From the outset, academics realised that the development programmes being deployed across the Amazon in the 1960s and 1970s would bring irreversible harm. Attempts to promote conservation were a natural…
The Nioaque Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state is home to some 2,000 Terena people living in four villages. The territory spans some 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres)…
JAKARTA — The tropics lost 10% more primary rainforest in 2022 than in 2021, as forest loss in deforestation hotspots like Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continued…
In the transition zone between the eastern Amazon and the Cerrado, an interaction between climate change and agricultural expansion may be resulting in increased temperature and reduced rainfall. This is…
From high up in the Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve in Brazil’s Ceará state, the forest spreads out beyond the horizon. It’s April here in the municipality of…
Starting in the 1990s, ecosystem ecologists and atmospheric scientists in the Brazilian space agency embarked on a sophisticated collaboration with NASA and other international research institutions; their goal was to…
“People need to think about river basins or freshwater systems like a heart, a living system,” says Bernardo Caldas, from WWF-Brasil. Caldas is the co-lead author of a new study…
The alerts of illegal mining in the Yanomami Indigenous Land have zeroed for the first time since 2020, according to satellite monitoring by the Brazilian Federal Police.
Harvard-trained ethnobotanist and host of the popular podcast Plants of the Gods, Mark Plotkin is no stranger to psychedelic plants. But many people across the world, particularly in countries where…
A tropical rainforest is composed of thousands of species of long-lived trees, each with a natural history characterized by unique morphological, physiological and reproductive attributes. Very little was known about…
Macarena Martinic wasn’t surprised earlier this year when the Chilean government said yes to extending the life of Los Bronces, a large, centuries-old open-pit copper mine in the Andes, an…
In recent years, the state-run company made bold pledges about combating deforestation and received billions of dollars in reduced-interest loans to carry out these promises.
An afro-descendent community in northern Ecuador is fighting to retake its land from a palm oil company that has allegedly used questionable permits and expensive lawsuits to maintain a hold…
When Pablo Garcia Borboroglu first laid eyes on a wild penguin colony in Patagonia, Argentina, he experienced two things at once: a sense of extraordinary wonder for these wild animals,…
This investigation is a collaboration between the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), NBC News, Mongabay and El Espectador, with support from the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network. Conservation…
Beneath the luxurious foliage and the majestic trees of the Amazon Rainforest lies a counterintuitive reality: a mostly infertile soil that becomes swiftly depleted once its plant coverage is stripped…
In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, scientists affiliated with institutions in the Northern Hemisphere organized most expeditions into the Amazon. These botanists, zoologists and anthropologists were…
The environmental issues facing Venezuela are serious and wide-ranging: illegal mining in the Amazon, national water shortages, mudslides and flooding exacerbated by climate change, the degradation of protected areas, oil…
The economies of nations are traditionally evaluated by their gross domestic product (GDP), a metric that measures the total economic output of a nation. The GDP of the Pan Amazon…
Sydney Possuelo was just a teenager when he became close with two men he viewed as national heroes: the Villas-Bôas brothers, fundamental figures in the creation of Xingu Indigenous Park,…
The pungent smell of manure as cows and sheep graze on the green pastures makes the campus of the University of Concepción in the Chilean city of Chillán look like…
The takeover of a polluting landfill in Colombia was supposed to help clean up the area for residents falling sick from exposure to toxic chemicals, but years later they say…
Wild pigs are recognized worldwide as a nuisance to the environment. The IUCN lists them as one of the worst invasive species due to their potential to damage crops, harbor…
The sun has barely risen above the mountains, yet the cavalcade is already in full swing at the Agricultural Exhibition Park. While men attempt to mount powerful zebu cattle or…
Indigenous groups are seeking urgent measures against the escalation of police violence they face in seeking to reclaim their ancestral lands in Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state. In most…
It took several days of observation before researchers and local fishermen found the best way to catch the Amazon river dolphins they were studying in the largest lake in the…
Politics is idiosyncratic to each country, but trends in economic policies span borders. The political economy of the Pan Amazon is the legacy of strategic development plans that began in…
Mayra Parra presses play on her laptop, and the video on the screen comes to life for the Perez family in the town of Abriaquí, Colombia. As a spectacled bear…
When it comes to the Belo Monte dam complex on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon, biologists and fishers agree on one thing: this hydroelectric power plant, theoretically the…
The Gran Chaco, South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon, has been steadily replaced by croplands and cattle ranches for decades. Now, the semiarid lowland faces a new threat: the…
