On the latest episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we welcome journalist Sue Branford, a regular contributor to Mongabay who has been reporting from Brazil since 1979 when she was with the Financial Times and then the BBC.

Branford is one of the writers behind a hard-hitting 14-part series in English and Portuguese that Mongabay is producing with The Intercept-Brasil exploring the many impacts of massive dam development projects in Brazil’s Tapajos Basin.

You can read all the features and watch the powerful videos Sue and team have produced for the series right here.

Sometimes your reporting has an impact that you don’t actually realize…These reports that we’re doing for Mongabay, we may discover such an impact…the Brazilian prosecutor is asking for compensation for this indigenous community, but there may also be other impacts that we only discover years later.

We journalists sometimes feel we just go on reporting and don’t really change very much, but now and again you come up with cases where you very definitely have changed things, and it makes you feel like, OK, it really was worthwhile.

– Sue Branford

And here’s this episode’s top news:

• Increased use of snares in Southeast Asia driving extinction crisis, scientists warn
• First-ever underwater photos of newly discovered Amazon Reef have surfaced
• Record heat and drought seen in Amazon during 2015-16 El Niño
• Logging in certified concessions drove intact forest landscape loss in Congo Basin
• Norway starts $400-million fund to halt deforestation, help farmers
• Bright lights, big city, tiny frog: Romer’s tree frog survives Hong Kong
• There are now just 30 vaquita left in the wild
• ‘Revolutionary’ new biodiversity maps reveal big gaps in conservation

For those of you who want to keep up with the top news as it’s happening, we rolled out topic-based news alerts that allow you to get daily or weekly notifications via email about topics that you select. We started with a set of about 20 topics and plan to expand the list. Go here to sign up.

And don’t forget, you can find all of our podcast episodes on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, Google Play, and RSS.

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