Rainforest Action Network

The Gulf Coast is a biodiversity hot spot – and methane gas (LNG) is threatening all of it. Over 15,000 documented species live in or travel through the area, 130 of which are federally protected, including whales, sea turtles, corals, dolphins, ocelots, migratory birds, snakes, and bats. Among those threatened include species only found in the Gulf of Mexico, like the critically endangered Rice’s Whale. But the Gulf is experiencing a methane gas boom.

The global conversation about biodiversity finance is still too often framed around one question: how do we mobilize more money for nature? But that’s only part of the story. Equally important are the ideas and assumptions shaping that conversation and the questions that never get asked. Across negotiations under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), familiar narratives appear again and again. We hear that there’s “no public money.” That private capital is the only realistic solution.

Picture a rhinoceros in a rainforest. Add in orangutans swinging above, and elephants and tigers prowling below. There is only one place on our planet you could be — the Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra, Indonesia. The Leuser Ecosystem is the last place on Earth where critically endangered orangutans, rhinos, elephants, and tigers still share the same rainforest. Its ancient forests and deep peatlands store vast amounts of carbon. Its rivers provide water for millions of people.

At the beginning of this year, I shared the strategic priorities that would guide RAN in 2026. We knew the road ahead would be challenging. We also knew that meaningful change would require focus, persistence, and a willingness to confront some of the most powerful institutions on Earth. Six months later, those priorities remain as relevant as ever.

In March, a mobilization of frontline community leaders and environmental and social justice advocates gathered in Houston, Texas to confront the corporate billionaires and fossil fuel executives at CERAWeek, the Super Bowl of oil and gas conferences. We’re in the midst of the biggest fossil fuel buildout of our lifetimes: methane gas (aka liquefied “natural” gas or LNG) expansion across the US Gulf South, including Texas.

Everyone knows by now that the war in Iran — a devastating conflict already exacting a heavy human toll — is disrupting the flow of oil around the world. It’s also having major effects on global agricultural markets and, with them, the world’s tropical rainforests. American farmers are being squeezed: fertilizer and fuel costs are rising due to the war, and export markets remain from Trump’s tariffs.

2025 proved to be a challenging year for the global climate movement, with a trifecta of escalating disasters, a changing political landscape, and cuts to international aid uniquely affecting frontline communities in the Global South.

The Forest Stewardship Council still wants you to trust that little green tree logo on your furniture box, which is supposed to mean that the wood didn’t come from razed rainforests or lands stolen from Indigenous peoples. A little known fact is that we helped create the certification scheme back in 1993.

On National Oreo Day — March 6 — activists in more than a dozen cities gathered outside offices and facilities belonging to Mondelēz International, the $40 billion company behind Oreo, Ritz, and Chips Ahoy!, to protest the company’s palm oil supply chains.

The agreement that kept the Amazon rainforest from turning into a giant soybean field is falling apart after the industry body representing some of the world’s biggest grain traders backed out of it. For 13 years, deforestation was down 69% in monitored parts of the Amazon rainforest that fell under the Amazon Soy Moratorium’s protections, an agreement that came about in 2006 to control soy — one of the Amazon’s biggest deforestation drivers.