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Rhett Ayers Butler, Mongabay founder and CEO, has been named to the 2025 Forbes Sustainability Leaders List, which honors 50 global leaders working to combat the climate crisis.

“Mongabay has tended to fly under the radar. We’ve focused on the journalism rather than promoting ourselves, so this recognition is especially meaningful — and it reflects the contributions of everyone involved,” Butler said.

The recognition is a milestone in a journey that goes back some 25 years to when Butler was a teenager visiting a rainforest in Borneo.

“I vividly remember cooling my feet beside a jungle creek when a wild orangutan emerged in the canopy overhead. We made eye contact — just for a few seconds — but the moment stayed with me,” he told Forbes.

He later learned that the forest where he had that profound experience was to be destroyed for pulp and paper. That devastating news sparked in him a lifelong commitment to conservation; he eventually quit his tech job in Silicon Valley and started Mongabay out of his California apartment.

“My parents weren’t thrilled about the idea,” he recalled. “I was often asked when I’d get a ‘real job.’ It took several years — and external recognition — for them to see that Mongabay could be a ‘real job.’”

Today, Mongabay is a global newsroom with roughly 1,000 contributors across more than 80 countries, producing podcasts, videos and articles in seven languages from bureaus in Latin America, India, Africa and Brazil. Hundreds of local media outlets republish Mongabay content, worldwide.

All that work, expansion and outreach are in service of the same goal: “to ensure that credible environmental information is available to everyone — especially those with the power to act,” Butler told Forbes.

Unlike many media outlets, Mongabay doesn’t measure success in clicks or pageviews. Instead, it focuses on “meaningful, real-world outcomes,” Butler added.

To that end, the organization engages directly with policymakers and local communities most affected by environmental degradation. Mongabay’s planned story transformer initiative, for example, will use AI with human editors to repackage original reporting into audio and local languages for frontline communities that may struggle with barriers in access, language or literacy.

Mongabay’s direct engagement has made tangible impacts on the ground. In Gabon, coverage of a community’s fight against a foreign logging company helped lead to the revocation of the company’s permit, a first in Gabon.

Reporting from Paraguay linked illegal deforestation to cattle and leather, helping push the EU to include leather in its anti-deforestation law.

In Peru, Mongabay’s reporting on United Cacao practices contributed to the government revoking its permit, the company’s delisting from the London Stock Exchange and the protection of nearly 100,000 hectares of rainforest.

“These aren’t abstract wins — they’re forests still standing, communities empowered and ecosystems given a second chance. Bearing witness to both the threats and the possibilities reminds me daily that telling these stories matters,” Butler said.

Banner image: Rhett Butler in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay

A fourth person died during Optus’s network outage on Thursday, its CEO has confirmed.

Stephen Rue said in a statement released on Saturday afternoon that the telco was “saddened to learn of a new fatality in Western Australia, which appears to have occurred during the outage period”.

“I am deeply saddened by this further news and extend my heartfelt condolences to the person’s family and friends,” he said.

It comes after Optus confirmed the emergency calls were offline for nearly 14 hours, during which four people died – including an eight-week-old baby. Two deaths occurred in South Australia and two in WA.

Rue said that WA police advised Optus that they believed the “individual likely attempted to contact triple zero for assistance”, adding that the company would work with authorities to “understand more of what has occurred”.

The CEO earlier confirmed that two customers had called Optus during the outage on Thursday to warn the telco that triple zero calls were not working, but the complaints were not escalated.

Rue told reporters on Saturday afternoon: “We now know we were informed by two individuals that they could not connect into triple zero, and this information was not surfaced with the relevant escalation at that time.”

“Early review suggests that we had not handled these calls as would be expected,” he said.

Earlier on Saturday, the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, said triple zero calls were out of action for 10 hours – eight hours longer than Optus initially claimed – but Rue confirmed on Saturday afternoon the timeframe was more than 13 hours.

