Amazon Dams News

Legislation would open indigenous reserves in Amazon and across Brazil to commercial mining, oil and gas exploration, ranching, agribusiness, new dams and tourism.

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.

Deforestation and climate change could convert Amazon rainforest to savanna by 2050. New infrastructure development would quicken process.

Indigenous group entered Brazilian museum and retrieved sacred funeral urns that courts said were rightly theirs, but which dam construction firm and authorities kept from them.

Amazon mega-dam was built with 11,233 MW capacity, but has fallen far short, even as deforestation and drought make the goal more remote. The US$9.5 billion dam may never be profitable.

A researcher at the INPE Center of Land System Science, Antonio Donato Nobre, describes the state of degradation threatening the future of the Amazon rainforest in an exclusive interview with Mongabay.

Brazil started the decade as an example to the world, dramatically curbing Amazon deforestation, but under Jair Bolsonaro the nation is moving toward ecological ruin.

A major six nation study finds that the arrau is thriving mostly in river systems where conservationists are active, but not elsewhere; climate change looms as a major threat.

SANTARÉM, Brazil, and BERLIN — I got off the mototaxi, a means of transportation that is part of everyday life in several cities in the Amazon, took off the helmet…

Violence and impunity are the fuel that feeds the fires in the Amazon: not just the ones broadcast across the world this August, when it was revealed that fires in…

This July represents a critical opportunity to protect rivers and the World Heritage sites that depend on them. Key government leaders will converge on Baku, Azerbaijan for the 43rd annual…

Indigenous reserves and other conserved lands in nine Amazonian nations are under extreme pressure as roads, mining, dams, oil drilling, fires and deforestation encroach.

Eight past environmental ministers assail policies. Amazon Fund and 334 Brazilian parks at risk; sweeping illegal deforestation amnesties head to approval.

13 tons of oxygen-starved fish died as water filled the new Sinop dam reservoir, a project of French firm Electricité de France (EDF), along with Brazilian companies.

At least 9 people are known dead in new violent attacks on remote Amazon communities near areas of heavy deforestation and large hydroelectric dams.

JUYUINTSA, Ecuador — More than 75 elders and community leaders gathered last week in the Shiwiar community of Juyuintsa, located in Ecuador’s far eastern Amazon rainforest, just at the border…

As part of a wave of rural violence sweeping Amazonia, dam activist Dilma Ferreira Silva, her husband and a friend were brutally murdered last Friday; a large scale landowner is in custody.

The dourada, one of the Amazon’s goliath catfish species, plus other commercially valuable migratory fish stocks crashed after Santo Antônio and Jirau dams were built, say researchers.

Animals around the globe are losing ground to farming and ranching, and their numbers are dwindling at the hands of human hunters. But the question of where to direct precious…

With 3,700 dams in the planning stages worldwide, it is time for governments and builders to consider the true socio-environmental cost of hydroelectric dams before building them: study.

The Sinop Dam has become a critical test case — not only on the question of clearing reservoirs before filling, but also on the real effect of Brazil’s environmental legislation…

On February 20, Nature published a comment on hydropower claiming that dams are good for the climate and should be subsidized through the Climate Bonds initiative, a proposal that is…

An upcoming Amazon Synod at which Catholic clergy from nine Amazon nations will discuss ecological, indigenous and climate issues is seen by Brazil as international interference.

On today’s episode, we talk with Mongabay contributor Martha Pskowski, who recently traveled to central Mexico to report on threats to monarch butterflies in their overwintering grounds. Listen here:  …

A wave of announcements by the Bolsonaro administration threatens indigenous reserves, could worsen deforestation and bring major environmental harm: experts.

A Brazilian official last week announced plans to build an Amazon River bridge, Trombetas River dam, and highway thru what he called “desert-like” rainforest.

More than 2,000 illegal mining sites in the Amazon, a wetland in Chile threatened by a highway extension, and a possible new monkey species in Peru were among the top…

Presidents in Peru and Brazil, and construction firm Odebrecht, schemed to build 22 Marañón River dams; the people and the law defeated them; today the river flows free.

Indigenous groups, quilombolas, agrarian reform settlements, and environmentalists are all responding to the new president’s early moves which could undermine past protections.

On his first day in office, Brazil’s new president shifted the demarcation responsibility for indigenous lands to the agriculture ministry, potentially putting the Amazon at risk, critics say.