In-person Indigenous plea leads to key Swiss gold refiners promising to stop import of gold illegally mined inside Brazilian Amazon Indigenous reserves — a pledge, if fulfilled, that may be a game changer. (Video)
Thirty years ago, Brazil issued a decree officially recognizing the ancestral land of the Yanomami people as an Indigenous territory. The new designation made the area, located deep in the…
Satellites have detected forest clearing within Triunfo do Xingu this year, an area that’s supposed to be a legally protected swath of Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s northern state of Pará.…
CANELOS, Ecuador — An almost invisible trail snakes through thick buzzing forest leading to a chakra, an ancestral food garden in the Kichwa Cuya community located in Ecuador’s largest province,…
The Amazon Rainforest is resilient: the largest rainforest on the planet has been around for at least 55 million years, surviving repeated ice ages and warming. But human impacts, combined…
Amazon Basin urban centers are contaminating the Amazon, Negro, Tapajós and Tocantins rivers with pharmaceuticals and wastewater, with still largely unknown impacts on aquatic ecosystems.
Three young women from the Munduruku Indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon run an audiovisual collective that uses social media to raise awareness about illegal invasions of their territory. “Many people no longer believe what we say, they only believe what they see,” says Aldira Akai, who, at 30, is the oldest member of the collective.
Since 2013, the Ka'apor expelled the Federal Brazilian Indigenous Agency from their territory in the state of Maranhão, creating a new government council, adopting their own education system and establishing permanent settlements along their borders to contain the illegal advance of loggers, land grabbers and miners.
Years of artisanal mining along the Madre de Dios River and its tributaries have left their marks, both seen and unseen. Miners, swarming to the region in a modern-day goldrush,…
Forest degradation due to environmental causes (such as drought) and human causes (such as fragmentation) released three times as much carbon as deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 2010 and 2019, say researchers.
Felipe “Pipe” Henao is a young environmentalist from the small town of Calamar in southeastern Colombia. At the meeting point of the Amazon and Orinoco basins, it’s an area of…
Josefina Tunki is a mother, even though she doesn’t have any biological children. In 2019, she became the first president of the Shuar Arutam People (Pueblo Shuar Arutam, PSHA, in…
"Where does your ayahuasca come from?" is a question many drinkers of the psychoactive Amazonian brew would just as soon not ask of their suppliers. But Thiago Martins e Silva,…
Yasuní National Park in Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest has long been famed for being one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, home to thousands of species of plants, birds,…
France is taking new steps to ensure that products imported from Brazil aren’t contributing to deforestation in vulnerable forests and savannahs. The French government published a new risk analysis platform…
Today, being an environmental defender in the Peruvian rainforest means challenging death. It means facing narcotrafficking, land encroachment, deforestation, and illegal logging and mining. It implies traveling hundreds of kilometers,…
Deforestation in Earth's largest rainforest surged 22% to the highest level since 2006, according to official data released today by the Brazilian government. Preliminary analysis of satellite data by Brazil's…
The U.N. climate summit now underway in Glasgow, Scotland needs to empower Indigenous peoples to protect the Amazon forest, which in turn stores carbon and helps prevent disastrous climate change.
Public hearings are underway on the proposed reconstruction of BR-319, a highway which will pierce the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, despite vast potential environmental harm, and a failure to consult Indigenous groups.
How do you get a small rancher to give up cutting trees for pasture and instead produce high-value and sustainable agricultural products without the requisite skills, money, or access to…
Brazil is likely feeding international demand for gold with bullion tainted by violence, deforestation and pollution, given that almost a third of the country’s registered gold production is classified as…
The Brazilian Amazon has been transformed by fires and deforestation into a net emitter of carbon dioxide, rather than a sink absorbing the greenhouse gas, with dangerous implications for global…
Thousands of Indigenous people marched in Brazil’s capital this week, ahead of a landmark Supreme Federal Court ruling that activists warn could hamper the official recognition of Indigenous people’s territories…
Less than two weeks after preliminary data from the Brazilian government suggested a year-over-year drop in Amazon deforestation over the past 12 months, independent analysis from a Brazilian NGO provides…
Home to a third of the planet’s tropical forests, Brazil accounts for only 0.17% of the world’s main forest-friendly exports, new research has found. Significantly smaller nations — both in…
The Brazilian state of Acre, nestled along the border with Peru and Bolivia in the Amazon, has been called “the place where the wind makes the curve,” a saying that,…
The great drought and megafires that the Amazon experienced in recent years caused the death of 2.5 billion trees and vines in the Lower Tapajós River Basin, one of the…
"In 2000, Loreto had only one protected natural area, which was the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve (RNPS), today there are 14," says Corine Vriesendorp, director of the Andean Amazon Program…
Nearly 10,000 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon, an area the size of Lebanon, is at high risk of being cleared, according to a new tool using artificial intelligence technology…
A profit of over 400%. That’s what BrasilAgro got from one of its early business ventures. The company bought the Cremaq farm in 2006, paying 42 million reais ($8 million)…
