分类： environment

In a startling discovery that has spotlighted the persistent global crisis of endangered wildlife trafficking, five infant orangutans— a species classified as critically endangered and not indigenous to India—have been found in a sparse casuarina forest in India’s eastern state of Odisha, thousands of kilometers away from their only native range in the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. Local residents first spotted the young apes, which are estimated to be between one and two years old, gathering on the forest floor and feeding on bananas in Ranakata, a proposed reserve forest in Bhogarai block of Balasore district, near Odisha’s border with West Bengal. After locals alerted authorities early Tuesday, forest rescue teams launched an immediate operation to extract the animals, who were given emergency first aid before being transported to Nandankanan Zoological Park in Bhubaneswar, the state capital, where they are currently undergoing mandatory quarantine and round-the-clock health monitoring.

Officials leading the probe have ruled out any possibility that the orangutans reached Odisha through natural migration, noting that their location just off a major state highway aligns with suspicions that the apes were trafficked into India by an international smuggling ring and abandoned mid-transit. “These animals could never have reached this region on their own,” Pratik Prakash Indalkar, Balasore District Forest Officer, told reporters. “The site is near a highway, which suggests they were transported here by road before being left behind.” An initial search of the surrounding forest area turned up no additional orangutans or direct evidence linking to the smuggling operation, and forest officials estimate the apes had only been in the area for two to three days before their discovery.

The unusual find has drawn alarm from wildlife conservation experts, who point to the vulnerable age of the rescued orangutans as an indicator of the cruelty of the illegal exotic pet trade. Young orangutans normally stay with their mothers for the first several years of life, learning critical survival skills, and female orangutans only produce offspring once every eight years on average, making every young individual vital to the species’ survival. All three recognized living orangutan species—Bornean, Sumatran, and Tapanuli—are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with wild populations plummeting over the past decades due to widespread deforestation, habitat destruction, and poaching.

International commercial trade of orangutans is completely banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the global regulatory agreement for endangered wildlife, and the apes are also fully protected under India’s domestic wildlife protection laws. Even with these strict regulations, demand from private collectors for orangutans as exotic pets continues to drive widespread trafficking networks that operate across Southeast Asia and South Asia. This discovery is not an isolated incident in India: in 2022, two other baby orangutans were found abandoned at a border checkpoint between Assam and Mizoram, with investigators suspecting the apes had been trafficked into the country from neighboring Myanmar.

To expand the ongoing investigation, the Odisha state government has formally requested support from India’s national Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, with local police, forest department officials, and a special anti-trafficking task force all participating in the probe to trace the smuggling network responsible for the illegal shipment.

For more than a month, volunteer firefighters across Indonesian Borneo have waged an uphill battle against out-of-control wildfires, breathing in toxic fumes as they fight to contain a catastrophe that has grown into the region’s worst haze disaster in a decade.

Dwi Sujatmoko, a 35-year-old volunteer, describes the acrid smoke that envelops the fire line as indistinguishable from tear gas. “It strikes your nose immediately, and your eyes burn nonstop,” he says. “People call these fires extraordinary, and they are absolutely right.” Since early July, these blazes have turned 200,000 hectares of forest and farmland into charred carbon, with invisible underground peat fires continuing to smolder long after surface flames are extinguished, releasing poisonous fumes into the air that travels across national borders to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Manila.

Armed only with hand tools, wheeled carts, and portable fire pumps, thousands of local volunteers – many from indigenous Dayak and Banjar communities – are the first line of defense against an inferno that is fueled in large part by a Super El Niño-driven drought that has parched the landscape. Fahrin Ramadhianto, another volunteer stationed in the hard-hit city of Banjarbaru in South Kalimantan, has spent a month on the front lines and already feels the toxic impact of the haze on his body. “The smoke smells like burning decaying wood – that’s the unique signature of peat,” he explains. “That’s all decomposed organic material accumulated over thousands of years, and we breathe it in every single day.”

What makes this wildfire crisis far more dangerous than typical seasonal blazes is that it is burning through one of the world’s largest tropical peatland ecosystems – a 4.5 million-hectare swath of ancient swamp and forest that acts as one of the planet’s most efficient natural carbon sinks. Under normal waterlogged conditions, peat slows decomposition, allowing carbon to build up underground for millennia. In Borneo, some peat deposits reach more than 20 meters deep, holding up to 6,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare – roughly equal to the annual CO₂ output of 4,800 gasoline-powered cars.

