Both El Niño and climate change contributed to the lack of rainfall in the region, but climate change also led to extremely high temperatures and increased water evaporation.
"Hope is the last to die. We are apprehensive about what happened, but we will fight." These are the words of Indigenous leader Jose Antônio Parava Ramos, a member of…
Mexico’s government recently announced the creation of 20 new protected areas across 12 states and two coastal areas in the country, covering roughly 2.3 million hectares (5.7 million acres). This…
The Caribbean spiny lobster is a coveted delicacy. But its flourishing trade comes at the expense of the Indigenous Miskito community living along the Atlantic coast of Honduras, according to…
With reduced support in Brazil’s Congress following the 2022 elections, the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been unable to prevent the passage of bills dismantling environmental safeguards in favor of agribusiness interests.
The need to fast-track the regularização of smallholder titles motivated the Terra Legal programme, which sent teams of surveyors to selected municipalities to accelerate the process for landholdings established prior…
The third pillar of the institutional mission of the Instituto Nacional de Colonização y Reforma Agraria (INCRA) encompasses both administrative and legal aspects of land tenure and, as such, is…
Coral bleaching is on the rise along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, according to the results of several expeditions made by Corales de Paz, an NGO that works to conserve and restore…
Ecuador’s new free trade agreement with China is getting backlash from critics worried about public health risks and potential damage to the environment. The agreement, which was signed last May…
It was a tourist who first found the nest. It was March 2020, and the visitor was walking through the Lacandon Jungle in southern Mexico. When he reached the highest…
Xalapa, Veracruz, MEXICO — In April 2023, Julia Martínez was washing her two children when she turned on the tap, but no drops came out. She did her best to…
While the name Katahirine seems like it could be for an observatory or some ambitious outer space project, it is rather the name of the first audiovisual network created and…
For more than 200 million years, the ancient Valdivian Temperate Forest in southwestern Chile has been a refuge for plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth. This global…
Yuly Velásquez grew up on the banks of the Magdalena River near the Colombian city of Barrancabermeja, an area surrounded by a large network of swamps, lagoons and tropical forests.…
The Mexico-U.S. border wall has interrupted the ecological connectivity of a nature reserve that’s a World Heritage Site, and should be addressed to remedy the situation, according to UNESCO. Without…
An unprecedented time-series study in the basin of the Tapajós River, a major tributary of the Amazon, assesses the level of degradation of small rivers threatened by agribusiness expansion.
Rural real estate markets in the Pan Amazon are regulated by institutions that are a legacy of the agrarian reform movements that played a prominent role in domestic politics during…
Possible plans to develop large-scale agriculture in Suriname have sparked backlash from Indigenous communities, conservation groups and some members of parliament, who are concerned about deforestation of the Amazon and…
The adage ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’ is not legally true, but the concept reigns supreme on frontier landscapes in the Pan Amazon. Land grabbers and peasant pioneers share…
Humanity’s footprint in Ecuador now covers more than 30% of the country’s total area, at the expense of coastal ecosystems, the Andes, and forests across the country. But it’s the…
Bianca’s Bird Farm sits on a two-lane country road outside of the city of Antwerp in Belgium. There’s no sign out front, just a keypad and a video camera. A…
From September to November 2023 Manaus, a city located in the relatively intact forest area in the central part of Brazilian Amazonia, was surprised to find itself under a dense…
The Atlantic Forest, located along Brazil’s southern coast, has been in dire straits for decades, with expanding cities and agriculture leaving only a small fraction of the forest standing today.…
Even before sunrise, along the beaches of the rivers and lakes of Xingu Indigenous Park in the Brazilian Amazon, a series of bonfires appear on the horizon to warm the…
In September of last year, 154 river dolphins perished in Lake Tefé in the Brazilian Amazon, reminding conservationists of the urgency required to protect threatened freshwater cetaceans. The deaths occurred…
One of the final stages in demarcating the Amazonian territory of the isolated Kawahiva tribe is set to take place this year, Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples has announced. It’s…
This story has been supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Carrying a shovel on her shoulder, Nely Flores walks quickly on the beach. “Before the guards from the mine…
Occupying a plot of land is the first, and perhaps easiest, step in the process of creating a legally constituted private property. In all eight Amazonian nations, a title or…
Colombia’s environmental authorities plan to take new steps this year to restore an important national park hit hard by deforestation and pollution, most of it from illegal gold mining. Farallones…
On Dec. 17, Chile said no to a proposal to change the country’s Constitution, with 55% of voters rejecting a second try at reforming the country’s fundamental law. The first…