For two years, regions of Brazil that depend on precipitation fed by Amazonian vegetation have seen rainfall below historical averages, impacting crops and harvests. A recent bulletin from a federal agency points to agribusiness itself as one of the drivers of this pattern.
The new Science Panel for the Amazon — modeled on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — aims to consolidate knowledge on the Amazon rainforest and guide future public policies to conserve it.
In Pará, the Brazilian state with the highest deforestation rate, communities inside Tapajós National Forest have for the past 15 years run one of the most successful native timber management projects.
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.
Most of the fires in the Amazon rainforest last year were associated with industrial agriculture, according to a study cross-referencing NASA satellite data with corporate supply chains.
Jan Erik Saugestad, executive vice president of Norway’s Storebrand Asset Management, who has led an international pressure campaign against deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, says the government must back up its promises with action to reverse the rising trend.
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.
The International Finance Corporation injected $85 million into Minerva, even though it was aware that the company’s activities involved deforestation, child labor and land conflict risks. In recent years, Minerva has become Latin America’s largest meat exporter. But doubts remain over whether it has strictly complied with envi-ronmental and social compensation guidelines specified in its contract.
Censorship, persecution, and dismissals of supervisors have become the norm in Brazil’s environmental agencies since Jair Bolsonaro took office. Now, prosecutors are seeking the dismissal of his environment minister, Ricardo Salles, alleging "countless initiatives that violate the duty to protect the environment."
With the Amazon fire season looming, 38 transnational firms, including Alcoa, Bayer, Shell, Siemens, Suzano, and Amaggi asked Brazil to act against environmental crimes. Brazil’s vice president has responded with a fire ban — critics say much more is needed.
It’s the one-year anniversary of the finalization of a gigantic trade agreement between the EU and Mercusor, a bloc of Latin American nations, but Brazil’s soaring deforestation rate puts ratification at risk.
A cattle farmer in Tefé, Brazil, has turned his ranch into a new standard for cattle raising in the forest. It’s a more productive and more profitable system that eliminates the need for cutting down forest to open new pastureland.
Late rainfall, intense drought, dry riverbeds, more forest fires, less food available — indigenous communities across the Amazon suffer social transformations due to climate change.
Global outrage at Environment Minister Ricardo Salles caught on video saying "run the cattle herd" through the Amazon, "changing all the rules and simplifying standards" while public distracted by pandemic.
A new study shows taxpayer money is helping to prop up the beef industry in Brazil, one of the primary drivers of deforestation in the country. For every dollar of tax revenue collected from the industry, only 20 cents effectively goes to society — the rest goes back to producers in the form of incentives, easy credit, and even debt forgiveness.
38 indigenous groups in Brazil are reporting 537 COVID-19 cases. In Mato Grosso state, a new map tracks the virus, while officials push measures that put indigenous land rights at risk.
The Brazilian savanna has always been a dry place, but the massive conversion of native vegetation to soy is making it far dryer, as is deepening, climate change-driven, drought.
An area half the size of Switzerland in Brazil’s Cerrado biome could see its biodiversity plummet as sugarcane farms expand to meet global demand for bioethanol, a new study says. Researchers calculated that some parts of the Cerrado could see up to 100% loss of mammalian species richness; endangered animals like the maned wolf and the giant anteater will be the most affected.
The Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve turns 30 this year, but the spirit of sustainable forest use that drove its creation is fading away amid economic and environmental pressures. The reserve’s young people are increasingly being drawn away from the extractivism model to work in more stable activities, such as cattle ranching.
A valuable Atlantic Forest reserve and the historic setting of the discovery of Brazil, the land of the Pataxó is suffering from the illegal logging of fine woods used to produce handicrafts.
André Baniwa is one of the oldest indigenous leaders working in the Upper Rio Negro region of the state of Amazonas. He spoke with Mongabay about school education, generation of income, indigenous people in public life and his people’s concept of “good living” based in interculturality.
Continued deregulation and fast tracking of new products under President Bolsonaro have helped secure Brazil’s place as the world’s largest user of very toxic pesticides.
Climate change and deforestation are forcing a rainforest-to-savanna tipping point threatening agribusiness, hydropower, and the Brazilian economy; Bolsonaro is blind to the danger.
JBS SA, a Brazilian meatpacking company dogged by its links to deforestation, recently signed a deal that would put its products in more than 60,000 shops and markets around China.…
The construction of the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon is the narrative engine that drives Sequestrada, the first full-length film by U.S. cinematographer and sociologist Sabrina McCormick.
Legislation would open indigenous reserves in Amazon and across Brazil to commercial mining, oil and gas exploration, ranching, agribusiness, new dams and tourism.
An intensification in fires, coupled with increasing deforestation and worsening climate change, could rapidly shift the Amazon toward being a carbon source by 2050.
In an exclusive interview with Mongabay, Marcelino Guedes, a researcher at Brazil’s Amapá Federal University, talks about how important the management of traditional knowledge is for strengthening the forest economy in Brazil to overcome the paradigm that sees standing forest as an enemy of development.
25 environmental and indigenous groups in Brazil have filed a formal inquiry request into Environment Minister Ricardo Salles’ possibly illegal deal with convicted land grabbers.
Models and real-world events indicate that, unless action is taken now, up to 70% of the Amazon rainforest could become savanna in under 50 years, with huge carbon releases, destabilizing global climate.
