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.

Salmon run, for article on Klamath River salmon

Salmon will soon swim freely in the Klamath River for first time in a century once dams are removed

By / / Good News For Humankind

Klamath River salmon are swimming freely past the sites of two demolished dams for the first time in over a century, just in time for fall Chinook spawning season. The breakthrough completes the largest dam removal project in U.S. history, a victory the Karuk and Yurok Tribes spent at least 25 years fighting to secure. Already, salmon have been spotted at the river’s mouth, beginning the upstream journey their ancestors couldn’t make. Ecologists point to Washington’s Elwha River as proof that rivers heal themselves once obstacles fall away. Beyond restoring a vital ecosystem, this moment shows what sustained Indigenous-led advocacy can accomplish — reshaping policy, moving concrete, and reopening a relationship between people and place that was interrupted but never broken.

Baby crocodile, for article on Siamese crocodile hatching

Near-extinct Siamese crocodiles make comeback in Cambodia

By / / Good News For Humankind

Sixty baby Siamese crocodiles have hatched in Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains, the largest single hatching of this critically endangered species recorded anywhere this century. With only around 400 surviving in the wild worldwide, those tiny new arrivals represent a meaningful slice of the entire global population. What makes the news especially hopeful is where the five nests were found: in an area where no captive-bred crocodiles had ever been released, meaning the species is quietly breeding on its own again. Local community wardens guarded the nests around the clock until every egg hatched, a reminder that this recovery belongs to the people who live alongside these rivers. For a species many scientists once believed extinct in the wild, it’s a quiet, powerful sign that patient, community-led conservation works.

image for article on rights of nature ruling

Ecuador river is granted the right to not be polluted in historic court case

By / / Good News For Humankind

Ecuador’s Machángara River just won a landmark legal case: a court ruled that decades of pollution have violated the river’s constitutional rights, and Quito must now draft a concrete cleanup plan. The river runs through a capital city of 2.6 million people, and its oxygen levels have dropped to around 2 percent — barely livable for aquatic life. The Indigenous organization Kitu Kara filed the complaint on the river’s behalf, drawing on Andean traditions that treat rivers as living relatives. From New Zealand’s Whanganui to Colombia’s Amazon, this approach is spreading, giving courts a way to protect ecosystems as parties with standing rather than property — and reshaping what environmental justice can mean for communities everywhere.

Close up of a Black-faced impala., for article on white-eared kob migration

South Sudan launches epic effort to protect the world’s largest mammal migration

By / / Good News For Humankind

South Sudan’s great migration — now confirmed as the largest land mammal movement on Earth — sweeps up to six million animals across the floodplains each year, following rainfall in a vast circular loop. A new 10-year partnership between the South Sudanese government and the nonprofit African Parks is working to keep it that way, blending aerial surveys and GPS collars with generations of Indigenous knowledge. Seventeen ethnic groups share this landscape, and for centuries they’ve left informal corridors of “No Man’s Land” open so wildlife can pass freely between them. Tribal members now serve as observers, technicians, and field operators in the conservation effort itself. It’s a hopeful reminder that the most enduring protection often grows from the people who’ve always lived alongside what they’re protecting.

Iberian lynx, for article on Iberian lynx recovery

Iberian lynx no longer endangered after numbers improve in Spain and Portugal

By / / Good News For Humankind

The Iberian lynx has climbed from just 94 individuals in 2002 to 2,021 today, earning a reclassification from “endangered” to “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List. Two decades ago, the world’s most threatened wild cat was confined to two small populations in southern Spain and widely expected to vanish. What turned things around was patient, unglamorous work: breeding programs, reintroductions across Spain and Portugal, rabbit recovery efforts, and local communities choosing to share their land with an animal once treated as vermin. Threats remain — road deaths, rabbit disease, and climate change — but the lynx now stands as living proof that coordinated, cross-border conservation can pull a species back from the edge, offering a template for recoveries elsewhere.

