Scattered in the countryside around the municipalities of Itaituba and Jacareacanga in Brazil’s Pará state, gold mining operations run by the family of a notorious convicted enslaver have have subjected…
The illegal sale of protected land in the Brazilian Amazon has been going on for years, but a new BBC report got deeply inside the criminal network and found some land grabbers advertising on Facebook.
It happened the way it so often does in Colombia: the government announced a new official appointment and outrage ensued. As the year 2020 drew to a close, the minister…
In 2016, Matheus Sborgia, then a 26-year-old Brazilian pastry chef, received sad news: Luis Sborgia, his grandfather, had passed away. Matheus was in Pollenzo, in northern Italy, about to graduate…
Impunity still reigns when it comes to the murders of human rights defenders around the world, according to the Front Line Defenders organization, in its global analysis of 2020. The…
“How to pass the custom?” “You need to bribe someone. We do not bribe the custom, but the police officer, with higher level…” “By container?” “Yes. Possible.” “Have you tried?”…
A solemn Kanimari man looks at filmmaker Céline Cousteau and says, "I'm 28 years old. All of my cousins — my relatives that were born at the same time as…
In 2019, XPRIZE Rainforest opened its doors and challenged the world to develop new biodiversity assessment technologies by offering a $10 million prize for the best one. The consequent mobilization will extend…
"If a tree lives 500 years, it carries the carbon assimilated and stocked for the last 500 years,” says Giuliano Locosselli, a researcher at the University of São Paulo (USP)…
The Kalunga — 39 quilombola communities, the descendants of runaway slaves — have united with international funders to use high-tech georeferencing to catalog their traditional lands and natural resources in Brazil.
“We consider the witches’ broom not a plague, but rather a ‘holy’ broom,” says Rubens de Jesus. “Thanks to it, we are on the land today.” That’s not a sentiment…
Scientists warn that we are approaching the Amazon biome tipping point, but proposed solutions in Brazil appear stillborn, politically impractical or lack sufficient scale and/or funding.
Monitoring the ongoing deforestation of the Cerrado, the vast savanna scrubland that abuts the Amazon in Brazil, has become increasingly essential in recent decades. This biome, the most biodiverse savanna…
How do you let your crush know you’re interested in taking things to the next level? If you’re a male spider, you may give the female in question a gift…
An analysis of social and economic parameters in gold and diamond mining regions in the Brazilian Amazon shows that these activities have done little to boost development for locals. The…
The Black Jaguar Foundation is planning a 1,615 greenway to be planted with 1.7 billion trees. The big challenge: the corridor runs through rural landowners’ properties, and they need convincing.
With no natural predators to worry about, jaguars (Panthera onca) roam the forests of South and Central America. This feline is found in 18 countries, but only 4% of its…
When Jair Bolsonaro took office as president of Brazil at the start of 2019, he ushered in a climate of hostility toward rural activists — Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, advocates for…
A two-and-a-half hour flight separates the Chilean capital of Santiago and the Archipiélago de Juan Fernández National Park. The archipelago is rich in marine and terrestrial biodiversity and comprises three…
Even as agribusiness and the Brazilian government became allies to aggressively convert more of the savanna for soy and cattle, the National Campaign in Defense of the Cerrado moved to conserve the biome.
If we want to transform the way we care about the ocean, we must radically transform society. We need every solution and every solver, including women. We need to discuss…
After nearly giving up on their coffee plantations, farmers in Apuí, in Brazil’s Amazonas state, have turned to a different farming model. Through agroforestry, they have found they can both…
At the beginning of the 1990s, while observing the large trees of the Amazon ceding ground to the scrub-like vegetation of the Cerrado, in a process driven by human activity,…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting South America’s crab-eating fox. The crab-eating fox…
In a once-cleared patch of rainforest, four black-tufted marmosets scamper up to a pile of bananas lying in a plastic dish on the ground. Within the banana flesh are the…
The flower-gatherers of the Cerrado uplands, invisible for centuries, win UN recognition for sustainable farming, even as threats from mining, agriculture, and a national park deepen.
In 2016, Lumber Liquidators, a US retailer, paid a record-setting $13 million penalty after pleading guilty to importing flooring manufactured from illegally logged timber. As part of its plea deal,…
Between April and November last year, the government of the Brazilian state of Bahia authorized agribusinesses to collect nearly 2 billion liters (528 million gallons) of water a day.
Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s state of Amazonas, has gained worldwide notoriety for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, first for the collapse of its hospital system in April 2020…
For citizens of the Netherlands and Japan, the dream of a comfortable retirement is fueling an environmental nightmare in the Amazon. Three of the biggest pension funds in thse countries,…
