Brazilian gold exporter BP Trading accounted for 10% of the country’s exports of the precious metal in 2019 and 2020, having purchased it from companies prosecuted for buying illegal gold.
Siã Shanenawa strikes a markedly different image from the stereotypical view of Brazil’s Indigenous people using bows and arrows as their main tools. Siã Shanenawa’s weapons of choice are drones…
Before the pandemic, Ecuador’s Indigenous communities were on a roll, winning a series of lawsuits against the state for selling, or trying to sell, their land to oil and mining…
The U.N. climate summit now underway in Glasgow, Scotland needs to empower Indigenous peoples to protect the Amazon forest, which in turn stores carbon and helps prevent disastrous climate change.
Liliana Dávalos had only been studying geology for a few days at the National University of Colombia in 1991 when the program director told the whole class that women were…
Public hearings are underway on the proposed reconstruction of BR-319, a highway which will pierce the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, despite vast potential environmental harm, and a failure to consult Indigenous groups.
Brazil’s Senate has opted not to call for a genocide charge against President Jair Bolsonaro, a week after the death of two Indigenous children in an Amazonian reserve being invaded…
A code red for humanity. These were the words of the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, summarizing the strong messages of the latest IPCC report on climate change. Among the most…
Last month, nine organizations collectively announced a $5 billion pledge toward biodiversity conservation efforts worldwide. Most of the participants are philanthropic foundations, but one signatory is Rainforest Trust, a conservation…
Selective forest cutting in the Amazon is on the rise, according to data released on Friday by the Brazilian government. Monthly deforestation alert data published by Brazil's national space research…
On Friday, embattled social media giant Facebook announced it would crack down on the illegal sales of protected Amazon rainforest land via its platform, according to a blog post by…
A first look at this year’s deforestation hotspots across the Amazon shows that Brazil, once again, has the grim distinction of being a leader in destruction. Massive areas of forest…
Editor’s note: Tim Killeen provides an update on the state of the Amazon in his new book “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness – Success and Failure in the Fight…
Hours after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro painted a rosy picture of his administration's environmental record during a United Nations speech, Greenpeace and other environmental groups released a set of photos…
New study addresses the effects of fires on biodiversity loss in the world’s largest forest during the last two decades. Researchers measured the impacts on the habitats of 14,000 species of plants and animals, finding that 93 to 95% suffered some consequence of the fires.
One of the main fears about the Brazilian Amazon is beginning to materialize: logging is starting to move from the periphery of the rainforest toward the core of the biome,…
Deep in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, the emerald canopy of the Campos Amazonicôs National Park sprawls across nearly a million hectares of land. Within it, dense forest hugs stretches of savanna…
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon declined for the second straight month according to data released today by the Brazilian government. Brazil's national space research institute INPE detected 918 square kilometers…
On the western fringe of the Brazilian Amazon, lush forest stretches for miles across a protected reserve that is home to the Ashaninka Indigenous people. Just a few miles away,…
How do you get a small rancher to give up cutting trees for pasture and instead produce high-value and sustainable agricultural products without the requisite skills, money, or access to…
Nine months ago, Abdón was one of 40 Indigenous people from the Peruvian municipality of Flor de Ucayali who traveled, for the last time, to the border between his community…
The Brazilian Amazon has been transformed by fires and deforestation into a net emitter of carbon dioxide, rather than a sink absorbing the greenhouse gas, with dangerous implications for global…
Less than two weeks after preliminary data from the Brazilian government suggested a year-over-year drop in Amazon deforestation over the past 12 months, independent analysis from a Brazilian NGO provides…
A group of Kichwa patrollers living in the Peruvian Indigenous communities of Santa Rosillo de Yanayaku and Anak Kurutuyaku made an unexpected discovery in 2018. On their land in the…
In late 2019, Mongabay launched a special reporting project on Amazon women that took readers to communities throughout the region to meet and learn about the women who are emerging…
Home to a third of the planet’s tropical forests, Brazil accounts for only 0.17% of the world’s main forest-friendly exports, new research has found. Significantly smaller nations — both in…
The fragility of Latin American forests has been demonstrated by a pioneering study published in the journal Science Advances, which reveals an alarming finding: half of the region's forests would…
The spread of fires in a Brazilian state that’s still mostly swathed in Amazon rainforest is raising alarms about risks to public health, compounding what’s already one of the worst…
This story is a reporting partnership between Mongabay Latam and La Barra Espaciadora. Balsa wood is a hot commodity in Ecuador, with the country exporting $402 million worth of the timber in…
The Brazilian state of Acre, nestled along the border with Peru and Bolivia in the Amazon, has been called “the place where the wind makes the curve,” a saying that,…