Hydropower in the Pan Amazon: Río Trombetas and Calha Norte
In 2010, Electronorte initiated the construction of a high-tension (500 kW) transmission line to connect the power plants at Tucuruí and Belo Monte; this line was extended north to the…
Mongabay series: Perfect Storm in the Amazon
In 2023, Mongabay is publishing a new edition of the book, “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon,” in short installments and in three languages: Spanish, English and Portuguese. Author Timothy J. Killeen is an academic and expert who, since the 1980s, has studied the rainforests of Brazil and Bolivia, where he lived for more than 35 years. Chronicling the efforts of nine Amazonian countries to curb deforestation, this edition provides an overview of the topics most relevant to the conservation of the region’s biodiversity, ecosystem services and Indigenous cultures, as well as a description of the conventional and sustainable development models that are vying for space within the regional economy.
Hydropower in the Pan Amazon: The Tapajós Basin and the prevalence of Indigenous rights
The Tapajós is a clear-water river and the fifth largest tributary of the Amazon; it drops in elevation from about 800 meters above sea level in the highlands of central…
Hydropower in the Pan Amazon: Belo Monte and the Río Xingu
The most controversial hydropower project in the Pan Amazon is the complex on the Rio Xingu near the city of Altamira (Pará). The proposal to build a dam on the…
Hydropower in the Pan Amazon: The Madeira Hydropower Complex
The Rio Madeira was the next Amazonian tributary to attract the attention of Brazil’s hydropower developers. The river is free of rapids as it flows along the western edge of…
Hydropower in the Pan Amazon: Tucuruí and the Tocantins Cascade
The oldest hydropower facility in the Brazilian Amazon is the Tucuruí D&R complex (8.4 GW) on the lower Tocantins River, about 200 kilometers south of its confluence with the Amazon…
Hydropower in the Pan Amazon: The Guri complex and the Caroni Cascade
The largest hydropower complex in Venezuela is the oldest and least sustainable facility in the Pan Amazon. The complex of dams on the Rio Caroni is operated by Electrificación del…
Hydropower in the Pan Amazon: A shift toward reduced impact facilities, but the controversy continues
After highways, investments in large-scale hydropower facilities are the most controversial infrastructure investments in the Pan Amazon. Governments pursue hydropower as a sovereign source of renewable energy and driver of…
Infrastructure in the Pan Amazon: The Guiana Shield and the Coastal Plain
Roads are scarce in the Northern Amazon, and surprisingly, the few that exist have not triggered widespread deforestation. This apparent anomaly is largely the consequence of a development dynamic that…
Infrastructure in the Andean Amazon: The Carretera Marginal de la Selva
Although never organized as a specific project, the Carretera Marginal de la Selva has emerged from multiple projects that have been established in the Andean foothills from Colombia to Bolivia.…
The Andean republics of the Pan Amazon
Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia all invested in major highway building initiatives in the last half of the twentieth century, motivated in part to project sovereignty over their Amazonian provinces.…
The Human-Modified Landscapes (HML) and the Brazilian highway network
The Southern Amazon has experienced massive deforestation, coupled with the degradation of soil and water resources. The forest frontiers at the remote corners of the Brazilian highway system have remained…
Roads are primary vectors of deforestation in the Pan Amazon
It all starts with a road. In Brazil, the federal government commissioned the construction of mule trails and telegraph lines to link their coastal cities with long-established settlements on remote…
Infrastructure defines the future: Chapter 2 of “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines infrastructure as the ‘underlying structure’ of a country – specifically, the physical installations needed to ensure that its economy functions for the benefit of society. Modern…
Current policy approaches in the Amazon: certainly necessary, but are they sufficient?