“When peatlands are drained or burned, that stored carbon is released into the atmosphere extremely quickly, turning these carbon sinks into what experts call a ‘carbon bomb,’” explains Dr. Nisa Novita, a peat researcher with Indonesian conservation NGO Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara. “Indonesia’s tropical peatlands are some of the most valuable carbon stores on Earth, and their destruction has massive global climate impacts.”

The human cost of this crisis is already being felt across Southeast Asia. In Indonesia alone, the Health Ministry recorded more than 50,000 cases of fire-linked respiratory infections between July and August, over 12,000 of which are children under five. Air quality indexes across Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines have skyrocketed to dangerous “unhealthy” levels, with some areas recording pollution levels nearly 75 times the World Health Organization’s recommended safety limit. Hospital admissions for respiratory and cardiovascular conditions have surged across the region.

“Everyone trapped under this pollution cloud is inhaling toxic carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter from smoldering peat,” says Susan Page, a professor of geology and environment at the University of Leicester who has studied Asian peatlands for 30 years. “These particles are small enough to pass through lung tissue into the bloodstream, triggering heart disease and chronic health conditions beyond just respiratory issues. Living under this haze is extremely dangerous for everyone exposed.”

Nowhere are these risks more acute than on the front lines, where two volunteer firefighters in Central Kalimantan have already died after their health deteriorated from weeks of exposure to toxic smoke. Peat fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish, because they burn underground and can reignite weeks after being contained. To put them out, firefighters must saturate the dry peat until it is “like porridge” – a tactic that is increasingly difficult amid a crippling drought that has left much of the region starved for water.

Volunteers have dug emergency ponds, canals, and borewells to keep their hoses supplied, driven custom pipes into the ground to reach hidden subterranean fires, and slept within steps of the fire line to battle flare-ups through the night. Fatigue is constant, Sujatmoko says: “We’re all exhausted. We miss our families, our children, our partners. But we put that all aside right now – this is our duty to our home.”

While the current crisis is amplified by Super El Niño, experts say the root of the disaster stretches back decades to large-scale industrial land-use change that began under the Suharto regime, when vast swathes of Borneo’s peatlands were drained and cleared for logging, industrial plantations, and development projects. In 2025 alone, Kalimantan – Indonesia’s most heavily deforested region – lost nearly 160,000 hectares of forest, more than a third of the country’s total annual deforestation, much of it cleared for industrial monocrop agriculture.

Page notes that draining peatlands for plantations not only makes them far more vulnerable to wildfire, but also causes constant carbon emissions even when there is no blaze: “Fires are just the most dramatic and visible expression of a process that goes on every single day in drained peatlands. That constant emissions stream is often overlooked.”

Indigenous communities that have lived on and cared for Borneo’s lands for centuries have frequently been scapegoated for the wildfires, blamed for traditional controlled burning practices used to clear small plots for farming. But Tono, a representative of the West Kalimantan Dayak Kanayatn people, says these accusations are unfounded. His community’s traditional hill farming practice, called uma bukit, is rooted in maintaining balance with nature, and controlled burns are carried out with careful planning and strict adherence to ancestral customs that minimize fire risk. Today, many indigenous community members are on the front lines fighting the very blazes they are falsely blamed for causing.

As the crisis continues to escalate, firefighters on the ground say their greatest hope is for heavy, sustained rain to finally douse the persistent blazes. “We’ve been away from our homes for months,” Sujatmoko says. “We just hope all our efforts here protect everyone, and that the rain comes soon.”

An unprecedented large-scale algal bloom along Israel’s Mediterranean coastline has forced the temporary shutdown of five out of the country’s six major seawater desalination facilities, triggering a fresh discussion over environmental vulnerabilities in the region and the multiple factors that may have sparked the historic event, according to regional and international media reports.

Desalination is the backbone of Israel’s drinking water supply, meeting more than 65 percent of the nation’s demand, with nearly all major desalination infrastructure sited along the Mediterranean coast. Lior Gutman, a spokesperson for Mekorot, Israel’s national water utility, confirmed the scale of the disruption, noting that an event of this magnitude has never been recorded in Israeli history. “An event of this kind has never occurred before in Israel … it was an extremely rare event,” Gutman stated. The affected plants include key facilities at Ashkelon, Ashdod, Palmachim, Sorek A, and Sorek B.

