Menon for Mongabay India.

Banner image of a Madras hedgehog by Santhosh Krishnan13 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Camera traps installed in December 2024 in a community conservation area in the Niger Delta have captured the first videos of elusive and critically endangered red colobus monkeys. The news comes after years of community efforts to protect their habitat following degradation from oil extraction.

So far, camera traps have recorded 15 videos that show these primates feeding on fruits and leaves and exploring the forest canopy, helping researchers gain further insight into the species’ ecology and behavior.

Niger Delta red colobus monkeys (Piliocolobus epieni) are endemic to the marshy woodlands of the Niger Delta, Africa’s largest mangrove forest. When the species was first described in the 1990s, researchers estimated about 10,000 individuals remained in an area of roughly 1,500 square kilometers (579 square miles), about twice the size of New York City.

At the time, armed conflict between foreign oil companies and the region’s ethnic minorities prevented further research on the species. It wasn’t until 2013 that Rachel Ashegbofe Ikemeh, founder and director of Nigeria’s only Indigenous grassroots conservation organization, SW/Niger Delta Forest Project (SWNDF), could visit the region to take stock of the red colobus monkeys.

She found the forest floor was soaked in knee-deep crude oil, more than 7,000 oil spills that had released at least 13 million barrels (1.5 million tons) of oil since the 1950s, according to the U.N. The recurring oil spills polluted the region’s waterways, forcing fishing-dependent communities to take up logging, which devastated the red colobus’ habitat.

In the 1990s, researchers studying the red colobus recorded the species in 16 community forests of the Niger Delta. By 2013, they were in only four. “The species had become extinct in most of the community forests we visited,” Ikemeh said.

After years of working with the local communities, SWDNF set up a community-managed conservation area in 2021. By then, the primates were on the brink of extinction, with only one viable population with fewer than 200 monkeys.

“We snatched it out of extinction in the nick of time,” Ikemeh said, adding that the population has since doubled, although a rigorous population survey is pending.

“It is indeed miraculous that this species has survived up until now, and it is largely through the efforts of Rachel and her team and the communities with which she works,” said Russell Mittermeier, chair of the IUCN Primate Specialist Group.

Ebitimi Smart, youth president from the Indigenous Apoi community, said Ikemeh’s organization has made a tangible difference in conservation and his people’s lives by providing education and alternative incomes. “The community is so happy that these people came to us,” he said.

However, Ikemeh credits the community for the conservation success and their resolve to protect the forest. “I think they are the superheroes in this story.”

Banner image:  Image courtesy of SWNDF.

A new study has used camera-trap footage and scent analysis to confirm the unusual relationship between an African melon and the aardvark, an elusive ant-eating mammal found in sub-Saharan Africa.

Cucumbers and similar melon-like plants generally display their fruits aboveground, but an African melon (Cucumis humifructus) buries its fruit about 20 centimeters (8 inches) underground, a rare approach to seed dispersal.

Previous evidence suggests aardvarks help disperse the melon’s seeds: Researchers have found the seeds in aardvark intestines and poop and observed the plant emerging from aardvark droppings. Indigenous people and local communities also speak of the duo’s close association; in Afrikaans, C. humifructus is known as erdvarkkomkommer, or “aardvark cucumber.”

To verify the aardvark’s role, the new study deployed camera traps on a farm in Namibia at three kinds of sites: those where C. humifructus plants were fruiting at natural depths, those where the researchers placed the melon’s fruits at shallow depths, and those with the fruits kept aboveground.

The cameras recorded 11 mammal species around the fruits, but aardvarks and porcupines were the most frequent visitors.

The aardvarks were the only ones who dug deeply enough to remove the naturally buried fruits, while the porcupines ate only the shallow-buried fruits or those aboveground. Moreover, aardvark poop contained intact melon seeds, while porcupine droppings tended to have damaged ones. The authors posit that C. humifructus evolved to bury its fruits deep to avoid the seeds being destroyed by animals like porcupines.

As to how aardvarks detect the deeply buried fruits, the researchers analyzed the scents of C. humifructus fruits and found that their chemical signature is quite different from the fruits of related melons in the same region. It’s likely that the C. humifructus’s smell is “an important advertising signal,” the authors write.

Aardvarks are known to have powerful a sense of smell to sniff out ants and termites, and the researchers’ videos showed them vigorously sniffing, with their nose pressed to the ground where the C. humifructus fruits were buried.

“This is a really neat attempt to clarify what is actually a reasonably well-documented mutualism,” Graham Kerley, professor of zoology at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay. “Good science is often about the clear quantification of what we think we know, so super well-done to the authors.”

However, the study may have missed other species that may be interested in the melons and act like dispersers, Kerley added.

The study doesn’t address why aardvarks seek out the melons, when they mostly eat ants and termites, but some researchers have suggested the melons may be a source of water in arid areas.

The authors write they hope the study will draw attention to the value of aardvarks for the seed dispersal of C. humifructus, which has greatly declined in countries like South Africa.

Banner image of an aardvark by Theo Kruse via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).