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.
Analysts offer an assessment of the 13+ year-long record of the global carbon credit program, examining REDD’s pros and cons, and its future role in curbing deforestation and combating climate change.
Imagine you have invaded a public land in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, cut the forest down and, after all that, you get the papers that certify you as…
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.
Firings, threats, thefts, gag orders, attempted kidnappings and other intimidation against environmental researchers and civil servants appear to be on the rise; many blame an incendiary Bolsonaro government.
The Jair Bolsonaro administration, with its anti-environmental policies, has done little to promote a regulated carbon market in the country, which has resulted in the development of a very active voluntary market.
More than a decade after the Planetary Boundaries framework was first proposed by top scientists, we are no closer to changing our destructive trajectory — but 2021 gives us three opportunities to act.
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 Amazônia Minada reporting project has revealed 1,265 pending requests to mine in Indigenous territories in Brazil, including restricted lands that are home to isolated tribes.
“One of the good things about living here is that it is — or at least it was, before the pandemic — possible to coexist and share ideas, sips of…
The illegal sale of protected land in the Brazilian Amazon has been going on for years, but a new BBC report got deeply inside the criminal network and found some land grabbers advertising on Facebook.
It happened the way it so often does in Colombia: the government announced a new official appointment and outrage ensued. As the year 2020 drew to a close, the minister…
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.
Scientists warn that we are approaching the Amazon biome tipping point, but proposed solutions in Brazil appear stillborn, politically impractical or lack sufficient scale and/or funding.
ALBAY, Philippines — When Typhoon Goni made landfall in the Philippines on Nov. 1, 2020, experts predicted disaster. A day earlier, the national volcanology institute, PHIVOLCS, had warned that heavy…
MINDANAO, Philippines — Four years ago, villagers in the town of Labason in the southern Philippines’ Zamboanga Peninsula woke up to a spectacle they never thought could happen in these…
An average 75% of respondents in 12 European nations say the gigantic EU-Mercosur trade pact should not be ratified if Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil doesn’t end Amazon deforestation; EU governments are listening.
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.
Update: The five activists were released on February 8 after they "signed an agreement not to enter restricted areas without permission," as Reuters reported. On Friday afternoon Kratie provincial environment…
Michael Regan, President Biden’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2019 saw no climate benefit to the production of wood pellets in North Carolina to make energy abroad; what will he do at EPA?
Environmental monitoring and firefighting saw budgets cut by over a third in two years; agencies endured massive deregulation, with nearly 600 rule changes aimed at undermining conservation, say critics.
France has rolled out a new initiative to fight deforestation and promote sustainable development. Under the initiative, announced in Ecuador in early December 2020, the South American country will be…
The Roraima state bill legalizing garimpo prospecting, if signed into law by the governor, could put the Yanomami reserve and other Indigenous territories at greater risk of invasion and COVID-19 infection.
The governor of Amazonas state in an exceptional appeal — apparently bypassing the Bolsonaro administration — is asking for emergency international assistance to combat a devastating new COVID-19 second wave.
Amazon hospital beds and ICUs overflow, and oxygen runs out as a new, maybe more virulent, COVID-19 variant rages. “It’s not a second wave we’re dealing with, but a whole tsunami,” says a doctor.
Bogotá — As the world became fixated on the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the situation for environmental defenders across the globe has only become more precarious. In 2019, 212 environmental…
Brazil has been mined for gold, bauxite, manganese and more. While companies, investors and nations benefit, the Amazon’s people often haven’t, as they’ve lost traditional cultures, livelihoods and health.
There’s a saying in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that refers to “Article 15,” a nonexistent paragraph of the country’s constitution during the Mobutu Sese Seko dictatorship in the…
1. The ocean in a worldwide pandemic As the year that challenged the world with a widespread pandemic draws to a close, COVID-19 has affected almost every aspect of life…
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.
