The consensus strategy for saving the Amazon is based on a set of five self-reinforcing policies: (1) create protected areas and recognize Indigenous reserves; (2) improve governance to combat illegal…
The current development trajectory of the Pan Amazon is uncertain. The ongoing investment in protected areas and Indigenous territories has created a solid foundation for conservation of the region’s biodiversity.…
Anyone living near the Paraopeba River, which runs through the state of Minas Gerais, remembers what happened to its waters. Along its 510-kilometer (317-mile) stretch, the river still passes through…
In early April, 35-year-old Indigenous health worker Angelita Prororita Yanomami went missing near Boa Vista, the capital city of the northernmost Brazilian state of Roraima. Two months later, her remains…
The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen significantly since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, as revealed by data released today from Brazil's…
Environmental economics views the environment as a form of natural capital: land, water and biodiversity are viewed as assets that mediate the flow of goods and services from ecosystems toward…
The first encounter between the biologist and the primates was like a movie scene. The monkeys moved through the thick fog covering the montane forest (or cloud forest), where she…
The explosive growth of protected area networks was accompanied by the simultaneous recognition of the territorial rights of Indigenous people, an ongoing process that has yet to conclude. There are…
Amazon river dolphins navigate the complex waterways of the forest, their pods spread across the Amazon Basin in six different countries. The routes of these large, pink mammals are naturally…
A bill eyeing to strip uncontacted Indigenous people in Peru of lands and protections was officially scrapped at the end of June. This legislative proposal, called a “step backward” by…
For 38 years, Colombian-based NGO Fundación Proyecto Tití has successfully run a reforestation program to protect the critically endangered cotton-top tamarin and its tropical dry forest habitat in northwestern Colombia.…
It will take an investment of more than $500 billion by 2050 to implement a new economy, but the costs of not doing this “could be much higher,” say the study authors.
In the arid forests of northern Peru, a rare variety of cacao tree known as blanco de Piura is cultivated by farmers and used to produce "fine-flavor" cacao (the main…
Agribusiness magnate from the USA, who is already the biggest producer of corn-based ethanol in Brazil, plans to leverage “green” investments from governments and banks to meet negative carbon emissions using an unproven method.
In Suriname, a South American country where sloths find their homes, deforestation poses a great challenge. These slow-moving creatures, unlike birds, cannot fly away, nor can they run quickly to…
In recent decades, plastic pollution has become a key environmental issue. An estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic waste enter the ocean each year, equivalent to a truckload of…
Brazilian authorities announced the seizure of almost 29 tons of shark fins this month, exposing the extent of what they described as illegal fishing in the country. It was apparently…
When Mauricio Velasco Castro graduated from culinary school in Bogotá, he didn’t look for a job in one of Colombia’s fine dining restaurants or for an internship abroad. Instead, he…
The commitment to environmental governance in the 1990s was preceded by a civil society movement to create national parks and wildlife refuges. In the first half of the twentieth century,…
The trip from the heart of Almeirim municipality, on the banks of the Amazon River, to the rural community of Cafezal takes nearly three hours on the fast boat, referred…
The Pan Amazon nations have constitutions that were reformed or rewritten in the last decades of the twentieth century. Previous versions either ignored nature or incorporated a simple clause assigning…
At the end of April, about 60 Munduruku Indigenous people from several villages in Pará traveled more than 2,800 kilometers (1,740 miles) to Brasília to participate in the 19th Acampamento…
Colombia has nearly 60 million hectares (147.5 million acres) of natural forest covering over half its territory, much of it in the Amazon basin. As a “megadiverse” country, possessing around…
A recent agreement will allow the Brazilian state of Tocantins to sell carbon credits to Swiss oil-trading company Mercuria.
Last year, the Amazon saw some of the highest rates of deforestation in over a decade, due to a combination of cattle ranching, agriculture, mining and road projects that cleared…
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…
