The Brazilian Congress is analyzing a bill that would leave all the country's non-forestry vegetation unprotected, affecting an area twice the size of the United Kingdom.
Over the past 4 billion years, lifeforms have evolved into the spectacular array of species that now inhabit the planet. While many species radiated into extensive families of closely related…
The lowland forest of El Impenetrable National Park in northern Argentina sprawls across the hot, swampy green of the Gran Chaco biome, home to South America’s largest mammals and thousands…
New research from the NGO Conservation Strategy fund, working with federal prosecutors in Brazil, has refined a tool that puts a dollar value on the socioenvironmental costs of illegal gold mining across vital ecosystems in the Amazon.
Flooding caused by heavy rains in central Peru in March displaced hundreds of Indigenous families and destroyed their sustainable agroforestry projects, raising concerns about how they’ll recover and what steps…
Environmental advocates routinely oppose mining and hydrocarbon-development projects because they believe that remote areas of the Amazon should remain pristine. Typically, they organize their opposition during the environmental review process…
While wind turbines and solar panels multiply across the Brazilian dry forests, Tião Alves insists on tin windmills and PET bottle-based heaters. "Backcountry technology," as he defines it, arguing that…
Tasso Azevedo, one of the creators of Tropical Forests Forever, details the financial instrument envisaged to reward conservation.
Deforestation from soy continues to spread through Brazil’s Cerrado and Amazon Rainforest, with satellite readings showing new areas of forest loss from as recently as last December, a new study…
With exponential AI energy demand threatening to soon overwhelm the U.S. electric grid, analysts fear that AI’s rapid entry into Latin America could bring massive energy and water consumption, putting communities at risk.
Mineral extraction is a major cause of contention among the inhabitants of the Pan Amazon. Thousands of families depend on economic activity that originates, directly or indirectly, from the mining…
A team of paleontologists found a giant fossilized skull along the shore of the Napo River in the Peruvian Amazon. To their surprise, the relic belonged to a newly described…
The government in Suriname said it cancelled a controversial pilot program that would have brought hundreds of Mennonites to the country to carry out agricultural activity, likely in forested areas.…
In early January, Brazilian environmental agents went on strike, claiming their salaries do not make up for their risky and highly-qualified work, in a threat to Lula's zero deforestation target.
On May 9, 1983, Soraida Chindoy Buesaquillo’s placenta was planted in the mountains of Putumayo, where Colombia’s Amazon rainforest meets the Andes. Her mother, Concepción Buesaquillo, was a midwife by…
KOSÑIPATA, Peru – “It’s the best road I’ve ever gone birding on, in terms of the variety of habitats and birds,” says Victor Emanuel, one of the pioneers of modern…
Researchers and protection agencies expected a dry season with more fires in Brazil’s Roraima state at the start of 2024, but the effects of an intense and prolonged El Niño have aggravated the situation.
By now, dozens of countries have some version of a forestry incentive program, with the government paying local property owners to keep their trees in the ground. But a lot…
IQUITOS, Peru — "Oh, they're so delicious," said Soledad Coronil, an elderly local woman, as she enjoyed a boiled tortoise egg earlier this year. "You have to open the shell…
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has continued on a downward trajectory despite a sharp increase in fires associated with the severe drought in the region, reveals data released by Brazil's…
The climate emergency has affected development and violated the rights of children and adolescents around the world, and in Brazil. In addition to fires, prolonged, extreme droughts make access to…
Amazonian states have gone largely unrepresented at the top of the Brazilian judicial system for decades, a political distortion that has spurred calls for reform.
In the municipality of Camocim, on Brazil’s northeastern coast, the fishing village of Praia do Xavier was erased from the map. Or at least that’s how it appeared on the…
At Belén Market in the northeastern Peruvian city of Iquitos, monkeys illegally captured from the Amazon Rainforest are sold as pets right next to fruits and vegetables. The primates are…
One of the benefits of agroforestry and plantation forestry is the ability of tree crops to capture and store carbon in their above-ground biomass. Although they must be renovated (cut…
There are three fundamental rules of financial planning: (1) save continuously, (2) invest in a diversified portfolio of assets and (3) exercise patience via a long-term strategy. This common-sense advice…
As infrastructure projects and soy plantations pump up land values in the Brazilian Amazon, smallholders are selling up and moving to more distant frontiers, perpetuating a cycle of displacement and deforestation.
The Pampa grassland of South America covers just 2% of Brazil’s territory, dwarfed to the north by the immense rainforest, wetland and savanna landscapes of the Amazon, Pantanal and Cerrado.…
In late December 2023, when communities in the southeastern Peruvian province of Cotabambas received a copy of proposed modifications to the Las Bambas copper mine, they were at first surprised,…
JURUTI, Pará state, Brazil — One of the little sand piles appears to be moving. Fábio Andrew Cunha opens the way with his hands, and a baby pitiú emerges from…