Mongabay series: Amazon Conservation

A series of measures by the Bolsonaro government that attack the environment are putting indigenous peoples at risk, say the authors.

A cattle farmer in Tefé, Brazil, has turned his ranch into a new standard for cattle raising in the forest. It’s a more productive and more profitable system that eliminates the need for cutting down forest to open new pastureland.

Late rainfall, intense drought, dry riverbeds, more forest fires, less food available — indigenous communities across the Amazon suffer social transformations due to climate change.

IBAMA officials, while trying to halt deforestation in Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Reserve, were threatened and assaulted by illegal loggers. The Bolsonaro administration is largely unresponsive.

Global outrage at Environment Minister Ricardo Salles caught on video saying "run the cattle herd" through the Amazon, "changing all the rules and simplifying standards" while public distracted by pandemic.

Ricardo Lopes Dias, an anthropologist and Christian Evangelical pastor, appointed to head Brazil’s isolated indigenous tribes department, has been removed due to a “conflict of interest”

A bill in Congress on the verge of passage this week would allow land grabbers to self-declare their ownership of government land, ultimately converting vast stretches of Amazon rainforest to cattle ranches.

Four Alter do Châo volunteer firefighters were charged last year with setting Amazon fires; the police lack evidence, while locals say the real suspects — landgrabbers — are likely still on the loose.

The harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) lives in tropical forests stretching from the south of Mexico to the north of Argentina. But it’s in the Brazilian Amazon that a project has…

38 indigenous groups in Brazil are reporting 537 COVID-19 cases. In Mato Grosso state, a new map tracks the virus, while officials push measures that put indigenous land rights at risk.

Research measured the impacts of human disruption: bird flocks declined and vanished, seed dispersion changed, while the Rupununi region showed just how bountiful an undisturbed ecosystem can be.

Large biomes, like the Amazon rainforest, have closely linked habitats and species, which could lead to a domino effect and a rapid ecosystem collapse; even small effects can cause a crash over time.

A sweeping policy change by the Bolsonaro government opens unregistered ancestral indigenous lands to landgrabbers, loggers, ranchers, and soy growers, with huge risk for the Amazon.

Two environmental agency coordinators with a record of deeply reducing illegal mining and deforestation in the Amazon’s Xingu basin were sacked after they led a recent successful raid.

Extreme flooding in the Ecuadoran Amazon has caused widespread disarray along the banks of the Bobonaza River, all amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past couple of weeks, the surging…

Some 400 indigenous people displaced from an informal settlement in Manaus have struggled to make a living amid scarce jobs and limited income sources during the COVID-19 crisis. The capital of Amazonas state, Manaus accounts for Brazil’s fourth-highest number of deaths due to COVID-19; authorities warn that the state’s health system is close to its limit.

Huge swaths of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are drier than usual after a rainy season with rainfall index well below historical levels, raising concerns about a further spike in wildfires and deforestation as the dry season approaches.

The Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve turns 30 this year, but the spirit of sustainable forest use that drove its creation is fading away amid economic and environmental pressures. The reserve’s young people are increasingly being drawn away from the extractivism model to work in more stable activities, such as cattle ranching.

Brazil’s environmental agency IBAMA has stepped up efforts to fight environmental crimes during the COVID-19 crisis. But the fate of these operations is now uncertain, following the firing of IBAMA’s enforcement director.

Last December, I flew to Brazil to learn everything I could about Amazon conservation.  As a global citizen, I wanted to understand more about deforestation and how I can help.…

Environmental degradation has already triggered disease outbreaks in Brazil. The risk of a new emergent zoonotic disease arising there, like COVID-19, is intensified by Bolsonaro’s forest policies.

André Baniwa is one of the oldest indigenous leaders working in the Upper Rio Negro region of the state of Amazonas. He spoke with Mongabay about school education, generation of income, indigenous people in public life and his people’s concept of “good living” based in interculturality.

Invasions of indigenous reserves continue to escalate in the Brazilian Amazon amid the rapid spread of COVID-19 throughout the country, exposing how indigenous people are vulnerable to increased violence and infection amid a reduction in environmental oversight.

Created by an indigenous anthropologist, the Centro de Medicina Indígena Bahserikowi offers residents of the Brazilian Amazonian city of Manaus traditional healing and protective treatments by shamans from the Dessana, Tuyuka and Tukano ethnicities.

On 9 March 2020, Mongabay published a commentary written by Philip M. Fearnside on the “Solimões Sedimentary Area”, an oil and gas project that would implant thousands of wells spread over the western portion of the Brazilian Amazon. EPE, the Brazilian Energy Research Office, sent a response to Mongabay claiming “conceptual mistakes.” Fearnside, now, comments on these claims.

Illegal gold mining led to deforestation of thousands of hectares of forests inside indigenous reserves in the Brazilian Amazon, according to new satellite image analysis by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP). Mongabay had exclusive access to the report prior to its release.

A court in Brazil has granted the Kinja indigenous people an unprecedented right of reply to racist invective, in a move that legal experts say could be a game changer against rising discrimination by President Jair Bolsonaro’s government.

Christian fundamentalist Andrew Tonkin is allegedly planning to contact and convert isolated Brazilian Amazon indigenous people, according to Marubo and Mayoruna indigenous leaders.

In a city known for the color grey because of skyscrapers and high pollution levels, the green of Jaraguá State Park’s famed Jaraguá Peak provides a welcome respite. Situated in…

Conserved areas, indigenous and traditional communities are being put at risk by illegal roads rapidly being built in the Amazon’s Purus / Madeira basin, while authorities do nothing.