Controversial News

Indigenous group entered Brazilian museum and retrieved sacred funeral urns that courts said were rightly theirs, but which dam construction firm and authorities kept from them.

Joenia Wapichana is the first indigenous woman to be elected a federal representative in Brazil. Last year, she submitted a bill to Congress proposing that funds collected from fines for environmental infractions committed on indigenous lands be returned to native peoples.

Amazon mega-dam was built with 11,233 MW capacity, but has fallen far short, even as deforestation and drought make the goal more remote. The US$9.5 billion dam may never be profitable.

Farmers and irregular occupants in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve in Acre are enjoying newfound political power and pressuring for the reduction of the first protected area of its kind in Brazil as it approaches its 30th anniversary in March.

Three indigenous men in Amazonas state, and two peasant farmers in Maranhão, have been killed so far this month in violence experts say is spurred by Pres. Bolsonaro’s policies.

The Estrondo mega-farm exports soy to the EU and China, but it is accused in a mega-land grab; it also has a long record of threatening traditional people.

Transnational mining firms are in a rush to get access to the protected Amazon as the Bolsonaro administration plots with them to mine in RENCA and indigenous reserves.

Land grabbers and agribusiness are the big beneficiaries of new, little publicized policies; Amazon forests, indigenous and traditional peoples are the big losers.

A legal battle brewing since 2013 is coming to a head as the Mura people resist a Potássio do Brasil transnational mining project that could change their way of life for good or ill, forever.

The town of Autazes has potash deposits vital to agribusiness; the Potássio do Brasil mine wants to open, but remains blocked — it lies on the land of the Mura indigenous group.

A researcher at the INPE Center of Land System Science, Antonio Donato Nobre, describes the state of degradation threatening the future of the Amazon rainforest in an exclusive interview with Mongabay.

Brazil started the decade as an example to the world, dramatically curbing Amazon deforestation, but under Jair Bolsonaro the nation is moving toward ecological ruin.

The Amazon worst-case scenario has arrived, say leading researchers, as predicted signs of a shift from rainforest-to-savanna begin to be seen in real time on the ground.

Analysts are calling the COP25 climate summit in Madrid a colossal failure — undermining the carbon reduction goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, leaving the world in mortal danger.

Two top officials have announced that after 2020 the EU will look at closing the biomass carbon neutrality loophole that has created a boom in emission-producing wood pellets.

Three indigenous Guajajara were killed in the last six days in the Amazonian state of Maranhão, making 2019 the country’s deadliest years for indigenous leaders in two decades. In total, 10 indigenous people were murdered so far this year; seven of them were leaders.

While the Bolsonaro govt. pushes Amazon ‘development’ and agribusiness in Madrid, social movements defend forests, indigenous and traditional land rights.

Interviewed in Madrid, Will Gardiner, CEO of the UK’s largest biomass plant, said his firm leads way in energy decarbonization, despite scientific evidence to the contrary.

Even as delegates to COP25, the Madrid climate summit, sidestep the environmental and human rights goals of the Paris Agreement, a godly 71-year-old woman steps up.

Negotiators drafting Paris Agreement Article 6 rules appear to be assuring loopholes to up carbon emissions, turn forests into plantations, and failing to protect human rights.

“Don’t give money to NGOs!” Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro told viewers during a live stream on November 28. His urging came following the arrest of four volunteer firefighters belonging to…

Madrid negotiators plan to create rules for a global carbon market, but a failure so far to include forest incentives, and a silence on a biomass carbon accounting loophole could hinder progress.

SANTARÉM, Brazil, and BERLIN — I got off the mototaxi, a means of transportation that is part of everyday life in several cities in the Amazon, took off the helmet…

Listed by Brazil’s National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) as one of the largest cases of land grabbing in Brazil, the Condomínio Cachoeira do Estrondo Agribusiness venture occupies…

Intensifying cattle grazing on existing pasture could free up degraded land for new sugarcane plantations without need to clear Amazon forests and other native vegetation.

An area of primary forest in the Brazilian Amazon the size of Hawaii’s Big Island was cleared in the past year. Experts warn the deforestation rate could be even higher in the coming months amid lack of enforcement and deforestation preceding fires in August and September 2019.

Nearly three months after the spill first impacted Brazil’s coast, debate goes on over its source; now investigators using satellite data think they have found it; others aren’t so sure.

Nutrient limitations in the Amazon’s million-year-old soils may mean climate models are overestimating the size of the future carbon sink by 46-52 percent.

The Bolsonaro government is pressing ahead with plans to fast track a powerline through the Waimiri-Atroari Reserve without indigenous consultation.

A spill that coated Brazilian beaches with some 4,000 tons of oil is still a mystery, with critics blasting the Bolsonaro government’s weak response and secrecy of its investigation.