Illegal miners attacked and tried to block Indigenous leaders in Brazil’s Amazon from traveling to the country’s capital to protest invasions of their lands and violence against their people, in…
A gold mining impacts calculator launched this week is the first to offer Brazilian authorities and society a consistent science-based formula for calculating the social and economic costs of the industrial-scale illegal mining operations that have swept the Brazilian Amazon, experts say.
Prosecutors in Brazil have demanded immediate remedial action following a leak of waste from the Pitinga tin mine into rivers that serve Indigenous communities in the Amazonian reserve of Waimiri-Atroari.
Deforestation driven by illegal mining around Peru’s Pariamanu River has accelerated in the past six months, with forests one and a half times the size of London’s Hyde Park lost…
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) contains the bulk of Africa’s humid rainforest. But forests that were once dense, impenetrable and continuous are increasingly fractured by deforestation. New satellite…
JAKARTA — Massive deforestation for coal mines may have exacerbated floods that recently inundated the eastern part of Indonesian Borneo, the country’s coal heartland. Fourteen villages in Berau district, East…
Wildcat miners fired shots and set houses ablaze in an Indigenous village in the Brazilian Amazon this week, fueling worries among Indigenous rights groups of further violent attacks by gold…
An expansive clearing of primary forest has been detected in a protected area in the Brazilian Amazon, possibly driven by illegal mining activities. In March, the Global Land Analysis and…
After a week of violent clashes with illegal gold miners in Roraima state, the Yanomami people’s calls for federal help have remained unanswered. The government will incur daily fines of 1 million reais ($189,000) if the delay exceeds June 5.
While Yanomami people were under attack by illegal gold miners with automatic weapons for the third time this week in northern Roraima state, Brazil’s Lower House approved a bill that exempts environmental impact assessments and licensing for development projects, further endangering the country’s ecosystems and traditional communities.
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.
A new report reveals that investing in securing the land rights of Indigenous and tribal communities across Latin America and the Caribbean could cut carbon dioxide emissions at low costs…
Anglo American has up to 86 applications pending to mine on Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon — a practice that is currently prohibited but could soon be allowed under a controversial bill. The company has refused to commit not to mine on Indigenous lands, yet also claims it never intended to do so when it and its two Brazilian subsidiaries filed nearly 300 applications for that very purpose.
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.
Deforestation is so rampant throughout Madagascar, an island far larger than California, that it’s easy to forget the impact of tree clearance in any one specific area of the country…
Scattered in the countryside around the municipalities of Itaituba and Jacareacanga in Brazil’s Pará state, gold mining operations run by the family of a notorious convicted enslaver have have subjected…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has walked back its denial that deforestation for coal mines exacerbated recently deadly flooding in southern Borneo, saying it will now push to rehabilitate abandoned…
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 old adage of "money talks" is being given a modern data analysis stress test and applied to the assassinations of civil society activists in the global mining sector. In…
“This is a country that has a forestry vocation,” says José Miguel Orozco, professor of forest governance and policy at Bogotá’s Francisco José de Caldas District University. High-altitude Andean forests,…
Today we have two stories about the impacts of mining and some of the new and innovative ways conservationists are attempting to deal with those impacts. Listen here: Our first…
A thin plume of smoke rises above the lush canopy of the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, deep in the Brazilian Amazon. A couple of men feed the flames engulfing a wooden…
Their territory is suffering the ravages of COVID-19, invasion by 20,000 illegal miners, mercury pollution, severe deforestation, and “genocidal” government apathy, say the Yanomami people.
A historic court ruling in Ecuador that will let a community vote on whether to allow mining in its midst could set the stage for a region-wide grassroots pushback against…
Eleven road construction workers were killed on Oct. 21 by a landslide at an illegal coal mining site in Indonesia’s South Sumatra province. The workers were found buried under soil…
JAKARTA — When Indonesia’s parliament passed a new slate of deregulation that, among other things, drastically strips back environmental protections against coal mining, critics and protesters denounced it as catering…
Mining, both legal and illegal, impinges on more than one-fifth of Indigenous territory in the Amazon, according to a new study from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Amazon…
Last week a new film was released that documents the building of a road into the Manu Biosphere Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon. It's a story of conflict, community development,…
BANGKA BELITUNG, Indonesia — Fishers in Sumatra have joined forces in opposition to a government plan to allow coastal mining that they say will destroy their fisheries. The government of…
Gold mining can demolish Amazon rainforest in just a few days. New research finds that the impacted forest does not recover even 3-4 years after a mine is abandoned.
