Tropical Rivers News

Toilets: They’re not any easy subject to discuss. Even though eliminating waste from our bodies is an essential function we all must do, talking about how we deal with that…

IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, has reversed itself, allowing Norte Energia, operator of the mega-dam, to divert water flow to turbines, potentially wrecking the river’s Big Bend Indigenous and traditional fishery.

Brazil has been mined for gold, bauxite, manganese and more. While companies, investors and nations benefit, the Amazon’s people often haven’t, as they’ve lost traditional cultures, livelihoods and health.

Almost a fifth of Brazil’s soy and grains already flow down Amazonia’s rivers. Now a boom in private river port construction, with little government oversight, further threatens the region’s waterways.

The planned 650 MW dam on the Rio Branco in Brazil’s Roraima state is scheduled to become operational in 2028; it could do extraordinary socio-environmental harm.

In the Peruvian Amazon, two Indigenous groups have been battling the government and oil companies for decades to prevent an incursion they believe would forever alter their homeland. An immense…

Brazil’s current 10-year Energy Expansion Plan calls for three more large dams in Amazonia by 2029, and the country’s 2050 National Energy Plan lists many more — putting the environment at risk.

Earlier this month, Madagascar’s government suspended a controversial gold-mining operation in Vohilava commune in the country’s southeast. Many local people welcomed the news, which comes after years of tension over…

Mining, both legal and illegal, impinges on more than one-fifth of Indigenous territory in the Amazon, according to a new study from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Amazon…

JAKARTA — Newly published research has linked the spread of oil palm and rubber plantations across a watershed area of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island to worsening floods in the region. The…

Hundreds of dams are planned within global protected areas, a prospect that threatens people, plants and animals that rely on the lifegiving waters of free-flowing rivers. According to a first-of-its-kind…

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — A $9.3 billion residential and tourism development has been approved within the buffer zone of the Can Gio Mangrove Biosphere Reserve here in this…

A pork and chicken producer has expanded its operations in northern Ecuador with the help of funding from the World Bank's commercial lending arm, despite sustained complaints from local communities…

The state of Pará’s Calha Norte region, one of the Amazon’s least studied areas, is the planet’s largest mosaic of protected forests. It is a rich reserve of biodiversity facing threats from illegal land occupation and deforestation. Species could disappear even before they are discovered.

A lapsed moratorium protecting the Amazon river dolphin is up for renewal, but the Bolsonaro administration has delayed acting, even as scientists warn it could mean the freshwater mammal’s extinction.

Pixaim is one of the remaining quilombos on the Atlantic coast, an Afro-Brazilian settlement already gravely impacted by upstream dams. Now climate change could doom it.

Ecuador is in a deep economic and health crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic that has spread seriously in the city of Guayaquil, in the province of Guayas. Amid that…

Last year, while parts of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and southern Vietnam experienced a devastating drought, China held abundant water on the Upper Mekong River back from downstream communities, wiping out…

BOSTON/JAKARTA — It had rained all morning across Jakarta on the first Tuesday in February. The rivers in the Indonesian capital quickly filled up, carrying all kinds of debris toward…

Eighty-eight-year-old Le Huy Hoanh stands up from his bench and carefully poured tea in rural Vietnam, and mimes for us how he used to kill gods. With his long spear…

Snaking its way through Colombia’s northwestern department of Choco, for centuries the Atrato River has been the lifeblood for Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities living along its banks. But decades of…

A dense layer of pollution has plagued the Brazilian cities of São Paulo, Manaus and Cuiabá for days on end, rolling in from the large number of fires burning mainly…

In a comment article published in the Nature last month, scientists argue that an “energy future in which both people and rivers thrive” is possible with better planning. For decades,…

This story originally appeared on Mongabay Latam as part of a special series on threats facing isolated indigenous peoples in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Other stories in the series…

SUNGAI NIBUNG, Indonesia — The phone signal comes and goes and the electricity grid has yet to reach this patch of jungle on the west coast of Borneo. The quickest…

The Araguaian river dolphin was just discovered and described to science in 2014, so it’s no surprise that there’s a lot we don’t know about the cetacean native to the…

TANINTHARYI, Myanmar — Most of the waterways surrounding the islands of the Mergui archipelago in the Andaman Sea are lined with mangroves, and the one leading into the island of…

A group of 20 men, women, and children, mostly members of the Achuar and Shuar indigenous communities, move through dense jungle near a military base in the town of Shell…

In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report outlining strategies the world can pursue to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and maintain healthy economies and…

Animals around the globe are losing ground to farming and ranching, and their numbers are dwindling at the hands of human hunters. But the question of where to direct precious…