Nearly half of Brazil’s savanna biome has already been lost to agriculture. Scientists say further deforestation may bring biodiversity collapse and disastrous drought, putting Brazil’s water supply and agricultural economy at grave risk.
As the human population grows, so does our demand for food, and soy is one of the key crops meeting that demand. Found in far more than tofu, soy is…
An invasion of up to 5,000 illegal miners is underway in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Reserve in Brazil’s Roraima state, Indigenous leaders estimate. Analysts say Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric has emboldened the miners.
In a ruling that could strengthen Indigenous land rights claims across Brazil, the nation’s Supreme Court has sided with the Guarani Kaiowá, allowing the possible reopening of a case involving their territory claim.
As the planet warms, it isn’t just humans who are feeling the heat — trees are too. Rising temperatures are disrupting a primary engine of life on Earth: photosynthesis. A…
Experts see sustainable small-scale cultivation of endemic fruits, nuts and vegetables by traditional communities as a way to value and save Cerrado ecosystems, while also supporting some of the biome’s best defenders.
Three Guarani men were assaulted last week in Mato Grosso do Sul state allegedly over an ongoing land dispute between ranchers and Indigenous people; one expert accuses the Bolsonaro government of “restriction of the rights of Indigenous peoples.”
The Kadiwéu Indigenous group, living where the Cerrado and Pantanal biomes meet, has resisted annihilation since the colonial era. Their secret weapon: the creative arts that help define their identity.
Despite growing international awareness of the importance of protecting and restoring our vital ecosystems, President Bolsonaro’s far-right government has taken a wrecking ball to much of the environmental progress made…
Since Lucely Pio was a little girl, she has been collecting medicinal plants in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savanna. At 5, she walked through the grasslands and forests of the…
Veronica Tavares Batista is only 19 years old, but has seen more conflicts over land than most people will ever see in their lifetime. Her home of Brejo de Miguel…
In 2016, Matheus Sborgia, then a 26-year-old Brazilian pastry chef, received sad news: Luis Sborgia, his grandfather, had passed away. Matheus was in Pollenzo, in northern Italy, about to graduate…
The Kalunga — 39 quilombola communities, the descendants of runaway slaves — have united with international funders to use high-tech georeferencing to catalog their traditional lands and natural resources in Brazil.
Monitoring the ongoing deforestation of the Cerrado, the vast savanna scrubland that abuts the Amazon in Brazil, has become increasingly essential in recent decades. This biome, the most biodiverse savanna…
The Black Jaguar Foundation is planning a 1,615 greenway to be planted with 1.7 billion trees. The big challenge: the corridor runs through rural landowners’ properties, and they need convincing.
Even as agribusiness and the Brazilian government became allies to aggressively convert more of the savanna for soy and cattle, the National Campaign in Defense of the Cerrado moved to conserve the biome.
At the beginning of the 1990s, while observing the large trees of the Amazon ceding ground to the scrub-like vegetation of the Cerrado, in a process driven by human activity,…
The flower-gatherers of the Cerrado uplands, invisible for centuries, win UN recognition for sustainable farming, even as threats from mining, agriculture, and a national park deepen.
Between April and November last year, the government of the Brazilian state of Bahia authorized agribusinesses to collect nearly 2 billion liters (528 million gallons) of water a day.
The native vegetation of Brazil’s vast savanna is rapidly being replaced by plantations and pastures. At risk along with the biome’s grasslands are hundreds of endemic, uniquely adapted reptile species.
An innovative collaborative group is working to restore Brazil’s savanna by sowing native plant seeds on degraded agricultural lands; it’s an effort that’s working, say participants.
Today we look at efforts to preserve and restore the biodiversity of the Cerrado in Brazil, the world’s largest and most biologically-rich tropical savanna. Listen here: Comprising more than 20%…
A day after Brazil announced 11,000 square kilometers of annual deforestation, France, the EU’s biggest buyer of Brazilian soy flour, announced plans to become more self-sufficient on the commodity.
A mammal native to South America’s savannas, the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) now lives in the Amazon Rainforest. That’s the finding of a recent study by researchers in the Brazilian…
The illegal wildlife trade is out of control in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, says the award-winning NGO known as RENCTAS, which tracked 3.5 million wildlife trafficking ads on social networks last year.
Eight French supermarket chains will now require that their suppliers obtain soybeans that were not grown on deforested land, according to the Washington, D.C.-based environmental NGO Mighty Earth. The announcement…
Almost a fifth of Brazil’s soy and grains already flow down Amazonia’s rivers. Now a boom in private river port construction, with little government oversight, further threatens the region’s waterways.
One of the most devastating effects of the illegal trafficking of wild animals in Brazil is the proliferation of marmosets in large urban centers. There are two species in particular…
Georeferencing, a digital process for registering land ownership, is now widespread in South America, but it is high-tech that can be used by landgrabbers and companies to obtain deeds to collective ancestral lands.
Maned wolves, pumas, giant anteaters, tapirs and other Neotropical mammals are threatened with local extinctions unless more conserved areas are established in Brazil’s savanna biome, say scientists.
