Namibia | Shift in government policy threatens to undercut country's community conservancies

n the starkly beautiful desert landscape of Namibia, on the southwest coast of Africa, I have followed behind as Khoisan trackers conducted a second-by-second forensic reconstruction of a murder scene. (The victim was a young giraffe pounced on by a leopard half its weight.) I have climbed mountainous red sand dunes to watch beetles doing handstands, so fog off the Atlantic could run down their backs to their mouths. And I have listened as a Namibian wildlife guide snapped off the pipe-like branch of a Euphorbia bush and explained how the nearby rhinos had evolved, in the absence of finer foods, to thrive on its milky, poisonous flesh.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/namibia-wildlife-conservation-corruption

Iceland suspends annual whale hunt over animal welfare concerns

Iceland has suspended its planned hunt for fin whales this year, citing animal welfare concerns.

On June 20, Svandís Svavarsdóttir, the country’s minister of food, agriculture and fisheries, announced that the whale hunt was postponed because “the fishing method used when hunting large whales does not comply with the law on animal welfare.”

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/06/no-future-iceland-cancels-wale-hunt-over-animal-welfare-concerns/

Biden moves to undo Trump's weakening of ESA

The Biden administration moved on Wednesday to make it easier to protect wildlife from climate disruptions and other threats, restoring protections to the Endangered Species Act that President Donald J. Trump had removed.

Three separate regulations proposed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries service would make it harder to remove a species from the endangered list and restore a provision that strengthens protections for threatened species, the classification one step below endangered.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/climate/biden-endangered-species-act.html