Amazon

Before the pandemic, Ecuador’s Indigenous communities were on a roll, winning a series of lawsuits against the state for selling, or trying to sell, their land to oil and mining companies. In the Amazon, two of these trials were of particular importance: the Cofan trial in 2018 that led to 52 mining concessions being cancelled […]

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — In the space of just a few months, entire cities and small communities in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon have faced extreme weather conditions this year — from flood-related displacement to severe water shortage — that experts attribute to climate change and human actions, including the depletion of banks of […]

Liliana Dávalos had only been studying geology for a few days at the National University of Colombia in 1991 when the program director told the whole class that women were there to find a husband instead of pursuing a career in science. Dávalos had entered the university, the most important public academic institution in Colombia, […]

Just a day ahead of U.S. congressional hearings on climate change with heads of the largest oil companies in the world, a scathing new report has found that Chevron oil has dozens of outstanding legal cases for environmental damage, and a track record of not paying the associated fines, fees, and judgements. The independent report, […]

Brazil’s Senate has opted not to call for a genocide charge against President Jair Bolsonaro, a week after the death of two Indigenous children in an Amazonian reserve being invaded by illegal miners. The move by members of the upper house of Congress was made public on Oct. 19, with senators citing “doubts” that any […]

132 Amazon protected areas have been offered for adoption, with three transnational companies signing on so far (French Carrefour, Dutch Heineken, and U.S. Coca Cola). Activists say traditional peoples are not being consulted.

The asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed more than 75% of all species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs, triggered an ecological catastrophe that took the neotropical rainforests around 6 million years to recover from, according to a recent study published in Science. The mass extinction that followed claimed nearly half of all […]

In recent weeks, nine major fires have ignited in the Brazilian Amazon, heralding the start of another fire season which, after a particularly dry year, experts say could be a bad one. “The rainy season is already finished and it was a bad [dry] rainy season,” Marcelo Seluchi, a meteorologist in Brazil’s national space research […]

Land conflicts in Brazil hit 1,576 cases in 2020, the highest number ever recorded by the Catholic Church-affiliated Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), which has been keeping track of the issue since 1985. This number represents an increase of 25% from 2019, and 57.6% from 2018. It translates into an average of 4.31 land conflicts per […]