The Brazilian Congress is analyzing a bill that would leave all the country's non-forestry vegetation unprotected, affecting an area twice the size of the United Kingdom.
New research from the NGO Conservation Strategy fund, working with federal prosecutors in Brazil, has refined a tool that puts a dollar value on the socioenvironmental costs of illegal gold mining across vital ecosystems in the Amazon.
Tasso Azevedo, one of the creators of Tropical Forests Forever, details the financial instrument envisaged to reward conservation.
In early January, Brazilian environmental agents went on strike, claiming their salaries do not make up for their risky and highly-qualified work, in a threat to Lula's zero deforestation target.
Researchers and protection agencies expected a dry season with more fires in Brazil’s Roraima state at the start of 2024, but the effects of an intense and prolonged El Niño have aggravated the situation.
Amazonian states have gone largely unrepresented at the top of the Brazilian judicial system for decades, a political distortion that has spurred calls for reform.
As infrastructure projects and soy plantations pump up land values in the Brazilian Amazon, smallholders are selling up and moving to more distant frontiers, perpetuating a cycle of displacement and deforestation.
Scientists warn that 10% of the Amazon has a high risk of being converted into a drier and degraded ecosystem by 2050, while 47% has a moderate transitional risk.
Pensar Agro (“thinking agribusiness”), or IPA, lobbied hard for newly passed legislation like the so-called time frame bill that undermines Indigenous land rights and opens up the territories to mining.
Both El Niño and climate change contributed to the lack of rainfall in the region, but climate change also led to extremely high temperatures and increased water evaporation.
With reduced support in Brazil’s Congress following the 2022 elections, the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been unable to prevent the passage of bills dismantling environmental safeguards in favor of agribusiness interests.
An unprecedented time-series study in the basin of the Tapajós River, a major tributary of the Amazon, assesses the level of degradation of small rivers threatened by agribusiness expansion.
One of the final stages in demarcating the Amazonian territory of the isolated Kawahiva tribe is set to take place this year, Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples has announced. It’s…
The Surucuá community in the Brazilian state of Pará is the first to receive an Amazonian Creative Laboratory, a compact mobile biofactory designed to help kick-start the Amazon’s bioeconomy.
In the Ecuadorian Amazon, uncontrolled illegal fishing with agrochemicals and explosives is causing long-lasting damage to aquatic ecosystems, while representing a real danger to human health, a recent study has…
Water bodies across the Brazilian state of Roraima have shrunk in area by half over the past 20 years, according to research from the mapping collective MapBiomas.
Study finds Earth could reach 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2040 and shows regional climate variables in fine detail. These findings, along with others, are very worrying for the Brazilian Amazon.
Both Lula and the Supreme Court have previously called the measures in the bill unconstitutional and against public interests, and Indigenous organizations announced they will challenge the law.
Canadian mining company Belo Sun has filed a lawsuit against community leaders and environmental rights groups for allegedly invading and occupying company-owned land, in a case the defendants are calling…
A severe drought across the Amazon Rainforest continues to be felt along the Tapajós River in Brazil’s state of Pará, where locals say it “is the worst one ever.”
The municipality of Feijó in Acre state is the first in Brazil to receive a certification of origin for its açaí berries, raising hopes that the economy centered around the fruit will grow in value.
Germany was among the donor countries that welcomed the revival of the Amazon Fund at the start of the year, seen as an important conservation measure by Brazilian President Luis…
The new model suggests that Amazon plants would reorganize, allocating more energy to their roots at the expense of stems and leaves; consequently, they would have a lower capacity to retain and absorb carbon in a scenario with reduced rainfall.
Indigenous people and advocates are fighting for the Tanaru Indigenous land to remain an Indigenous territory, but ranchers want to take possession of the plot to turn it into pastures and soy fields.
Indigenous forest guardian Paulo Paulino Guajajara was killed in November 2019 in the Brazilian Amazon. Mongabay’s Karla Mendes, who interviewed Paulo nine months before his death, returned to the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in August 2023 to talk with his family and the other guardian who survived the attack, Laércio Guajajara, and shine a light on a case that still hasn’t gone to trial after four years.
The researchers estimate that 123 childhood deaths during the 2008-19 period are associated with exposure to pesticides from the soy fields, amounting to half the deaths of children under 10 from lymphoblastic leukemia in the region.
The Amazon Rainforest is being hit by three kinds of drought at once: an “eastern El Niño,” a “central El Niño” and an “Atlantic dipole.”
Reforestation pledges have promised to replant more than 12 million hectares (30 million acres) in the coming decade.
A professor at the University of Florida, Michael Heckenberger has been visiting and studying Indigenous peoples at the Upper Xingu River for decades and says the Amazon is already facing its tipping point: “It’s a tipping event.”
The measure became even more relevant in October, following the finding of more than 100 dead dolphins in an Amazonian lake — experts suspect that the deaths are directly linked to the extreme drought affecting the region.