Roads are scarce in the Northern Amazon, and surprisingly, the few that exist have not triggered widespread deforestation. This apparent anomaly is largely the consequence of a development dynamic that…
Although never organized as a specific project, the Carretera Marginal de la Selva has emerged from multiple projects that have been established in the Andean foothills from Colombia to Bolivia.…
Freshwater dolphins navigate the waterways of the Amazon Basin. In the wet season, water spills from the rivers, flooding parts of the forests. The dolphins go, too, using their exceptionally…
Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia all invested in major highway building initiatives in the last half of the twentieth century, motivated in part to project sovereignty over their Amazonian provinces.…
The Southern Amazon has experienced massive deforestation, coupled with the degradation of soil and water resources. The forest frontiers at the remote corners of the Brazilian highway system have remained…
It all starts with a road. In Brazil, the federal government commissioned the construction of mule trails and telegraph lines to link their coastal cities with long-established settlements on remote…
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines infrastructure as the ‘underlying structure’ of a country – specifically, the physical installations needed to ensure that its economy functions for the benefit of society. Modern…
The consensus strategy for saving the Amazon is based on a set of five self-reinforcing policies: (1) create protected areas and recognize Indigenous reserves; (2) improve governance to combat illegal…
The current development trajectory of the Pan Amazon is uncertain. The ongoing investment in protected areas and Indigenous territories has created a solid foundation for conservation of the region’s biodiversity.…
In early April, 35-year-old Indigenous health worker Angelita Prororita Yanomami went missing near Boa Vista, the capital city of the northernmost Brazilian state of Roraima. Two months later, her remains…
Environmental economics views the environment as a form of natural capital: land, water and biodiversity are viewed as assets that mediate the flow of goods and services from ecosystems toward…
The explosive growth of protected area networks was accompanied by the simultaneous recognition of the territorial rights of Indigenous people, an ongoing process that has yet to conclude. There are…
Amazon river dolphins navigate the complex waterways of the forest, their pods spread across the Amazon Basin in six different countries. The routes of these large, pink mammals are naturally…
A bill eyeing to strip uncontacted Indigenous people in Peru of lands and protections was officially scrapped at the end of June. This legislative proposal, called a “step backward” by…
The commitment to environmental governance in the 1990s was preceded by a civil society movement to create national parks and wildlife refuges. In the first half of the twentieth century,…
The trip from the heart of Almeirim municipality, on the banks of the Amazon River, to the rural community of Cafezal takes nearly three hours on the fast boat, referred…
The Pan Amazon nations have constitutions that were reformed or rewritten in the last decades of the twentieth century. Previous versions either ignored nature or incorporated a simple clause assigning…
From the outset, academics realised that the development programmes being deployed across the Amazon in the 1960s and 1970s would bring irreversible harm. Attempts to promote conservation were a natural…
Starting in the 1990s, ecosystem ecologists and atmospheric scientists in the Brazilian space agency embarked on a sophisticated collaboration with NASA and other international research institutions; their goal was to…
A tropical rainforest is composed of thousands of species of long-lived trees, each with a natural history characterized by unique morphological, physiological and reproductive attributes. Very little was known about…
Beneath the luxurious foliage and the majestic trees of the Amazon Rainforest lies a counterintuitive reality: a mostly infertile soil that becomes swiftly depleted once its plant coverage is stripped…
In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, scientists affiliated with institutions in the Northern Hemisphere organized most expeditions into the Amazon. These botanists, zoologists and anthropologists were…
The economies of nations are traditionally evaluated by their gross domestic product (GDP), a metric that measures the total economic output of a nation. The GDP of the Pan Amazon…
Politics is idiosyncratic to each country, but trends in economic policies span borders. The political economy of the Pan Amazon is the legacy of strategic development plans that began in…
The Pan Amazon spans approximately 825 million hectares, of which approximately ninety million hectares have been lost to deforestation; this corresponds to ~13% of the original forest cover. At first…
SÃO PAULO — On Tuesday, Brazil’s Lower House of Congress overwhelmingly voted and approved a bill to restrict the legal recognition of Indigenous territories throughout the country. Among many changes,…
Why do people clear forest? To anybody who has lived on the forest frontier, the answer is as simple as it is obvious: it is essential to the livelihoods of…
The Amazon, home to the largest tropical forest on the planet, is an irreplaceable natural asset with enormous biodiversity and a critically important component in global carbon and water cycles.…
Drug trafficking, logging, oil palm plantations, oil spills, highways, illegal fishing, expanding Mennonite communities — in the Peruvian Amazon, there’s no shortage of threats against Indigenous peoples or their lands.…
Lula's administration is weighing the renewal of Belo Monte hydroelectric plant's license, a dam blamed for taking away the livelihoods of riverine communities and causing socio-environmental chaos - built by Lula's party.