Late last year, historic wildfires raged through Bolivia, holding the country hostage for two months between July and September and burning more than 5 million hectares (50,000 sq km or…
MANILA – For more than two decades, anti-mining groups and indigenous communities in the southern Philippines have opposed a massive mining project there, blocking it both in the courts and…
The biodiverse rainforest of the Amazon’s Purus and Madeira river basins is at risk; new roads could be built to eventually serve extensive oil and gas wells.
At a UN event, Brazil was accused of Amazon deforestation policies leading toward “ethnocide” against indigenous peoples, and “genocide” against uncontacted indigenous groups.
Attacks on indigenous Kaiowá communities in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul at the start of the year have highlighted a long-running campaign of persecution and growing violence against the group.
JAKARTA — A top Indonesian official has declared a halt to new oil palm plantations in the country’s heavily forested Papua region in favor of other, “greener,” crops, apparently contradicting…
The scale of excavation for copper and gold in the 1970s and 1980s at the Panguna mine, then one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, was massive: It swallowed up…
The guanaco (Lama guanicoe), the spindly, wild forebear of the llama, ranges across a broad reach of western and southern South America. While the species as a whole is not…
Nearly 4,000 requests have been submitted for mining-related activities on 31 indigenous reserves and 17 protected areas in Brazil, according to recently obtained data from the nongovernmental Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA) and the National Mining Agency.
The construction of the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon is the narrative engine that drives Sequestrada, the first full-length film by U.S. cinematographer and sociologist Sabrina McCormick.
Local forest managers in southeastern Mexico are sounding the alarm that their livelihoods are under threat, as companies press for access to the region’s gold, silver and other minerals. “They…
An illegal armed group connected to land grabbers killed four members of the indigenous Mayangna people, left two injured and burned 16 houses in northern Nicaragua on Jan. 29, according…
Legislation would open indigenous reserves in Amazon and across Brazil to commercial mining, oil and gas exploration, ranching, agribusiness, new dams and tourism.
For Ecuador, 2019 was a critical year for court decisions regarding environmental and social issues. At the end of 2018, the courts set precedent by ruling in favor of the…
In an exclusive interview with Mongabay, Marcelino Guedes, a researcher at Brazil’s Amapá Federal University, talks about how important the management of traditional knowledge is for strengthening the forest economy in Brazil to overcome the paradigm that sees standing forest as an enemy of development.
Scientists know from a bevy of studies that the inclusion of indigenous peoples and local communities is critical to holding deforestation at bay across the tropics, even as a tide…
Data obtained via the Access to Information Act reveals that Vale has 236 applications registered with the National Mining Agency for mineral exploration in Brazil’s Amazon Basin. Many of them are applications for research, the first step to obtaining authorization for mineral exploration.
The new council headed by nation’s VP who is a retired general will oversee all ministries ‘involved in the protection, defense and development… of the Amazon.’
One year after a tailings dam collapsed in Brazil’s southwestern state of Minas Gerais, killing 259 people and unleashing a tsunami of toxic mud, affected indigenous inhabitants are still struggling to relocate away from the polluted waters of the Paraopeba River.
Deforestation and climate change could convert Amazon rainforest to savanna by 2050. New infrastructure development would quicken process.
The effects of commercial logging, mining and farming can ripple beyond the boundaries of the operations, leading to the substantial loss and degradation of nearby forest for subsistence agriculture, a…
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.
More than one-third of the world’s remaining pristine forests, known as intact forest landscapes, exist within land that’s either managed or owned by indigenous peoples, a new study has found.…
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.
JAKARTA — President Joko Widodo’s focus on building tourism hotspots has created an increasingly hostile environment for indigenous communities and land rights activists in Indonesia, a new report says. There…
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.
