On May 11 this year, dozens of activists with Greenpeace Netherland blocked a ship carrying 60,000 metric tons of soy from Brazil to the Netherlands. Among the protesters was Alberto…
During last year’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, more than 140 countries committed to halting and reversing deforestation by 2030. The Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use recognized…
Fires have destroyed at least 18,000 hectares of vegetation (44,480 acres) in central Brazil’s savanna region and now threaten a national park that’s home to rare species such as jaguars,…
Traditional people and communities are vital to conserving biodiversity, but many are still absent from official maps. A new report highlights progress made in making them visible.
Since Lucely Pio was a little girl, she has been collecting medicinal plants in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savanna. At 5, she walked through the grasslands and forests of the…
Veronica Tavares Batista is only 19 years old, but has seen more conflicts over land than most people will ever see in their lifetime. Her home of Brejo de Miguel…
An innovative collaborative group is working to restore Brazil’s savanna by sowing native plant seeds on degraded agricultural lands; it’s an effort that’s working, say participants.
Appreciation of the outsized role that Indigenous people play in helping to protect the planet’s biodiversity, intact ecosystems, and global carbon stocks is growing around the world. On Wednesday, the United…
NEW YORK — On an early December morning last year in the state of Maranhão, Brazil, half a dozen members of the Indigenous Guajajara people packed their bags with food,…
Brazil is well positioned to benefit from forest restoration and agroforestry, but policies in states like Maranhão fail to address that potential and could contribute to further deforestation.
New research finds that roughly 20% of Brazilian agricultural exports to the EU are linked to illegal deforestation, but only about 2% of agricultural properties produce the majority of this forest loss.
Pixaim is one of the remaining quilombos on the Atlantic coast, an Afro-Brazilian settlement already gravely impacted by upstream dams. Now climate change could doom it.
Ranching is booming in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco, destroying the biome, but the nation’s goal of breaking into sustainable beef and leather markets may offer a motive to curb deforestation.
A new initiative by Nutreco, Tesco and Grieg Seafood pledges $13 million to pay soy growers not to deforest the savanna for new soy fields. More are hoped to join the fund.
In April at the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, I was listening to a panel where Sônia Guajajara, the general coordinator of the Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil…
Meat and dairy consumption in Europe are contributing disproportionately to habitat destruction of charismatic species like the giant anteater in Brazil's Cerrado savanna.
Though large soy traders are resistant, research shows that full participation by Cargill and other firms in a Cerrado soy moratorium could help save the savanna.
Land use, more than climate change, predict how the Amazon burns. Deforestation, and new road building, could expand Amazon wildfire risk by over 70 percent by 2100.
Earlier this year, the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet and Health published its version of a sustainable diet that could feed the nearly 10 billion people expected to inhabit the…
In 2010, some 400 companies grouped under the Consumer Goods Forum agreed to the goal of achieving zero net deforestation by 2020 for the four commodities responsible for the majority…
In a letter to Brazilian soy farmers, Cargill promises not to back Cerrado soy moratorium, but offers $30 million for ideas to limit savanna biome forest losses.
NAPO, Ecuador — Gloria Ushigua, president of the Sápara women’s association, stops by a large, thin, spindly tree that looks almost dead, and breaks off a thin branch. Running her…
Climate change threatens to push endemic species in the Cerrado, Brazil’s vast tropical savanna, into extinction while allowing the spread of species already commonplace elsewhere, a new study says. This…
Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons and Lidl accused of buying corned beef sourced from Brazilian supplier JBS, a firm notorious for large-scale corruption and Amazon deforestation.
A new report urges the EU — a major Brazilian trading partner — to pressure the Bolsonaro government to end its regressive indigenous and environmental policies.
If Brazil alone were to cover the US-China soy deficit, land area dedicated to soy in Brazil could increase by 39 percent, with a loss of up to 13 million hectares of forest.
Cargill’s recent announcement of policies to achieve zero-deforestation in its supply chains comes at a crucial moment for the Brazilian Cerrado, which is being destroyed at a breakneck rate, primarily…
The United Nations’ Green Climate Fund (GCF) has accepted the first proposal for REDD+ results-based payouts from Brazil, effectively paying the country for reducing its deforestation rates in 2014 and…
Almost a decade after it was founded, the Green Climate Fund is ready to start paying tropical countries for emission reductions from REDD+. A proposal from Brazil has been submitted…
Sarah Sax is a multimedia freelance journalist and producer who covers the environment, deforestation, land rights, and gender. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, WIRED, Huffington Post, Undark, Bustle, VICE News and more. Sarah has a masters in environmental science and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
