Although never organized as a specific project, the Carretera Marginal de la Selva has emerged from multiple projects that have been established in the Andean foothills from Colombia to Bolivia.…
BEN GUERIR, Morocco — Moussa Bouray sifts through hundreds of soil samples on the shelves of his lab that that will undergo analysis for nutrients: nitrogen, potassium, and especially phosphorus.…
Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia all invested in major highway building initiatives in the last half of the twentieth century, motivated in part to project sovereignty over their Amazonian provinces.…
The Southern Amazon has experienced massive deforestation, coupled with the degradation of soil and water resources. The forest frontiers at the remote corners of the Brazilian highway system have remained…
Rangelands cover more than 40% of the African continent and about half of Namibia. Large portions of Namibia’s rangelands are communal, serving as shared pastures for livestock and wildlife. These…
It all starts with a road. In Brazil, the federal government commissioned the construction of mule trails and telegraph lines to link their coastal cities with long-established settlements on remote…
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines infrastructure as the ‘underlying structure’ of a country – specifically, the physical installations needed to ensure that its economy functions for the benefit of society. Modern…
The consensus strategy for saving the Amazon is based on a set of five self-reinforcing policies: (1) create protected areas and recognize Indigenous reserves; (2) improve governance to combat illegal…
The current development trajectory of the Pan Amazon is uncertain. The ongoing investment in protected areas and Indigenous territories has created a solid foundation for conservation of the region’s biodiversity.…
Every Friday at 7:30 a.m., María Isabel Aguilar sells her organic produce in an artisanal market in Totonicapán, a city located in the western highlands of Guatemala. Presented on a…
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — Ankarafantsika, a primary forest in Madagascar’s northwest Boeny region, is the site of a vicious cycle where declining livelihoods and its environmental impact aggravate one another. Rice paddies,…
Environmental economics views the environment as a form of natural capital: land, water and biodiversity are viewed as assets that mediate the flow of goods and services from ecosystems toward…
The explosive growth of protected area networks was accompanied by the simultaneous recognition of the territorial rights of Indigenous people, an ongoing process that has yet to conclude. There are…
A recent study found that locally managed marine areas in Fiji strengthened the mechanisms believed to advance conservation efforts but ultimately led to few social, economic or even ecological benefits.…
SAADNAYEL, Lebanon – Located in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, a region that has been farmed for millennia, a small experimental farm known as Buzuruna Juzuruna (BuJu) is establishing an agroecological network…
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 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…
Land legally designated or owned by Indigenous, Afro-descendant and local communities increased by 102.9 million hectares (254 million acres), larger than the size of Egypt, between 2015 and 2020, according…
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…
Hundreds of millions of people around the world live in spots considered critical for the protection of wildlife. More than three-quarters of these populations exist in less-industrialized countries, where poverty…
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…
We live in a rapidly urbanizing world, with half of humanity now concentrated in cities. Without adequate and affordable housing, more than a billion people live in informal settlements or…
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…
JAMBI — A quintet of Jambi residents gathered one morning in May at the home of Leni Haini, an Indonesian environmental activist who last year received a prestigious award from…
When growing up in the Congo Basin forest, I witnessed the consequences of forest destruction by logging and industrial agricultural plantations. In some areas, Indigenous communities used to live alongside…
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…