In the transition zone between the eastern Amazon and the Cerrado, an interaction between climate change and agricultural expansion may be resulting in increased temperature and reduced rainfall. This is…
From high up in the Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve in Brazil’s Ceará state, the forest spreads out beyond the horizon. It’s April here in the municipality of…
“People need to think about river basins or freshwater systems like a heart, a living system,” says Bernardo Caldas, from WWF-Brasil. Caldas is the co-lead author of a new study…
Sydney Possuelo was just a teenager when he became close with two men he viewed as national heroes: the Villas-Bôas brothers, fundamental figures in the creation of Xingu Indigenous Park,…
The sun has barely risen above the mountains, yet the cavalcade is already in full swing at the Agricultural Exhibition Park. While men attempt to mount powerful zebu cattle or…
It took several days of observation before researchers and local fishermen found the best way to catch the Amazon river dolphins they were studying in the largest lake in the…
When it comes to the Belo Monte dam complex on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon, biologists and fishers agree on one thing: this hydroelectric power plant, theoretically the…
Xamã is a year old. In August 2022, the jaguar cub was found all by himself, extremely malnourished and feeble, on private land in the municipality of Sinop, in Brazil’s…
Márcio Werá Mirim, chief of the village of Tekoá Yvy Porã, shares his people’s sacred story in a mix of Portuguese and Guarani as he walks along a path in…
YANOMAMI INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil – Four officers from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, throw themselves from a helicopter into the murky waters of the Uraricoera River below and swim toward…
“One of the most important days of my life,” are the words that anthropologist Beatriz Matos uses to describe her February visit to the Javari Valley on her first project…
SANTA CATARINA, BRASIL — A serene orange hue cuts across the horizon with the first rays of sunlight as dawn breaks in the mountainous countryside of Brazil’s second-most southerly state,…
If increasing global warming and deforestation were to transform Amazonia into an irreversibly degraded dry savanna, what could happen to the approximately 300 species of mammals that live there? These…
PERUÍBE, Brazil — On Oct. 2, 2020, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court overruled the marco temporal cutoff criteria for demarcating Indigenous lands, and upheld the 2016 homologation of the Piaçaguera Indigenous…
Journalists in Brazil have a saying, an expression penned by Brazilian poet Gonçalves Dias: “Boys, I saw it!” It’s popular among anyone going to the field to make reports, interview…
When it comes to environmental destruction in Brazil, the world’s focus tends to be on the deforestation and burning of the Amazon. Yet the Cerrado, the second-largest Brazilian biome, at…
Canadian mining company Aura Minerals plans to establish a major gold extraction project in Brazil’s Tocantins state without hearing the Quilombola (slave descendant) community that will be affected by the operations, thus violating their right to free, prior and informed consultation.
Reverse logistics, a principle introduced in Brazil in 2010 in the Brazilian government’s National Policy for Solid Waste (PNRS), is an approach that seeks to minimize levels of waste generated…
Whether you’re looking at her giant paintings of Indigenous women creators or having a chat before the interview, Daiara Tukano always transmits her power, her well-honed critical viewpoint and excellent…
The resumption of work on the controversial EF-170 railway project — also known as the Ferrogrão — in the Brazilian Amazon has sparked demands for a proper consultation process from…
At a conference on herpetology — the branch of zoology studying reptiles and amphibians — at the end of the 1980s, researchers from numerous countries began to tell of disappearing…
Barcarena – a traditional Quilombola territory in Pará – saw little of the development promised when the industrial complex was established with several mining enterprises — especially Imerys and Albras…
When we speak about destruction of the Amazon, deforestation data are often the reference. Over the last few decades, it is the rates of clear cutting that are best documented,…
“Everything is happening at the wrong time,” says Myrian Pereira Vasques. “The trees are blossoming at the wrong time, the soil isn’t the same, the weather is too hot and…
As unbelievable as it may seem, a neighborhood in the city of Salvador did not have electricity until the late 1980s and piped water until the end of the 20th…
"Keeping the nest tree standing and protecting a small area around that tree is one of our goals," says Tânia Sanaiotti, founder of the Harpy Eagle Project, 25 years old…
Canadian mining company Belo Sun wants to build a huge gold mine in the Big Bend of the Xingu region, in Pará; project foresees the extraction of 74 tons of gold in 20 years of operation.
Residents of a landless worker’s settlement in Anapu, Pará state in Brazil’s Amazon region, accuse the Federal Government of favoring large landowners, land grabbers and corporations at the expense of poor and landless peasants.
The sun had not yet risen when the men and women of the Mehinako people, inhabitants of the Xingu Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, started their…
Dom Roque Paloschi, president of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) and archbishop of Porto Velho in the state of Roraima, Brazil, has been under attack because he denounced Indigenous people’s rights violations. In 2021, 355 attacks against Indigenous people were reported in Brazil — the most since 2013, according to a CIMI report.