On July 15, Brazil’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MMA) and the Ministry of Transportation reached an “accord” for licensing the notorious BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) highway reconstruction project. The…
Remarkable discoveries in an Amazon cave rewrote human history, but it remains largely unknown as farmers advance closely.
As Brazil gears up to lead COP30, its Congress pushes the worst environmental setback in 40 years.
The world's largest meatpacker had a long journey to the U.S. stock market, one full of reports of greenwashing and corruption.
A new and alarming pattern of destruction is emerging in the rainforest, challenging Brazilian authorities ahead of COP30.
As a controversial bill passes in Brazil, environmentalists prepare for the "last stand" to save the Amazon.
A short boat ride from Belém, an Amazon island offers a living lesson of the climate crisis that leaders will debate.
Latin American cartels once were masters of the drug trade, but spikes in prices led them into controlling a new venture.
Mongabay published a five-part series delving into Brazil’s ongoing operation to evict illegal gold miners from Munduruku Indigenous territories, deep in the Amazon Rainforest. While there has been some disruption…
“The journalist should not be part of the story.” Jonathan Watts, British journalist based in Brazil, recalls the words of fellow British journalist Dom Phillips and the challenges they posed…
A Brazilian state was set to close a massive $180 million carbon credit deal, but now faces an escalating legal battle, accused of violating national laws and Indigenous rights, potentially ruining the project.
The citizens of the Pan Amazon have a common complaint: the politicians and bureaucrats who manage the affairs of state neither understand their needs nor care about their aspirations. This…
While oil prospects in the Amazon north shore attract international attention, the offer of exploration blocks around Indigenous territories goes unnoticed in Mato Grosso state.
The Brazilian environmental agency, IBAMA, approved a license to blast a natural rock barrier on the Tocantins River in Pará state to enable boats to pass during the dry season, as part of wider efforts to build a massive waterway for commodities.
"You can't stop important, high-quality journalistic work." Alessandra Sampaio, widow of British journalist Dom Phillips, says it was the main driver that led her to unite forces with his friends…
Poverty and poor border controls have allowed young women to be trafficked into the sex trade catering to illegal gold miners in Brazil’s border areas with countries like Guyana and Venezuela.
A Catholic priest, Pedro Porras, was the first to research and document the Amazon rainforest’s Upano Valley culture dating back 2,500 years.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva lives in a “disinformation space,” to use the term coined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to describe U.S. President Donald Trump. Lula is…
The Madeira River, the largest tributary of the Amazon, has been losing water flow over the last 20 years while facing severe droughts.
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.
"Everyone does it." That’s how the representative of a sawmill described the practice of selling fake documents to illegal timber from the Brazilian Amazon as legitimate, a fraud known as…
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.
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's Supreme Court backed down and withdrew its proposal to open up Indigenous territories to mining and economic activities from a controversial bill that critics say violates the Constitution.
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.
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 Superintendência de Desenvolvimento da Amazônia (SUDAM) was created to foster the development of private enterprises in the eight states of the Legal Amazon. Its policies in the first four…
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.
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.
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.