The CEO confirmed the planned technical upgrade began at 12.30am on Thursday but was cut short at 1.50pm after the telco was notified by SA police that there was an problem.

“Once notified, we stopped the upgrade, restoring triple zero, and began to confirm with relevant stakeholders, such as police and other regulatory and government agencies and departments that we had experienced an outage impacting triple zero,” he said.

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Rue said Optus commenced welfare checks, and during which it learned three people had died during the outage.

“Once we had this information and were confident of its accuracy, we shared this with our board, with the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority), the federal government and other bodies,” he said.

On Saturday, the federal government confirmed the ACMA would conduct an investigation.

SA police, which had also worked through Friday night conducting welfare checks on 150 people whose triple zero calls failed, confirmed an eight-week-old boy from Gawler, on Adelaide’s northern fringe, and a 68-year-old woman from Queenstown, a suburb in the city’s north-west, had died during the outage.

The third death linked to the outage, which involved up to 600 attempted triple zero calls, was a 74-year-old Western Australian man, the state government confirmed on Saturday.

“It is shocking and it is completely unacceptable that people’s lives have been put at risk, and of course, with deep sadness, I can confirm that one 74-year-old man has passed away,” Labor minister John Carey said at a press conference.

“WA police are now making safety checks on the calls that did not get through, and they’re working through that.”

Malinauskas said he was not informed about the outage until Optus had commenced a press conference announcing it to the public. He told reporters he had never witnessed “such incompetence” from an Australian communications company.

The premier said that only after its press conference on Friday did Optus give SA police the details, including the names of the deceased.

“They’ve got to make sure they’re letting our emergency services know … all the information the moment they have it, before they think about crafting a media statement,” Malinauskas said.

“It is somewhat extraordinary we had a situation (on Friday) after everything that had unfolded, that we were still struggling to get information from Optus to allow police to do their work.”

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Carey echoed the premier’s words on Saturday. “It is unbelievable, and the way that Optus has even just released the news, I think, is appalling.”

Rue said on Saturday afternoon that he had asked his team to make a plan for establishing a formal notification process between the telco and authorities during such incidents.

“I’m sorry that the lack of this process led to the late notification of the premiers and chief ministers,” he said, confirming they were contacted at the same time as Friday’s press conference was held.

“Optus will be appointing an independent person to lead a review into this entire incident, from every aspect. I hope to confirm that person in coming days.

“The loss of the lives of three people, two in South Australia and one in Western Australia, is absolutely tragic. I would again like to extend my deepest condolences to their families and friends.”

The SA police commissioner, Grant Stevens, told the premier on Friday night that Optus had only supplied the suburbs where the deaths had occurred.

“I then called the CEO of Optus and thankfully, it was rectified following that,” he said.

“But the lack of information flow from Optus to the South Australian government’s appropriate authorities is somewhat bewildering, and it raises a lot of questions.”

The federal communications minister, Anika Wells, said the incident was “incredibly serious and completely unacceptable”.

“The impact of this failure has had tragic consequences, and my personal thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one,” she said in a statement.

In a press conference on Saturday, Wells said Australians had “every right to be livid that Optus cannot get these basics right”.

“Optus have let Australians down when they needed them most.”

All telecommunications providers were obliged to ensure they carried emergency service calls, and the outage would be thoroughly investigated, Wells said, adding that the government would wait until state authorities and communications regulatory bodies had completed their investigations before considering possible consequences for Optus.

The federal opposition’s communications spokesperson, Melissa McIntosh, expressed deep concern the triple zero camp-on arrangements to divert calls to other carriers like Telstra or Vodafone had also failed.

The outage occurred almost two years after more than 10 million Optus customers and businesses were disconnected for more than 16 hours in November 2023.

People could not call triple zero on landlines, although it was still possible on a mobile.

The telco was fined more than $12m for breaching emergency call rules during the nationwide outage.

Rue took over as the company’s chief executive in 2024 from Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who resigned over the 2023 outage.