In response to the shutdowns, Israeli water officials moved quickly to stabilize the national water supply by drawing increased volumes from the Sea of Galilee, underground groundwater reserves, and existing storage reservoirs, while implementing limited restrictions on agricultural and public irrigation. Even as supplies remain stable for the moment, the crisis has pulled back the curtain on a critical fragility: Israel’s heavy reliance on desalination leaves it exposed to unexpected large-scale environmental disruptions.

Israeli news outlet Ynet first reported that one leading potential cause being examined by researchers is the massive volume of untreated sewage flowing into the Mediterranean from the Gaza Strip, where the local wastewater treatment infrastructure has sustained severe damage during the ongoing conflict. Palestinian and Israeli data indicates roughly 40,000 cubic meters of untreated wastewater enters the sea from Gaza every day. A number of leading Israeli environmental researchers have pointed to this nutrient-rich runoff as a key contributing factor.

Algal blooms require two core conditions to proliferate: warm water and high concentrations of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen, explained Avner Gross, head of Ben-Gurion University’s Climate Change Laboratory. While satellite data has detected similar algal masses near Egypt’s Nile Delta, where agricultural runoff enters the Mediterranean, Gross told Ynet that no other explanation currently fits the pattern of the bloom off Israel’s coast. “In our case, I currently have no other explanation except a pollution source in the southern Gaza Strip,” Gross said.

Gross added on the social platform X that human-caused climate change has transformed the Mediterranean into an ideal breeding ground for such events, writing: “global warming had turned the Mediterranean into ‘a bathtub in August.’ Add phosphorus and nitrogen pollution and you get a deadly algal bloom. Coincidentally, in recent days there were weak, steady winds that mixed the fertiliser from the sewage along Israel’s coast. A perfect storm.” Noga Armi, chief executive of Israeli environmental nonprofit Zalul, echoed this conclusion, telling Roya News that “the scientific link is well established. Untreated sewage discharged into the sea from Gaza was one of the factors that contributed to the incident.”

However, not all researchers agree that Gaza’s untreated sewage is the main driver of the bloom. Tamar Guy-Haim, a marine ecologist at Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography, argued that the probability of Gaza sewage being the primary cause is relatively low. Researchers have so far identified the organism behind the bloom as a cyanobacterium from the genus Synechococcus, but the exact species and the full set of triggers behind its sudden explosive growth are still the subject of active investigation.

In addition to nutrient pollution, scientists have pointed to a range of other possible contributing factors: unusually warm Mediterranean seawater, strong seasonal sunlight, natural ocean current patterns, and a recent storm that increased water turbidity along the coast. Or Bialik, a researcher at Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research, told Haaretz he had never encountered a bloom of this scale in his decades of Mediterranean work. “I’ve worked in the Mediterranean Sea for a long time and have never seen anything like this. The water is green like a lake. The turbidity is such that you can’t see your instruments after half a metre,” Bialik said.

Multiple research teams have noted the bloom appears to have originated near the Nile Delta before drifting northward along the coast with prevailing ocean currents. Looking forward, many researchers warn that even as this event is unprecedented, it is unlikely to be a one-off occurrence as climate change continues to warm Mediterranean waters. “It’s a fair estimation that this will not be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event … you can assume that this will occur more and more through climate change,” Edo Bar-Zeev, a water researcher at Ben-Gurion University, told CNN. To date, no definitive single cause has been confirmed, with most scientists acknowledging the bloom may have resulted from a combination of warming temperatures, natural ocean dynamics, Nile Delta agricultural runoff, and Gaza wastewater pollution.

Eight years ago, Nepal grappled with crippling energy insecurity: just two-thirds of its population had access to electricity, and connected homes endured up to 16 hours of blackouts daily. Through aggressive expansion of its hydropower sector, paired with anti-corruption reforms and strategic seasonal energy imports from India, Nepal pulled off a remarkable energy turnaround by 2018, delivering 24/7 power to nearly the entire country.

Today, Nepal’s energy sector is almost entirely powered by the fast-flowing glacial rivers of the Himalayas, with 225 operational hydropower plants holding 3,900 megawatts of installed capacity—enough to power 3 million households simultaneously. Hundreds more projects are under construction or planned, and the nation earns nearly $200 million annually exporting surplus clean electricity to neighboring India and Bangladesh. This natural advantage, however, has turned into a critical vulnerability as climate change rapidly reshapes the Himalayan landscape, where temperatures are rising 50% faster than the global average.

