Amazon

The lush rainforest stretches for miles across the Terra do Meio Ecological Station, in Brazil’s northern state of Pará. Near the edge of the vast protected reserve, a makeshift road slices through the thick emerald canopy. Flanking it are swaths of freshly cleared land, spanning hundreds of hectares. Further south, forest is being replaced by […]

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — The intensification of forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon is increasingly impacting the health of local populations, with a marked effect on the region’s Indigenous peoples. Combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, the risk of respiratory ailments in northern states such as Acre is escalating. At the peak of the fires in […]

Near the western fringe of the Brazilian Amazon, the emerald canopy blankets hundreds of thousands of hectares. Tucked into the vast Guajará-Mirim State Park, savanna forest stretches for miles before melting into rainforest, in a rare encounter of two starkly different ecosystems. But, abruptly, lush jungle gives way to neat rectangles of charred land and […]

“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, a devotee of Santo Daime, a religion whose rituals are based on the purifying power of this drink, and trained forester in Brazil’s northern Acre […]

At the COP26 climate summit last month, when Brazilian Environment Minister Joaquim Leite announced the country would update its climate goals to include zero illegal deforestation by 2028 (replacing the previous pledge for 2030), local environmentalists, researchers and policy specialists expressed skepticism. Their concern, conveyed on social media and in news interviews, was that the […]

A group of supermarket chains that includes Sainsbury’s in the U.K. and Lidl in the Netherlands said this week that they will either reduce or outright halt sales of Brazilian beef in the coming months. The move comes in the wake of an investigation published by the environmental advocacy group Mighty Earth and Repórter Brasil […]

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, insects, reptiles and mammals. It’s also home to various Indigenous communities, including the country’s last two uncontacted Indigenous nations, the Tagaeri and Taromenane. But during the […]

Low German Old Colony Mennonites, who have been settling across Latin America for the past 100 years, have cleared 495 hectares (1,223 acres) of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon so far this year. The illegal deforestation documented by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) is part of an ongoing expansion in the region […]

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 earlier this month that shows how much activity by soy traders is causing tree cover loss. The tool is intended to implement more rigorous oversight […]

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, for days, in rugged conditions and incommunicado, to detect these activities and risk life to defend the land. And when the person leading the fight […]