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 lapsed moratorium protecting the Amazon river dolphin is up for renewal, but the Bolsonaro administration has delayed acting, even as scientists warn it could mean the freshwater mammal’s extinction.
Worsening Amazon floods with reduced fish catches, along with government policies that shred welfare programs and encourage deforestation, are increasing food insecurity in riverine communities.
Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) arrived in Boa Vista on the Trombetas River in 1979. While the mining company made big profits, traditional people say it has given back little while doing great harm.
A bill in Congress on the verge of passage this week would allow land grabbers to self-declare their ownership of government land, ultimately converting vast stretches of Amazon rainforest to cattle ranches.
COVID-19 in the Amazon COVID-19 represents a particularly insidious threat for remote villages in the Amazon, where the nearest ICU bed is, on average, 315 kilometers (nearly 200 miles) away. The…
The pandemic is spreading across the Brazilian Amazon, but that isn’t slowing deforestation or land grabbing or a political crisis which has left the rainforest without adequate field surveillance.
On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we look at what’s driving the intense fire seasons we’ve seen around the world in recent years, what can we expect from the…
Large biomes, like the Amazon rainforest, have closely linked habitats and species, which could lead to a domino effect and a rapid ecosystem collapse; even small effects can cause a crash over time.
Extreme flooding in the Ecuadoran Amazon has caused widespread disarray along the banks of the Bobonaza River, all amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past couple of weeks, the surging…
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.
Indigenous activists have blasted Jair Bolsonaro’s ineffectual coronavirus response, as leaders cancel annual mass indigenous protest in Brasília; fear grows of virus spread to reserves.
More than a decade of illegal gold mining around the upstart town of La Pampa in the Peruvian Amazon has tainted local water supplies, razed forests adjacent to a world-class…
Leaders of several indigenous communities have lodged a complaint with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, that a Netherlands-based oil company fouled the environment in Peru's slice…
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.…
An intensification in fires, coupled with increasing deforestation and worsening climate change, could rapidly shift the Amazon toward being a carbon source by 2050.
A degraded secondary forest in Brazil stores carbon at only twice the rate of primary forest, compared to up to 11 times elsewhere; scientists could be overestimating Amazon carbon storage capacity.
The recent fires in Australia bring flashbacks of last August in the Brazilian Amazon, when news of massive blazes also captured the world’s attention (and for many, provoked intense concern…
Tech giant Microsoft says it will go “carbon negative” by 2030; to get there, it will rely on Pachama, a startup using LIDAR and artificial intelligence to truthfully track forest carbon storage projects.
Three European countries have put up $366 million in foreign aid to fight deforestation in Colombia’s Amazon. The region’s rate of forest loss remains stubbornly high, up 97% since the…
Scientists know from a bevy of studies that the inclusion of indigenous peoples and local communities is critical to holding deforestation at bay across the tropics, even as a tide…
Farmers and irregular occupants in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve in Acre are enjoying newfound political power and pressuring for the reduction of the first protected area of its kind in Brazil as it approaches its 30th anniversary in March.
Brazil is the most biologically diverse country in the world, harboring 10 to 18% of the world’s total biota. This biodiversity, however, is rapidly declining due to habitat degradation, overexploitation,…
As the COP25 climate conference in Madrid, Spain came to a close with little progress earlier this month, the future of the Brazilian Amazon remained dangerously unclear. The Amazon is…
On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Chris Fagan about the investigative report he recently filed for Mongabay that revealed a large-scale illegal land invasion encroaching on…
The Bolsonaro administration is downplaying new data showing a major surge in Amazon deforestation, but a close look at the numbers shows that the statistics are even worse than they appear at first glance.
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon surged more than 30 percent over the past year according to official data published today by Brazil's National Space Research Institute, INPE. The data, which…
The prevailing narrative about the Brazilian Amazon this past summer was that the world’s largest rainforest was burning. A more accurate assessment would be that vast areas that used to…
