As dawn began to break in the Peruvian Amazon on March 5, an oil slick spread across the Puinahua River in the district of the same name, engulfing clumps of…
All three legacy-oil pipelines in the Andean Amazon system are old. The Oleoducto Transandino Colombiano (OTC) has been operating for 53 years, followed by the Sistema de Oleoducto Transecuatoriano (SOTE)…
Gold is universally recognized as a form of money that has retained value over decades, centuries and millennia. Since it is non-corrosive and precious, approximately 95% of the gold mined…
Environmental advocates routinely oppose mining and hydrocarbon-development projects because they believe that remote areas of the Amazon should remain pristine. Typically, they organize their opposition during the environmental review process…
Mineral extraction is a major cause of contention among the inhabitants of the Pan Amazon. Thousands of families depend on economic activity that originates, directly or indirectly, from the mining…
A new species of giant anaconda has been found in the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador, scientists announced. The snake, named the northern green anaconda (Eunectes akayima), is genetically distinct from…
A new road connecting eight Indigenous Waorani communities to urban centers in Ecuador’s Pastaza province aims to improve access to the interior of the Amazon and reduce transportation costs. But…
Humanity’s footprint in Ecuador now covers more than 30% of the country’s total area, at the expense of coastal ecosystems, the Andes, and forests across the country. But it’s the…
Five policy briefs released at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai call for urgently protecting the Amazon Rainforest from degenerating into a dry savanna, providing insights about what drives destruction…
This year’s COP28 kicked off in Dubai on Nov. 30 and saw Amazonian countries arriving with a string of environmental triumphs since the last climate summit hosted in Egypt. While…
Between 15 and 18% of the least-studied areas in the Brazilian Amazon are at high risk of severe climate and land-use changes by 2050, research has shown, meaning we could…
Between 2019 and 2020, the Peruvian government cracked down on illegal gold mining in Madre de Dios, its southeastern Amazon region, through an unprecedented initiative dubbed “Operation Mercury.” But according…
One of Brazil’s largest states is ramping up efforts to monitor cattle ranching in the hopes of combatting deforestation and reducing carbon emissions. A new traceability program will keep tabs…
BOGOTÁ — In the world’s major cities, partygoers do lines of cocaine, far removed from the environmental and human costs of consuming this white powder. Most are likely unaware that…
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…
The Amazon Rainforest is the largest in the world and a key player in regulating global water and carbon cycles. It also happens to be home to sophisticated criminal networks…
In early April, 35-year-old Indigenous health worker Angelita Prororita Yanomami went missing near Boa Vista, the capital city of the northernmost Brazilian state of Roraima. Two months later, her remains…
Beneath the luxurious foliage and the majestic trees of the Amazon Rainforest lies a counterintuitive reality: a mostly infertile soil that becomes swiftly depleted once its plant coverage is stripped…
Within just five years, the Amazon Rainforest could lose half the total forest cover that it lost in the first 20 years of this century, a recent study has shown,…
Ancient forest fires seem to have played a role in enhancing resistance to drought in the Amazon, a recent study suggests. The research, published in Frontiers in Forests and Global…
In 2007, Ecuador’s then-president, Rafael Correa, announced an ambitious plan to prevent oil drilling in Yasuní National Park, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas and home to the Indigenous…
A transnational, large-scale restoration strategy for the Amazon basin would allow the countries that share it to create an alternative future for the world’s largest tropical forest, by making it…
Some of the last remaining carbon sinks in the Amazon Rainforest are largely managed by Indigenous people, a new report from the World Resources Institute says. In areas of the…
Illegal gold mining is accelerating deforestation in one of Venezuela’s most threatened national parks, a new report from Amazon Conservation revealed. Satellite imagery analyzed by the NGO shows that thousands…
Officials and NGOs have hailed the European Union's agreement on a law banning the import of commodities associated with deforestation, but say it falls short of protecting areas typically not…
This year’s Amazon fire season was milder than the previous two years, but there were still nearly 1,000 major fires, many of them in recently cleared areas in the Brazilian…
Scientists warn that the Amazon is hurtling toward a tipping point, beyond which it would begin to transition from lush tropical forest into a dry, degraded savanna, unable to support…
The deforestation sweeping across the Brazilian Amazon is driven largely by industrial agriculture, mining and cattle ranching. But those activities wouldn’t be possible without heavy machinery like bulldozers and tractors,…
For the Amazon, 2021 was yet another year under the pandemic where the onslaught against nature never seemed to end. Deforestation continues, surging at year’s end Deforestation continued in the…
In November 2020, Peruvian cacao company Tamshi filed a lawsuit against Mongabay Latam staff reporter Yvette Sierra Praeli for “aggravated defamation” over her reporting of a government investigation into the…