The Brazilian Congress is analyzing a bill that would leave all the country's non-forestry vegetation unprotected, affecting an area twice the size of the United Kingdom.
New research from the NGO Conservation Strategy fund, working with federal prosecutors in Brazil, has refined a tool that puts a dollar value on the socioenvironmental costs of illegal gold mining across vital ecosystems in the Amazon.
Flooding caused by heavy rains in central Peru in March displaced hundreds of Indigenous families and destroyed their sustainable agroforestry projects, raising concerns about how they’ll recover and what steps…
Tasso Azevedo, one of the creators of Tropical Forests Forever, details the financial instrument envisaged to reward conservation.
Deforestation from soy continues to spread through Brazil’s Cerrado and Amazon Rainforest, with satellite readings showing new areas of forest loss from as recently as last December, a new study…
A team of paleontologists found a giant fossilized skull along the shore of the Napo River in the Peruvian Amazon. To their surprise, the relic belonged to a newly described…
In early January, Brazilian environmental agents went on strike, claiming their salaries do not make up for their risky and highly-qualified work, in a threat to Lula's zero deforestation target.
Researchers and protection agencies expected a dry season with more fires in Brazil’s Roraima state at the start of 2024, but the effects of an intense and prolonged El Niño have aggravated the situation.
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has continued on a downward trajectory despite a sharp increase in fires associated with the severe drought in the region, reveals data released by Brazil's…
As infrastructure projects and soy plantations pump up land values in the Brazilian Amazon, smallholders are selling up and moving to more distant frontiers, perpetuating a cycle of displacement and deforestation.
A new lawsuit in New York claims that one of the world’s largest beef producers has been misleading the public about its efforts to curb deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions.…
Scientists warn that 10% of the Amazon has a high risk of being converted into a drier and degraded ecosystem by 2050, while 47% has a moderate transitional risk.
A new species of giant anaconda has been found in the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador, scientists announced. The snake, named the northern green anaconda (Eunectes akayima), is genetically distinct from…
Ocean rise and changes in the Amazon River are ruining the way of life in an archipelago close to where the Amazon River runs into the Atlantic.
Teeming with tropical rainforest, the Amazon Basin is a vital defense against global warming. Yet deforestation combined with extreme weather are behind the region's worst drought in fifty years. Forest clearance to make…
“When I see the rainforest burning, I know what I’m really seeing is Amazonia dying. I see that fire and, as a scientist, I know how much that hectare will…
The reconstruction of Brazil’s BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) highway (Figure 1) and its associated hidden projects are not yet a fait accompli, but the danger has reached a critical moment. In…
The government in Ecuador is looking for ways to keep open a controversial oil block in the Amazon Rainforest, defying the results of a referendum to close the operation due…
A new amendment to Peru’s forest and wildlife law is being criticized by opponents as unconstitutional and a step backward in forest protection after it came into effect Jan. 10…
Update 2/23/2024: Delegates to COP-14 approved Brazil's proposal to protect these species under Appendix II. The Amazon is the largest, most biologically diverse basin in the world. Its rainforest, the…
In June 2023, where the Caquetá River leaves Colombian territory and enters Brazil, no more than 35 kilometers (21.7 miles) from the border, Custodio Yucuna Tanimuca came across a group…
Brazil’s “Transversal Environmental Agenda,” released on 25 January 2024, contains many good things for the government to be doing, but it misses the opportunity to implant what a transversal agenda…
A new study has for the first time identified the most common tree species in the tropical forests of Africa, the Amazon and Southeast Asia — and their similarities have…
Pensar Agro (“thinking agribusiness”), or IPA, lobbied hard for newly passed legislation like the so-called time frame bill that undermines Indigenous land rights and opens up the territories to mining.
The 2022 documentary “The Territory” won an Emmy award this January, shining a light on the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous people and the invasions, conflicts and threats from land grabbers in their territory in the Brazilian Amazon from 2018 to 2021.
Both El Niño and climate change contributed to the lack of rainfall in the region, but climate change also led to extremely high temperatures and increased water evaporation.
With reduced support in Brazil’s Congress following the 2022 elections, the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been unable to prevent the passage of bills dismantling environmental safeguards in favor of agribusiness interests.
Last week, Indigenous leaders from around the world joined business leaders and politicians for the World Economic Forum's 2024 Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. While much of the discussion on…
An unprecedented time-series study in the basin of the Tapajós River, a major tributary of the Amazon, assesses the level of degradation of small rivers threatened by agribusiness expansion.
From September to November 2023 Manaus, a city located in the relatively intact forest area in the central part of Brazilian Amazonia, was surprised to find itself under a dense…