Mongabay Newscast

When then-U.S. president John F . Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development in 1961, it was meant primarily to administer health and food aid around the world. In the decades since, USAID expanded to become one of the world's largest financial contributors to conservation, providing nearly $400 million annually before the end of 2024.
However, that money is now completely gone after the current president, Donald Trump, gutted and shut down the agency in one of his first acts upon returning to office in January 2025. Since then, an estimated 834,000 people have lost their lives as a result of the ending of health programs, two-thirds of them likely children, according to an analysis from Impact Counter. Much of the agency's health focus was on HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention.
"Support for HIV/AIDS treatment, malaria control and other initiatives have saved an estimated 91 million lives just over the past 20 years," says environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis.
Nijhuis, who joins Mongabay's podcast this week, says it's a similar story on the conservation front, with projects around the world suddenly losing their main — and in many cases their only — source of funding.
She notes that "$400 million [was] going toward really creative … successful conservation projects in some of the most endangered habitats in the world [that] were also stopped abruptly."
The impact is being felt in places and communities that relied on this funding, such as Ethiopia, the Congo Basin, the Amazon and Indonesia. Also affected are many of the world's largest conservation NGOs, some of which received tens of millions of dollars from USAID annually. The long-term damage from this, Nijhuis says, is very difficult to measure.
"Some of the effects we're already seeing, but some of the effects are going to be much slower to appear, much harder to measure," she says, "and in many ways we will not know what we've lost."
Michell Nijhuis is also the author of the recent book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.

Initiatives mentioned by Nijhuis:
One Earth Partners
Reimagining Conservation Project
Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here.
Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Image Credit: The WeMUNIZE program in Nigeria, significantly disrupted by aid cuts, used digital record keeping and community engagement to increase early childhood immunizations. Image by KC Nwakalor for USAID/Digital Development Communications via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
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Timecodes
(00:00) How USAID funded conservation
(05:10) Human health and conservation fallout after USAID shuts down
(13:52) Large NGOs feel the impact
(21:39) 'We will not know what we lost'
(31:45) How conservation groups are surviving
(37:34) The bright spots

Tiger populations have risen in some countries, such as Bhutan, Nepal and India, but the global population of the big cat species remains critically endangered, says Debbie Banks, campaign lead for tigers and wildlife crime at the Environmental Investigation Agency. The global tiger population was recorded at roughly 5,574 in 2022, with the species having disappeared from roughly 95% of its historical range.
Banks joins Mongabay's podcast this week to detail the status of Panthera tigris, the successes and failures of the first Global Tiger Recovery Program (GTRP), what the second iteration (2.0) seeks to do differently, and what she thinks range countries need to focus on.
"This story is very much a mixed bag of localized successes and elsewhere just stagnation … and a lack of political and financial investment to bring tigers back from the brink in some places."
Making good on the commitments of GTRP 2.0, Banks says, would also benefit nations seeking to fulfill their environmental protection commitments under the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed upon by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). That's because tigers are what's known as an umbrella species, meaning that protecting them also protects ecosystems and a host of other species and biodiversity contained within these ecosystems.
"Tigers are an apex predator, therefore a keystone species, an umbrella species, a flagship species. And by saving tigers…we save so much more."
Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here.
Image Credit: A tiger in Sumatra. The Sumatran subspecies is critically endangered due to habitat loss and hunting, and now faces additional threats from two hydropower dams planned to be constructed within their habitat. Image courtesy of Pete Morris.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Introduction
(03:07) The global status of the tiger
(10:33) Threats to the tiger
(24:16) Law enforcement and reducing tiger demand
(33:35) The Global Tiger Recovery Program
(42:02) Protecting tigers 'saves so much more'

Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany, says she's trying to build legitimacy around the concept of animal temporality — the ability to experience time — specifically in elephants. Doing so could have implications for conservation and beyond.
"How we envision an animal's relationship to time influences whether we see them as feeling, remembering beings. My aim is to encourage a more dynamic view of their place in the world when we recognize them as equally temporal beings."
This week on the Mongabay Newscast, Rahmat explains three key areas of evidence for interpreting elephant temporal experience and how this knowledge could be folded into how we think about protecting elephants or animals in general.
"I think it increases the depth of empathy we can have for animals," she says. "It can really push the concepts of policy … but it also can really challenge some of our current, basic assumptions about how we think about logic and evidence."
Image credit: An elephant that has just wallowed in mud in the Linyanti River in northern Botswana. Image by Roger Borgelid for Mongabay.
Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Why study how animals experience time?
(06:58) Elephant eco-cultural identity
(11:58) Human-impacted time
(27:03) Individual elephant history
(34:44) Getting hit with a pineapple is no accident
(39:30) How this might help conservation

Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta (Apalech clan (Wik) Lostmob Nungar) joins the Mongabay Newscast to detail the Aboriginal perspectives behind his latest book, Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. The book explains how stories shape society, how they can harm us and the environment, and how they may save our species and the natural world.
Yunkaporta explains how Indigenous laws, systems and lore can help us improve modern society, specifically in how humans relate first to the land, then to each other, and why this shapes how we exploit nature and care for it.
Identifying the "wrong story" is critical, Yunkaporta explains, to correcting harmful behaviors or ways of governing. Ultimately, it's a lie, he says. Personified by what he characterizes as narcissistic or selfish behavior, it's generally seen by those who exploit the natural world at the expense of community well-being.
"It's a terrible thing to … misrepresent things, make false claims, bear false witness in a way that is bending story, the story that everybody follows. The narratives that people tell that weave together to make a community and to hold a community on the right path that's sustainable for thousands of years."
Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here.
Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Image Credit: Mt. Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, captured March 16, 2022. Image courtesy of Planet Labs PBC.
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Timecodes
(00:00) What is 'Wrong Story'?
(14:26) The 'Sacred Mind'
(17:54) First Law
(27:24) The environment and Wrong Story
(38:13) The tale of Tidalik the frog
(42:28) Totems and kinship
(47:06) Serpent law

Mongabay Latam's multiyear, *award-winning **investigation that uncovered 67 clandestine airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon used for drug trafficking sent waves across the local media landscape. It drew attention to the Indigenous communities impacted by these illegal airstrips and the 15 Indigenous leaders who were killed defending their territory. To communicate this story to a wider audience, Mongabay Latam director Maria Isabel Torres and managing editor Alexa Vélez adapted it into an interactive live theater performance for an audience of 100.
They join this week's podcast to tell the "story behind the story" of what they, their reporters, and Indigenous leaders experienced during this investigation, and how their play adaptation brings that to the eyes and ears of a theatrical audience.
"I think that all the journalists in these times, we are very worried [about] trying to find ways to understand our audience and to get their attention. We know that there are news avoiders. We know that there are fake news. So we are trying to look for different ways," Torres says.
*This story was first published by Mongabay Latam in Spanish on Nov. 12, 2024, and won the 2025 Global Shining Light Award for investigative journalism and the Digital Storytelling prize given by the 2025 Future of Media Awards.
**This investigation was conducted in partnership with the Consortium to Support Independent Journalism in the Region (CAPIR), which leads the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in Latin America.
Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here.
Image: In the Indigenous community of Galilea, drug traffickers abandoned this airstrip a year ago. But they could revive it at any time. Image by Mongabay Latam.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Chasing answers on narco airstrips
(13:38) Ground-truthing the data and building relationships
(18:41) Risks, impacts and beyond
(28:55) Bringing the story to the stage
(36:13) "The story behind the story"
(44:48) Plans for the future