Last week’s catastrophic flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border laid bare this existential risk. The disaster, which preliminary investigations trace to a collapsed glacial formation and bedrock collapse, has killed more than 1,300 people and left thousands more missing. Entire villages were wiped off the map, and 12 hydropower plants in the Trishuli River basin—including major international investment projects—sustained severe damage, knocking out more than 10% of Nepal’s total electricity generation capacity. Plant operators say it remains unclear whether any of the damaged facilities can be restored to service.

The Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA), which owns six of the damaged plants, has moved to reassure domestic consumers that current power supplies remain adequate. But NEA spokesman Rajan Dhakal acknowledges that the rising frequency of climate-linked disasters has forced a long-overdue reckoning: “The time has come for a rethink of our hydropower policy.”

Most of Nepal’s existing and planned hydropower projects are built high in the Himalayan mountains, relying on fast-flowing currents without large water storage systems. This design keeps construction costs low but leaves infrastructure extremely vulnerable to glacial outburst floods and flash floods. Between 2018 and 2024, more than 90% of all disaster events recorded in Nepal were climate-related, a trend that has accelerated in recent years: the Trishuli River basin has already been hit by two major flood events in the past two years, first in 2024 from a cloudburst and again in 2025 from a glacial lake outburst in Tibet that killed 11 people and closed a key Nepal-China border crossing for six months.

Even with that history of hazard, critics say project planners and international lenders failed to take adequate preventive action. The $647 million Upper Trishuli-1 project, one of Nepal’s largest foreign direct investment ventures backed by the Asian Development Bank and International Finance Corporation, was all but destroyed in the latest floods. Another major project, Upper Trishuli 3A, funded by China’s Export-Import Bank, also suffered severe damage. Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People, says international lenders were fully aware of the extreme risks but ignored repeated warnings and failed to implement stringent safety measures.

“Their own reports repeatedly highlighted it. But they did not take any preventive steps, did not demand stringent checks and balances, nor were they prepared for a calamity they knew could occur,” Thakkar says.

Dhakal of NEA concedes that even when climate risks were correctly assessed, hydropower plant designs were not adjusted to account for them: “Clearly we will need to improve in the way we build and operate our hydropower plants.”

The conversation around rethinking Nepal’s energy strategy has split stakeholders into two broad camps, though all agree that change is needed. One path, proposed by the NEA, is shifting to reservoir-based hydropower projects that do not need to be sited in high-risk mountain areas, allowing for controlled water storage and release. But this approach carries steep economic and environmental costs that could slow Nepal’s energy expansion.

Many energy and climate experts argue the country needs to move beyond overreliance on hydropower and diversify into wind and solar energy. A report from a German aid agency found Nepal’s total technical potential for solar power is roughly 10 times greater than its hydropower potential. “We should not be putting all our eggs in one basket in these dangerous times,” says Kushal Gurung, founder of clean tech firm WindPower Nepal. “We need to seriously embrace other alternatives as well, like solar and wind. And for that we will need to revise our energy policy that is at the moment very pro-hydropower.”

Vivek Shastry, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, echoes this view, noting that adding wind and solar capacity acts as a built-in resilience strategy that can prevent widespread system failure if a major hydropower facility is knocked offline.

Other analysts note that while diversification makes sense, hydropower will remain Nepal’s core competitive advantage in South Asian energy markets for the foreseeable future. “While there is untapped capacity in wind and solar, hydropower really is the one that gives Nepal massive competitive advantage vis-a-vis its South Asian neighbours,” says Puspa Sharma, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies.

The financial toll of rising climate disasters is already hitting Nepal’s private hydropower sector. Over the past three years, insurers have paid out roughly $40 million in flood damage claims for more than 20 privately owned plants, and insurance premiums have risen so sharply that many operators say doing business is becoming unfeasible.

Beyond Nepal’s borders, the disaster highlights the global inequity of climate change: Nepal is responsible for a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions driving glacial melt, yet it faces disproportionate climate risk. Manjeet Dhakal, a member of Nepal’s UN climate delegation, says climate risks are cross-border and cannot be managed by Nepal alone.

“Nepal is among the least responsible for the greenhouse emissions that led to these exacerbated risks. Ironically, our hydropower industry is an attempt to reduce our already minimal emissions… We cannot, and should not, be made to respond to these risks alone,” he says, calling for global cooperation on shared data collection, impact assessment, and cross-border early-warning systems.