Amazon Rainforest News

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 trip from the heart of Almeirim municipality, on the banks of the Amazon River, to the rural community of Cafezal takes nearly three hours on the fast boat, referred…

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…

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,…

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.…

Drug trafficking, logging, oil palm plantations, oil spills, highways, illegal fishing, expanding Mennonite communities — in the Peruvian Amazon, there’s no shortage of threats against Indigenous peoples or their lands.…

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.

Loggers have entered the Trombetas River Biological Reserve in Oriximiná, in Brazil’s Pará state, to develop a forest management project that has divided the local Quilombola community.

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…

Jacobo, a Mennonite farmer who preferred only his fist name be used, had just begun to explain why he left Belize to settle in the Peruvian town of Tiruntá when…

A court in Ecuador ordered oil companies to stop the hazardous practice of burning natural gas at extraction sites because it was a major driver of cancer and other illnesses…

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…

Ancient forest fires seem to have played a role in enhancing resistance to drought in the Amazon, a recent study suggests. The research, published in Frontiers in Forests and Global…

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…

In 2015, researchers in Brazil started a project to address a tricky challenge: Reducing exposure to mercury contamination in the region of the Tapajós River, a major tributary of the…

Jaguars have been feared and revered for centuries, inspiring rituals, cults, and, more recently, conservation concerns. Although jaguars’ known range extends from Mexico to Argentina, they’ve been eradicated from almost…

Analysis of 40 years of climate temperature data shows a connection between Amazon tree loss and Tibetan snow decrease via a 20,000-kilometer oceanic and atmospheric pathway. West Antarctica is also impacted.

Two days after the two-year anniversary of the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, copycat mayhem broke out in Brazil's own capital, Brasília. On that Sunday, newly-inaugurated Brazilian President…

The Amazonian Chief Raoni Metuktire visited the U.K. in January 2020, accompanied by Megaron Txucarramãe and other Indigenous leaders. This visit kicked off a global tour that held very special…

Brazilian scientist Antonio Donato Nobre has long been a student of the Amazon Rainforest. An agronomist with a master's degree in tropical biology and a Ph.D. in Earth science, Nobre…