Alive sturgeon in aquarium, for article on Atlantic sturgeon reintroduction

Atlantic sturgeon reintroduced in Sweden for the first time after “functional extinction”

By / / Good News For Humankind

Atlantic sturgeon are back in Sweden’s Göta River for the first time in over a century, with 100 juvenile fish — each around 60 centimeters long — released near Bohus Fortress. Each one carries an acoustic transmitter so researchers can follow their journey toward the sea and, hopefully, back again to spawn. The fish were bred in Germany and brought over with support from Rewilding Europe, part of a growing network of sturgeon recovery projects stretching across the continent’s rivers. Sturgeon stir up riverbeds, host mussels, and signal a healthy ecosystem just by showing up. Their return is a quiet, patient kind of hope — proof that even species lost for generations can find their way home when the water is ready to receive them.

Rainforest scene, for article on Suriname Indigenous land rights

Landmark ruling in Suriname grants protections to local and Indigenous communities

By / / Good News For Humankind

Suriname’s Indigenous land rights just got their first real domestic legal footing, with a court blocking agricultural development across roughly 535,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest. Twelve Indigenous and maroon communities brought the case, and for the first time a Surinamese court — not an international body — affirmed that the government must seek free, prior and informed consent before handing over ancestral land. The communities involved include descendants of Africans who escaped colonial plantations and have stewarded these forests for centuries. Suriname remains one of only three countries on Earth that absorbs more carbon than it emits, and protecting these forests helps keep it that way. Domestic rulings tend to stick, offering a model for Indigenous land defenders across the Amazon basin and beyond.

Horses on grassland, for article on Przewalski's horses

Wild horses return to Kazakhstan steppes after two-century absence

By / / Good News For Humankind

Przewalski’s horses—the only truly wild horse species left on Earth—are back on the Kazakh steppe after a two-century absence, with seven animals arriving from zoos in Berlin and Prague in June 2024. Their 30-hour flight aboard a Czech air force transport ended in the very landscape where humans likely first domesticated horses some 5,500 years ago. The herd is set to grow to 40 over the next five years, and the horses will quietly get to work as ecosystem engineers, spreading seeds and loosening soil as they roam. A similar effort in Mongolia has grown a wild population to roughly 1,500—a hopeful sign that this homecoming could ripple outward, restoring both a species and the grasslands that need it.

Bison, for article on Portugal wild bison

Portugal welcomes first wild bison in 10,000 years as part of plan to rewild a quarter-million acres

By / / Good News For Humankind

European wood bison are back in Portugal for the first time since the last Ice Age, with a small herd settling into the Greater Côa Valley. They came from Poland, where more than 4,000 wisent now roam wild — a remarkable turnaround for a species that survived the 20th century with just 50 animals left in zoos. Conservationists hope the bison will reshape the landscape through grazing and trampling, encouraging biodiversity and even helping break up the dense, dry vegetation that fuels Portugal’s wildfires. It’s a small herd with a big role to play, and a hopeful sign of what Europe’s growing rewilding movement can do when given room to breathe.

A person preparing for planting the plant, for article on Colombian Amazon restoration

Campesinos plant nearly a million trees in deforestation hotspot in the Colombian Amazon

By / / Good News For Humankind

More than 700 campesino families in the Colombian Amazon have planted nearly a million native trees across former cattle pasture, transforming one of the country’s worst deforestation hotspots into recovering forest. In just four months, families across the Cuemaní region planted over 984,000 trees and palms — and tapirs, deer, and parrots that had disappeared with the chainsaws are already coming back. Teenagers who joined botanical surveys alongside scientists discovered they could earn a living as local forest experts, with some now pursuing degrees in agroforestry. What makes this remarkable isn’t just the scale, but the model: when the people who once cleared the land become its protectors, restoration starts to hold — a lesson echoing across the Amazon and beyond.