A new report links Brazil's top meatpackers — JBS, Marfrig and Minerva — to widespread deforestation across the Pantanal, Amazon and Cerrado; of five farms investigated between October 2023 and February 2024, 86% of the destruction occurred in the Pantanal.
Reports show it failed (or sabotaged) airspace control and food deliveries to the Indigenous people, who suffer from malnutrition as a result of mercury contamination from illegal mining.
Experts say the outlook for the next months is even worse, putting researchers on alert for the possibility of Amazon’s worst drought ever.
Following regulatory changes and heavier enforcement of the gold trade, the Amazonian municipality of Itaituba, notorious as Brazil’s illegal gold capital, is struggling to deal with the new restrictions.
River levels in parts of the Brazilian Amazon are even lower than in 2023, when the region experienced its worst drought.
That amounts to 1.5 metric tons of the precious metal in 2023, sourced from wildcat mines known as garimpos, which have a long history of illegality and opaqueness.
Fire outbreaks are setting records all over Brazil, with flames burning the Amazon, the Cerrado, the Pantanal and the São Paulo state.
The article, published in Nature Sustainability, concluded that the domestic market answered for three times more deforestation than international sales.
Acre's population experienced a flood at the start of 2024 and is now suffering from water shortages due to the severe drought.
Brazilian environmental agents and the federal government have agreed a deal to end a months-long strike by the civil servants.
A study using detailed 3D imagery found that the carbon released by roads, selective logging, fires and natural disturbances in the southern Brazilian Amazon are not fully reflected in the country’s carbon emissions reporting.
Sustainable forest management plans in the Brazilian Amazon are intended to ensure compliance with strict environmental rules, but many are used fraudulently as cover for illegal logging, according to new research.
Gold was central to the colonization of the Mato Grosso state area. The state’s current capital city, Cuiabá, was founded by bandeirantes, settlers in Portuguese Brazil from São Paulo, who…
In Middle Madeira, fishing became more costly and demanding, with fishers needing to spend more days and travel farther to spots to maintain decent productivity, which led many riverines to illegal activities.
Mines are widespread in the biome, affecting especially Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, and Peru, following a sharp increase in the price of the metal, which nearly doubled since 2018.
The construction is part of a series of projects to upgrade infrastructure in Belém ahead of the COP30 climate summit next year, alongside dredging Guajará Bay to make space for ocean liners to address the shortage of hotel rooms in the city.
According to a report from Brazilian think tank the Escolhas Institute, up to 73% of all mercury used in Brazil's gold mines is of unknown origin; the country’s environmental agency states practically all mines in Brazil use illegal mercury.
In the Brazilian Amazon, low river levels and insufficient rain might lead to 2024’s dry season being worse than 2023’s historic drought.
There are a multitude of mineral ores used to produce industrial metals, which can be organized into four major groups with similar geological histories. Iron (Fe) and manganese (Mn) are…
The bill went into effect as the use of pesticides banned long ago in the European Union exploded in the Brazilian Amazon.
As criminal groups combine forces with miners in Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous Territory, officials have found it more difficult to control the spread of crime and violence that have killed hundreds…
Major raids to seize cattle in protected areas and to fight illegal mining on Indigenous territories are suspended during the strike.
This year, both the Pantanal and the Amazon have recorded alarming rates of burning, with the wetland breaking recent records that caused an international uproar.
After being locally extinct for a century in Belém, the host city of next year’s COP30 climate summit, it’s being reintroduced by conservationists who have so far released 50 individuals into the wild since 2018.
Vale SA Brazil’s second most valuable company is also the fifth largest global mining corporation. In 2022, it was as ranked by the Refinitiv ESG framework as best in its…
A year-long Mongabay investigation tracked several dozen illegal or suspicious activities in and around Araroibia in the last few years, including logging, deforestation and cattle ranching, and found a clear rise in environmental crimes in the region in mid-2023, the deadliest year for Indigenous people in Arariboia since 2016.
A new report has found wildlife smugglers employ sophisticated methods to traffic species from the Brazilian rainforest, including widespread fraud and corruption.
Raids to remove these cattle herds are logistically challenging, involving long distances, many personnel, life threats and even traps left in the middle of dirt roads.
The raid occurred two weeks after Mongabay showed the links between the REDD+ projects and a suspected logging scam.
Friends, relatives and Indigenous organizations now say the international uproar wasn’t enough to curtail local crime.
According to the investigators, the group was running land-grabbing and timber laundering crimes in the Amazon for more than a decade and profiting millions of dollars.
A bill that would reduce the amount of primary forest that landowners in the Brazilian Amazon must preserve may lead to the deforestation of an area twice the size of Rio de Janeiro state.
