As Venezuela sinks into chaos and violence, Pres. Maduro rushes to salvage its sinking economy by selling off the nation’s natural legacy in the Orinoco Mining Arc – analysis.
Venezuela has proposed the Arco Minero and Petro cryptocurrency, backed by the nation’s oil and mineral wealth, as solutions to its economic crisis. Critics say it won’t work.
Visit by Pope Francis to Peru brought needed attention to Amazon deforestation and indigenous suffering due to illegal mining, but will the pontiff’s words be a game changer?
Pope Francis will visit one of the Peruvian Amazon’s most threatened regions today, where the leader of the Catholic Church is expected to address escalating deforestation and uncertainty about indigenous…
Experts say 2017 Brazilian wildfires were caused not principally by drought, but mostly set by people, and worsened by human-caused forest degradation. Agency budget cuts worsened the crisis.
In 2016, President Maduro declared the Arco Minero; today thousands of indigenous people are being impacted by a mining boom that endangers their lives and culture.
In 2018, expect more Amazon assaults by the Temer administration, as indigenous and environmental resistance builds, with court rulings and October elections adding uncertainty.
In a major policy shift, the Brazilian government says it is abandoning plans for new mega-dams in the Amazon basin, a victory for conservationists and indigenous groups.
GARUT, Indonesia — It was, at first sight, a typical scene for the Ath-Taariq Islamic boarding school in Indonesia’s West Java province: some 50 people, most of them women, gathered…
President Temer, pressed by the ruralist lobby, attacked indigenous and traditional land rights, conserved lands, and Amazon forests this year, and retreated from Brazil's Paris climate goal – analysis.
In the last four years, Ecuador’s social organizations have tiptoed over a series of obligations (Executive Orders 16 and 739) imposed for their own subsistence by former president Rafael Correa’s…
PUNAN ADIU, Indonesia — It’s no ordinary day here in the tiny village of Punan Adiu, tucked away in the northeastern corner of Indonesian Borneo. Devit, 9, is rushing off…
The indigenous inhabitants of Indonesia’s Mentawai district, a cluster of islands off the southwestern coast of Sumatra, are a step closer to reclaiming their ancestral rights to their land from…
TAMBRAUW, Indonesia — It took more than two hours by boat, through a driving rain, to reach the village of Saubeba from the nearest large town of Sausapor in Indonesia’s…
QUITO, Ecuador – Indigenous communities in Ecuador celebrated this week after President Lenin Moreno announced Monday that the government would come down harder on oil and mining companies that don’t…
A soon to be finalized Mercosur / European Union trade deal will contain indigenous human rights clauses that may be a last hope for indigenous groups under attack in Brazil.
Papua New Guinea has been granted its largest-ever conservation area, a 3,600-square kilometer (1,390-square mile) protected area of rainforest in the country’s southeast that stretches from near the ocean up…
In 2016, Pres. Maduro proclaimed the Orinoco Mining Arc. Today armed gangs and the military fight over its riches at the expense of the environment and small-scale miners.
Brazil is fast-tracking the Ferrogrão grain railway planned for the Tapajós Basin without prior environmental review, and despite protests from indigenous groups.
Deforestation is rife in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, which lies deep in the western Amazon rainforest. A new investigation by Greenpeace reveals that as deforestation of protected areas has…
