Wildlife & land conservation

This archive tracks meaningful progress in protecting wildlife and preserving land — from habitat restoration and endangered species recoveries to new protected areas and conservation policy wins. These stories focus on what’s working, grounded in evidence and reported with care.

Aerial view of dense Amazon rainforest canopy with winding river

Colombia bans all new oil and mining projects across its Amazon

By / / Good News For Humankind

Colombia Amazon ban: Colombia has announced a complete ban on new oil, gas, and mining projects across its entire Amazon biome, covering roughly 42% of the country’s national territory. The policy immediately blocks 43 oil blocks and 286 pending mining requests, making it one of the most sweeping conservation decisions any government has made in recent memory. Announced alongside COP30, the ban is framed as a binding national commitment rather than a voluntary pledge. It offers significant protections for Indigenous communities and positions Colombia as a potential catalyst for coordinated conservation across all Amazonian nations.

Milu deer standing in wetland marsh habitat

China pulls milu deer back from extinction as population rebounds to 8,200 animals

By / / Good News For Humankind

Milu deer recovery has reached a remarkable milestone, with an estimated 8,200 Père David’s deer now living across protected reserves in China — a species that had completely vanished from the wild before 1895. The entire modern population descends from just 39 animals preserved on a private English estate, making this one of the most dramatic conservation rebounds ever recorded. A formal China-UK reintroduction program launched in the 1980s returned the deer to their ancestral wetlands, establishing a cooperative model now studied worldwide. The recovery demonstrates that sustained captive breeding, genetic stewardship, and international collaboration can bring a species back from the edge.

A pangolin curled into a defensive ball in natural habitat

Nigeria enacts tough new wildlife trafficking law to protect pangolins, elephants, and leopards

By / / Good News For Humankind

Nigeria’s new wildlife trafficking law raises the stakes for poachers and criminal networks by introducing significantly higher fines and longer prison sentences than the decades-old framework it replaces. The legislation targets the full trafficking chain, adds protections for pangolins, forest elephants, and leopards, and mandates coordination between rangers, police, and customs officials. Nigeria’s ports and markets had long served as major nodes in global trafficking routes, meaning weak domestic penalties carried consequences well beyond its borders. Stronger legal tools now exist — the harder work of funding and enforcing them lies ahead.

A Chinook salmon swimming upstream in a clear river

Salmon return to the Klamath River for the first time in over 100 years

By / / Good News For Humankind

Klamath River salmon have returned to Oregon waters for the first time since 1912, arriving within weeks of the final dam coming down. An autumn-run Chinook was confirmed in a tributary upstream from where the J.C. Boyle Dam once stood, stunning biologists who expected the recovery to take years. The milestone follows the largest dam removal project in U.S. history, which reopened more than 400 miles of river habitat. Driven by decades of persistence from the Yurok, Karuk, and other tribal nations, the restoration shows what becomes possible when Indigenous leadership guides conservation on ancestral lands.

A wild jaguar moving through dense tropical forest

Mexico’s jaguar population surges 30% as communities and scientists join forces

By / / Good News For Humankind

Mexico’s jaguars are thriving in ways that surprised even the scientists doing the counting. The 2024 census — the most ambitious mammal survey ever conducted in Mexico — deployed 920 cameras across 15 states over 90 days, with nearly 50 researchers working shoulder-to-shoulder with Indigenous and rural communities whose land knowledge shaped where every camera was placed. That partnership is the real story here: local stewardship didn’t just support the science, it drove it. What Mexico is proving is that large predator recovery is possible when conservation is genuinely community-rooted — and that model is spreading.

A herd of wild horses grazing on an open highland plateau

Wild horses return to Spain’s Iberian highlands after 10,000 years

By / / Good News For Humankind

Wild horse rewilding in Spain’s central highlands marks a milestone not seen since the last Ice Age, with primitive Iberian breeds returning after a 10,000-year absence. Led by Rewilding Europe and local partners, the project restores a keystone species whose grazing reduces wildfire fuel loads, opens habitat corridors, and disperses seeds across a landscape long diminished by shrub encroachment. Unlike top-down conservation efforts, this initiative was built with landowners and residents from the start, framing the horses’ return as an economic opportunity through nature-based tourism alongside ecological recovery. The horses are back, and the land is already changing.

Aerial view of dense tropical rainforest canopy

Guatemala permanently closes major oil field inside protected rainforest

By / / Good News For Humankind

Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve has taken a landmark step forward as the government permanently closed the Xan oil field rather than renew its operating concession. The facility once produced nearly 90% of Guatemala’s oil while operating inside a protected national park, a arrangement conservationists long considered incompatible with the reserve’s ecological importance. The former infrastructure is now being converted into a joint military and police security hub to combat illegal ranching, logging, and drug trafficking. A dedicated .5 million conservation fund will support local communities, restoration projects, and long-term monitoring across one of the most biodiverse tropical forest corridors in the Americas.

Tall older-growth trees in a dense Pacific Northwest forest

Washington state permanently protects 77,000 acres of legacy forests

By / / Good News For Humankind

Legacy forests in Washington State gained permanent protection on August 26, 2025, when Public Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove signed an order shielding 77,000 acres of ecologically rich older forest from logging. Officials at the Department of Natural Resources called it the most significant forest conservation decision in a generation. The protected stands store exceptional amounts of carbon, support wildlife corridors, and could develop old-growth characteristics within decades if left undisturbed. Sustained public activism, including tree-sit protests, helped drive the decision, demonstrating how civic pressure can produce concrete policy change on a measurable timeline.

Aerial view of dense tropical rainforest canopy

Three nations sign agreement to protect 14 million acres of Mayan forest

By / / Good News For Humankind

Mayan forest protection took a historic step forward on August 15, 2025, when the leaders of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize signed an agreement to safeguard more than 14 million acres of tropical forest as the Great Mayan Jungle Biocultural Corridor. The deal covers the Selva Maya, the largest continuous tropical forest in the Americas north of the Amazon, anchored in part by Belize’s biodiverse Bladen Nature Reserve. What sets this agreement apart is its formal integration of Indigenous Maya governance into conservation oversight, recognizing that cultural stewardship and ecological protection are inseparable. Significant challenges remain, but the commitment represents one of the most ambitious multilateral conservation efforts in the Western Hemisphere.

Aerial view of a vegetated wildlife overpass spanning a busy highway

Colorado’s Greenland wildlife overpass is now the largest in the world

By / / Good News For Humankind

Colorado’s Greenland Wildlife Overpass, completed in December 2025, is now the largest wildlife crossing on Earth — nearly an acre wide and built to reconnect elk, pronghorn, and mule deer across one of the state’s busiest highways. The structure links 39,000 acres of conserved Douglas County land with over one million acres of Pike National Forest, restoring a migration corridor fragmented by Interstate 25. As part of an 18-mile system of crossings and fencing, it is projected to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions by up to 90 percent. At $15 million, the investment is modest compared to the cumulative cost of doing nothing.