The current development trajectory of the Pan Amazon is uncertain. The ongoing investment in protected areas and Indigenous territories has created a solid foundation for conservation of the region’s biodiversity.…
Environmental economics views the environment as a form of natural capital: land, water and biodiversity are viewed as assets that mediate the flow of goods and services from ecosystems toward…
The explosive growth of protected area networks was accompanied by the simultaneous recognition of the territorial rights of Indigenous people, an ongoing process that has yet to conclude. There are…
A bill eyeing to strip uncontacted Indigenous people in Peru of lands and protections was officially scrapped at the end of June. This legislative proposal, called a “step backward” by…
Agribusiness magnate from the USA, who is already the biggest producer of corn-based ethanol in Brazil, plans to leverage “green” investments from governments and banks to meet negative carbon emissions using an unproven method.
When Mauricio Velasco Castro graduated from culinary school in Bogotá, he didn’t look for a job in one of Colombia’s fine dining restaurants or for an internship abroad. Instead, he…
The commitment to environmental governance in the 1990s was preceded by a civil society movement to create national parks and wildlife refuges. In the first half of the twentieth century,…
The Pan Amazon nations have constitutions that were reformed or rewritten in the last decades of the twentieth century. Previous versions either ignored nature or incorporated a simple clause assigning…
From the outset, academics realised that the development programmes being deployed across the Amazon in the 1960s and 1970s would bring irreversible harm. Attempts to promote conservation were a natural…
Starting in the 1990s, ecosystem ecologists and atmospheric scientists in the Brazilian space agency embarked on a sophisticated collaboration with NASA and other international research institutions; their goal was to…
Harvard-trained ethnobotanist and host of the popular podcast Plants of the Gods, Mark Plotkin is no stranger to psychedelic plants. But many people across the world, particularly in countries where…
A tropical rainforest is composed of thousands of species of long-lived trees, each with a natural history characterized by unique morphological, physiological and reproductive attributes. Very little was known about…
Beneath the luxurious foliage and the majestic trees of the Amazon Rainforest lies a counterintuitive reality: a mostly infertile soil that becomes swiftly depleted once its plant coverage is stripped…
In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, scientists affiliated with institutions in the Northern Hemisphere organized most expeditions into the Amazon. These botanists, zoologists and anthropologists were…
The economies of nations are traditionally evaluated by their gross domestic product (GDP), a metric that measures the total economic output of a nation. The GDP of the Pan Amazon…
Politics is idiosyncratic to each country, but trends in economic policies span borders. The political economy of the Pan Amazon is the legacy of strategic development plans that began in…
The Pan Amazon spans approximately 825 million hectares, of which approximately ninety million hectares have been lost to deforestation; this corresponds to ~13% of the original forest cover. At first…
SÃO PAULO — On Tuesday, Brazil’s Lower House of Congress overwhelmingly voted and approved a bill to restrict the legal recognition of Indigenous territories throughout the country. Among many changes,…
Researchers analyzed never-before-used satellite data to calculate how much carbon is stored in protected areas worldwide.
Why do people clear forest? To anybody who has lived on the forest frontier, the answer is as simple as it is obvious: it is essential to the livelihoods of…
The Amazon, home to the largest tropical forest on the planet, is an irreplaceable natural asset with enormous biodiversity and a critically important component in global carbon and water cycles.…
While his early days as a Boy Scout brought him closer to nature and introduced him to a number of outdoor activities during his childhood in the U.S., it was…
Elon Musk may claim to hate them, but can Twitter bots be put to good use? A new tool that aims to monitor and expose deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest…
Lula's administration is weighing the renewal of Belo Monte hydroelectric plant's license, a dam blamed for taking away the livelihoods of riverine communities and causing socio-environmental chaos - built by Lula's party.
The human rights organization Front Line Defenders has published its Global Analysis 2022, a report on the state of people who have dedicated their lives to defending the environment, Indigenous…
MEXICO CITY — As climate change continues to choke off rainfall, many parts of the Amazon are facing a higher probability of dying off from drought than previously thought. A…
Conservation International and its partners pledged to plant 73 million trees in the Brazilian Amazon in 2017. Only 20% of that goal has been met, with the pandemic, the anti-environmental presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, and fires taking a toll.
SÃO PAULO—A new study published in Nature estimates that forests in Indigenous lands in Brazil’s Amazon have the potential to absorb over 7,000 tons of noxious fumes from forest fires…
Illegal deforestation, wildcat mining, drug trafficking, and lethal violence: Name your scourge and the Amazon Basin seldom disappoints. But as an unusual compact between police officers, prosecutors, environmental protectors, and…
A new legislative proposal, criticized by opponents as a step backwards in recognizing the rights and protections of uncontacted and recently contacted Indigenous people, is currently under debate in Peru’s…
