Carving up rainforests to make room for farming, ranching and other uses induces a host of changes into the ecosystem, many of which scientists are only just beginning to understand.…
Conservationists recently awoke to the extraordinary value of the Cerrado - a biodiverse biome long outshone by the Amazon and a key carbon sink; but agribusiness is fast destroying it.
Most environmentalists expect more deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere due to last week’s high court ruling upholding the constitutionality of much of the 2012 New Forest Code.
A 2007 study estimated that with 40% Amazon deforestation a tipping point could be reached, converting forest to savannah. New factors put that tipping point at 20-25%. Deforestation is now at 17%.
Forest fires are no longer driven mainly by deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, with climate change induced drought now taking a major role.
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 2018, expect more Amazon assaults by the Temer administration, as indigenous and environmental resistance builds, with court rulings and October elections adding uncertainty.
Mongabay published hundreds of stories on forests in 2017. Here are some of our favorites. 1. Rebel road expansion brings deforestation to remote Colombian Amazon With the demobilization of Colombia’s…
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.
Parts of the EU-Mercosur trade deal, leaked by Greenpeace, reveal incentives to radically push Latin American soy and beef production and exports, putting rainforests and global climate at risk.
Colombian community leader Hernan Bedoya, who defended collective land rights for Afro-Colombian farmers as well as local biodiversity in the face of palm oil and industrial agriculture expansion, was allegedly…
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.
Brazil is fast-tracking the Ferrogrão grain railway planned for the Tapajós Basin without prior environmental review, and despite protests from indigenous groups.
Cattle ranching can be a scourge to forests, requiring vast tracts of cleared land to produce relatively small amounts of food. It is also the primary cause of deforestation in…
With COP23 well underway, scientists warn that President Temer’s policies could doom the Amazon and Brazil’s Paris goals, while destabilizing the global climate.
In Paris, Brazil promised to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 37 percent by 2025. But the country’s emissions grew by 8.9 percent in 2016, largely due to deforestation.
To avoid impeachment on corruption charges, Brazil’s president has bought Congress and wealthy elite ruralists with a wave of decrees that will destroy the Amazon.
Brazil’s Temer has forgiven 6o percent of $3.5 billion in fines for environmental crimes, so long as perpetrators pay other 40 percent. No new means of enforcement was announced.
The president has undermined Brazil’s slavery law, making it very difficult to prosecute the wealthy elites enslaving roughly 155,000 Brazilians, critics say.
Colombia is home to more bird species than any other country on Earth. It’s also well-known for a long-simmering conflict that has only recently begun to cool. Now, a pair…