The consensus strategy for saving the Amazon is based on a set of five self-reinforcing policies: (1) create protected areas and recognize Indigenous reserves; (2) improve governance to combat illegal…
The challenge of the future (and lessons from the recent past) in the Pan Amazon
The current development trajectory of the Pan Amazon is uncertain. The ongoing investment in protected areas and Indigenous territories has created a solid foundation for conservation of the region’s biodiversity.…
Monetizing nature: The under-explored power of the Amazon’s natural capital
Environmental economics views the environment as a form of natural capital: land, water and biodiversity are viewed as assets that mediate the flow of goods and services from ecosystems toward…
An Indigenous revival in the Pan Amazon
The explosive growth of protected area networks was accompanied by the simultaneous recognition of the territorial rights of Indigenous people, an ongoing process that has yet to conclude. There are…
The largest land set-aside in history
The commitment to environmental governance in the 1990s was preceded by a civil society movement to create national parks and wildlife refuges. In the first half of the twentieth century,…
Environmental governance in the Amazon
The Pan Amazon nations have constitutions that were reformed or rewritten in the last decades of the twentieth century. Previous versions either ignored nature or incorporated a simple clause assigning…
Environmental policy and action on the ground in the Amazon
From the outset, academics realised that the development programmes being deployed across the Amazon in the 1960s and 1970s would bring irreversible harm. Attempts to promote conservation were a natural…
Climate change and moisture recycling in the Amazon
Starting in the 1990s, ecosystem ecologists and atmospheric scientists in the Brazilian space agency embarked on a sophisticated collaboration with NASA and other international research institutions; their goal was to…
Forest ecology and carbon dynamics in the Amazon
A tropical rainforest is composed of thousands of species of long-lived trees, each with a natural history characterized by unique morphological, physiological and reproductive attributes. Very little was known about…
The natural history of the Amazon Rainforest
In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, scientists affiliated with institutions in the Northern Hemisphere organized most expeditions into the Amazon. These botanists, zoologists and anthropologists were…
Understanding the conventional economy of the Pan Amazon
The economies of nations are traditionally evaluated by their gross domestic product (GDP), a metric that measures the total economic output of a nation. The GDP of the Pan Amazon…
The political economy of the Pan Amazon
Politics is idiosyncratic to each country, but trends in economic policies span borders. The political economy of the Pan Amazon is the legacy of strategic development plans that began in…
The geography of environmental degradation in the Amazon
The Pan Amazon spans approximately 825 million hectares, of which approximately ninety million hectares have been lost to deforestation; this corresponds to ~13% of the original forest cover. At first…
Drivers of environmental degradation in the Amazon
Why do people clear forest? To anybody who has lived on the forest frontier, the answer is as simple as it is obvious: it is essential to the livelihoods of…
The state of the Amazon: Chapter 1 of “A Perfect Storm”
The Amazon, home to the largest tropical forest on the planet, is an irreplaceable natural asset with enormous biodiversity and a critically important component in global carbon and water cycles.…
A wild life studying the Amazon: Q&A with author Tim Killeen
While his early days as a Boy Scout brought him closer to nature and introduced him to a number of outdoor activities during his childhood in the U.S., it was…
Book: A perfect storm in the Amazon
Today, Mongabay launches a digital version of the book, A Perfect Storm in the Amazon, by Timothy J. Killeen, an academic and expert who, since the 1980s, has studied the…
Special series
Forest Trackers
- Bolivia’s El Curichi Las Garzas protected area taken over by land-grabbers
- Authorities struggle to protect Bolivian national park from drug-fueled deforestation
- Poverty and plantations: Nigerian reserve struggles against the odds
- Logging, road construction continue to fuel forest loss in Papua New Guinea
Oceans
- ‘Our life support system is at risk’: Interview with ‘Her Deepness’ Sylvia Earle
- No answers for Ghanaian fishery observer’s family months after suspected death
- Fewer fish and more rules lead to illegal catches, Italian fishers say
- Fishing by dodgy fleets hurts economies, jobs in developing countries: Report
Amazon Conservation
- Deforestation haunts top Peruvian reserve and its Indigenous communities
- Amid record-high fires across the Amazon, Brazil loses primary forests
- A web of front people conceals environmental offenders in the Amazon
- Brazil boosts protection of Amazon mangroves with new reserves in Pará state
Land rights and extractives
- Women weave a culture of resistance and agroecology in Ecuador’s Intag Valley
- Hyundai ends aluminum deal with Adaro Minerals following K-pop protest
- Brazil’s illegal gold trade takes a hammering, but persists underground
- Maluku bone collector unearths troubling consequence of coastal abrasion
Endangered Environmentalists
- Indonesian activists face jail over FB posts flagging damage to marine park
- Vietnamese environmentalist sentenced to 3 years in prison for tax evasion
- Son of slain Quilombola leader will still strive for community’s rights
- Video: Five Tembé Indigenous activists shot in Amazonian ‘palm oil war’
Indonesia's Forest Guardians
- Fenced in by Sulawesi national park, Indigenous women make forestry breakout
- In Borneo, the ‘Power of Mama’ fight Indonesia’s wildfires with all-woman crew
- Pioneer agroforester Ermi, 73, rolls back the years in Indonesia’s Gorontalo
- After 20 years and thousands of trees planted, Kalimantan’s veteran forester persists
Conservation Effectiveness
- The conservation sector must communicate better (commentary)
- Thailand tries nature-based water management to adapt to climate change
- Forest restoration to boost biomass doesn’t have to sacrifice tree diversity
- How scientists and a community are bringing a Bornean river corridor back to life
Southeast Asian infrastructure
- Study: Indonesia’s new capital city threatens stable proboscis monkey population
- Indonesia’s new capital ‘won’t sacrifice the environment’: Q&A with Nusantara’s Myrna Asnawati Safitri
- Small farmers in limbo as Cambodia wavers on Tonle Sap conservation rules
- To build its ‘green’ capital city, Indonesia runs a road through a biodiverse forest
