In the heart of the Colombian Amazon, the towering mountains of the Serranía del Chiribiquete harbor secrets including South America’s oldest rock art. The remote site was off-limits and poorly…
Mongabay followed the steps of Adriano Aguiar de Castro, who, according to authorities, jumped from one gold laundering scheme to another and now is also involved with gold smuggling into Venezuela.
Illegal gold miners have been moving into Amapá in the wake of federal raids on mining hotspots in other parts of the Brazilian Amazon, including the Yanomami and Munduruku Indigenous territories.
A Mongabay investigation that revealed an illegal cattle boom amid a record-high number of killings of Indigenous Guajajara has been cited by Brazilian authorities to remove thousands of head of cattle from the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in the Amazon Rainforest.
The large leaves of the aguaje, a tropical palm tree that grows in the peatlands and other seasonal wetland areas in tropical South America, form a rounded crown on its…
As REDD projects around the world face setbacks, restoration projects in the Amazon are flourishing as a means of reviving market confidence in forest-based carbon credits.
Brazil is facing an alarming surge in forest fires. Last year, the country registered 237,000 fires and over 30.8 million hectares of vegetation were consumed by flames—an area the size of Italy. This represented a 79% increase in…
For members of the Sani Warmi collective in Amazonian Ecuador, the day begins before sunrise. They tend to the chacra — their agroforestry garden — and harvest plantain, yuca, palm…
Brazil’s plans to build ports and roads to help move grains, beef and iron ore from the rainforest echo a development vision that dates back to the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s.
Colombia has created a first-of-its-kind territory meant to protect a group of Indigenous people living away from regular contact with the rest of the world. Located in the southern department…
Hidden within the Amazon Rainforest are rare, carbon-rich ecosystems known as peatlands, a type of swamp forest that’s key to combatting climate change through its capacity to absorb and store…
"They're curious about us, and we're curious about them." That’s how Daniel Cangussu describes the recent interaction with a small Indigenous group that had just contacted non-Indigenous society in the…
An international court published its ruling this month that the Ecuadorian government was responsible for a long list of human rights violations against uncontacted Indigenous communities in the Amazon Rainforest.…
Presented in February by Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes, a draft bill violates Indigenous people's constitutional rights by stripping their veto power against impactful activities on their ancestral lands and adding further obstacles to an already long land demarcation process.
Mongabay went to Pará state’s southwest and found examples of people struggling to keep sustainable initiatives in a region dominated by soy, cattle, gold and logging.
The situation is worse than previously thought In February 2025, three scientific papers were published showing that the climate situation is much worse than the scientific community thought, much less…
In 2003, Indigenous organizations petitioned the Peruvian government to create Yavarí Mirim, an Indigenous reserve on the Amazon border with Brazil and Colombia, spanning 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres),…
Journalist Alex Cuadros’s latest book, “When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon” tells the story of how an Indigenous group in Brazil was forced to reckon with Western culture.
“It’s amazing, it’s amazing! I have no other word to describe it.” That’s how biologist Marcos Roberto de Brito defines the thrill of seeing a jaguar up close for the…
I’ve learned to speak some spider monkey over the years. As a conservationist working out of the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, I’ve spent years of my life in the jungle. I…
Officials in Suriname are considering legislation that would finally establish territorial rights for Indigenous and Tribal communities. But not everyone is happy with the language of the bill, and some…
In the Yanomami Indigenous Land, the largest in Brazil, leaders believe in their youths’ skills to maintain their ancestors’ legacy and safeguard the future of a sprawling territory covering almost the size of Portugal.
Between 600 and 1,500 years ago, Indigenous people of the seasonally flooded savannas in the Bolivian Amazon created an advanced farming system that allowed them to grow corn throughout the…
The construction of the Balbina hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon led to the loss of seven endemic fish species in the Uatumã River, researchers have found.
The mounting pressure on Brazil’s federal environmental agency (IBAMA) to approve the disastrous project to extract oil from the mouth of the Amazon River (see here and here) should be…
A wide range of sustainability, health and environmental programs in the Amazon Rainforest are at stake after the U.S. government announced a 90-day pause on all foreign aid funding, including…
Randy Borman was never meant to be Cofán. And yet, from the moment he was born in 1955, deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, he belonged to them. His parents, American…
In some Amazon rivers in Brazil, cases of diseases related to inadequate basic sanitation, such as malaria and acute diarrhea, have been increasing amid climate change and population growth.
The return of the floating structures shows the resilience of illegal gold mining in the Amazon, which destroys the riverbeds and contaminates the water with mercury.
In December 2024, Ecuador completed a debt-for-nature swap to support Amazon conservation through the creation of the Amazon Biocorridor. While this provides economic relief, Amazonian leaders contend they were not…
A community in the Brazilian Amazon is transforming fallen trunks and dead trees into everyday items and art pieces.
The last time Ecuador held elections, in 2023, the country’s national assembly had been dissolved and then-President Guillermo Lasso had faced potential impeachment for a corruption scandal involving embezzlement of…
