After four years of a government that led the Amazon rainforest and other biomes to record levels of destruction, the world's attention is on the Brazilian presidential elections in October…
Recent data confirm that 2022 is on pace to match 2021’s rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: the founder and CEO of Mongabay, Rhett A. Butler, is a sought-after commentator on…
Scientists warn that the Amazon is hurtling toward a tipping point, beyond which it would begin to transition from lush tropical forest into a dry, degraded savanna, unable to support…
The world’s largest rainforest makes its own weather. Up to half of all the rainfall in the Amazon comes from the forest itself, as moisture is recycled from the trees…
The last logging period granted by the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampis Nation (GTANW) ended on May 30, 2022, yet timber has continued to be indiscriminately extracted in the…
Crimes associated with illegal logging, mining and other illicit activities in the Brazilian Amazon are being felt in 24 of Brazil’s 27 states, a new report shows.
Forest loss is increasing south of the Orinoco River due to lack of Venezuelan official oversight, a growing Colombian insurgency, fires set to create mining camps, and new agricultural lands cleared to feed miners.
Repórter Brasil’s tool points out the federal deputies with the worst socio-environmental performance and shows that the right-wing wave of 2018 strengthened the rural caucus in Congress. Analysts say that the ruralist leanings of the Chamber were already a reality, but the Bolsonaro government unbalanced the political chessboard with the weakening of the Ministry of Environment.
Just weeks after visiting a patch of Malaysian rainforest, Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler learned it had been logged for wood chips to supply a paper plant. A teenager at…
This past June, scientists and researchers gathered outside the office of INPE, Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research, in the municipality of São José dos Campos. They were there to…
On an expedition in the Amazon River Delta, researchers found mangroves growing in water with little to no salinity and overlapping with freshwater forested wetlands — a phenomenon never before…
Alexandra Narváez and Alex Lucitante, two young Indigenous leaders from the A’i Cofán community of Sinangoe, located in the Ecuadoran Amazon, have been awarded the 2022 Goldman Environmental Prize for their…
The rainforest is dense with sound. Like musicians in an orchestra, each animal plays a part, occupying its own “acoustic niche” in both frequency and time. But repeated fires are…
Scientists already knew that where the western Amazon rainforest sits today was once a vast wetland, almost four times the size of Texas and periodically flooded by pulses of seawater.…
In the world’s largest rainforest, wildlife crawls, hops, flies and prowls through every nook and cranny. Most animals are adept at hiding from humans, though, so finding them can be…
Satellites have detected forest clearing within Triunfo do Xingu this year, an area that’s supposed to be a legally protected swath of Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s northern state of Pará.…
Patricia Gualinga takes a deep breath and pictures herself inside the rainforest in Sarayaku, Ecuador. “It’s hard to describe the smell of such pure air when you’re in the rainforest”,…
Based on the best scientific data available, the unprecedented Amazon Water Impact Index draws together monitoring and research data to identify the most vulnerable areas of the Brazilian rainforest. According to the index, 20% of the 11,216 Brazilian Amazon microbasins have an impact considered high, very high or extreme; half of these watersheds are affected by hydroelectric plants.
JAKARTA — Tropical forest loss remained consistently high in 2021 with no sign of slowing down, despite commitments by companies and governments to curb deforestation, according to new data from…
A reassessment by an international group of scientists finds that human-caused destabilization of the water cycle is seriously impacting global soil moisture, with knock on effects for forests and other ecosystems.
CANELOS, Ecuador — An almost invisible trail snakes through thick buzzing forest leading to a chakra, an ancestral food garden in the Kichwa Cuya community located in Ecuador’s largest province,…
The Amazon lost millions of hectares of primary forest in 2021, mostly as the result of cattle ranching and other agricultural activities, a new report reveals. Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of…
QUITO, Ecuador — On Jan. 28, 2022, Ecuador’s Heavy Crude Oil Pipeline (known by its Spanish acronym OCP), ruptured, contaminating more than 20,000 square meters of the Cayambe Coca National…
Three young women from the Munduruku Indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon run an audiovisual collective that uses social media to raise awareness about illegal invasions of their territory. “Many people no longer believe what we say, they only believe what they see,” says Aldira Akai, who, at 30, is the oldest member of the collective.
Since 2013, the Ka'apor expelled the Federal Brazilian Indigenous Agency from their territory in the state of Maranhão, creating a new government council, adopting their own education system and establishing permanent settlements along their borders to contain the illegal advance of loggers, land grabbers and miners.
To support ongoing conservation efforts in the Amazon rainforest, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is putting an additional $300 million toward its Andes-Amazon Initiative, which is the largest private…
A Brazilian Federal Police operation dismantled a criminal organization that operates in illegal mining inside Kayapó Indigenous Land, in southern Pará state. The gold is sold abroad to Chimet, an Italian business group specializing in refining gold to make jewellery.
MANAUS, Brazil — As she walks through the rubble, Yawaratsuni Kokama steps over loose bricks and piles of broken tiles, her eyes welling up. From time to time, she stops…
A photo of an odd-looking amphibian drew attention on Twitter last week, where it was described as a “smooth lil fella”, compared to a melted tootsie roll candy, and likened…
Forest degradation due to environmental causes (such as drought) and human causes (such as fragmentation) released three times as much carbon as deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 2010 and 2019, say researchers.
