Rainforest Mining News

Soaring gold prices, brought on by the economic meltdown and COVID-19 uncertainty, have led to a rapid, largely un-policed, expansion of illegal gold mining in the Amazon.

More than 3,660 indigenous people are infected, with many elders dead. Analysts suggest the rising toll may be driven by deep poverty, and the undermining of traditional cultures and overall health by modern intrusions.

Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) arrived in Boa Vista on the Trombetas River in 1979. While the mining company made big profits, traditional people say it has given back little while doing great harm.

A series of measures by the Bolsonaro government that attack the environment are putting indigenous peoples at risk, say the authors.

Boa Vista Quilombo — an Afro-Brazilian community of runaway slave descendants — lacks basic health services, but COVID-19 is now just a half mile away, infecting MRN mining company personnel.

Brazil’s environmental agency IBAMA has stepped up efforts to fight environmental crimes during the COVID-19 crisis. But the fate of these operations is now uncertain, following the firing of IBAMA’s enforcement director.

On satellite images, the Panguna mine yawns amid the otherwise green mountain forests of central Bougainville Island in the South Pacific, a silty river valley tracing a jagged path from…

JAKARTA — A litany of loopholes allows mining companies in Indonesia to shirk their obligation to restore and rehabilitate their former concessions, a new report says. Spatial analysis of eight…

Invasions of indigenous reserves continue to escalate in the Brazilian Amazon amid the rapid spread of COVID-19 throughout the country, exposing how indigenous people are vulnerable to increased violence and infection amid a reduction in environmental oversight.

Scientists who spent five years studying the impact of illegal mining in Peru’s southeastern Madre de Dios department recently explored that impact in La Pampa, a geographic area in the…

JAKARTA — The coal industry in Indonesia, one of the world’s top exporters of the fossil fuel, has laid waste to large swaths of forest, polluted waterways, and disenfranchised local…

More than a decade of illegal gold mining around the upstart town of La Pampa in the Peruvian Amazon has tainted local water supplies, razed forests adjacent to a world-class…

Leaders of several indigenous communities have lodged a complaint with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, that a Netherlands-based oil company fouled the environment in Peru's slice…

At a UN event, Brazil was accused of Amazon deforestation policies leading toward “ethnocide” against indigenous peoples, and “genocide” against uncontacted indigenous groups.

Pan American Silver, one of the world’s largest mining companies, operates eight mines in Central and South America that are beset with allegations of environmental disruption and human rights violations,…

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…

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.

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has shut down 26 mining pits on the hilly outskirts of Jakarta, following floods and landslides last month exacerbated by environmental degradation in the area.…

On Jan. 25, 2019, the Brumadinho dam collapsed, releasing a slurry of water containing the waste products, or tailings, from the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine in southeastern Brazil.…

Authorities in Indonesia have expanded their efforts to shut down illegal gold mining in Sumatra, where they practice has grown in recent years. Officials in West Sumatra province pledged last…

Legislation would open indigenous reserves in Amazon and across Brazil to commercial mining, oil and gas exploration, ranching, agribusiness, new dams and tourism.

SAMARINDA, Indonesia — Major flooding from just a few hours of heavy rain in Samarinda, Indonesia’s coal-mining capital, has underscored the severity of the environmental degradation being carried out by…

Gold mining in just 23,613 hectares (58,349 acres) of the Peruvian Amazon forest — an area about twice the size of the city of Paris — emitted as much carbon…

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.

Models and real-world events indicate that, unless action is taken now, up to 70% of the Amazon rainforest could become savanna in under 50 years, with huge carbon releases, destabilizing global climate.

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.’

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…

In eastern Liberia, efforts are underway to formally demarcate the boundaries of Sapo National Park, the largest tract of protected rainforest in the country and one of the most important…

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.