In 2025, botanists Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Juan Carlos Copete embarked on a two-hour boat ride down the Vaupés River in the Colombian Amazon, followed by a two-hour hike to the…
Kashiri, the Moon, saw the young woman through a window. The celestial body descended from the sky and found her eating soil molded into the shape of a tubercle. “What…
HONORIA, Peru — Jacqueline Flores sits cross-legged on a wooden platform inside a dim Asháninka maloca, the Indigenous longhouse where her dress, painted with geometric patterns, seems to merge with…
Forest loss, along with climate change, is changing the resilience of the Amazon Rainforest. By disrupting the movement of moisture through the atmosphere, deforestation is reducing rainfall and extending the…
In October 2023, a delegation of La Gente de Centro — the Andoke (Pɵɵsiɵhɵ), Nonuya (Nonova), Muinane (Féénemɨnaa) and Uitoto (Nɨpode) peoples of the Middle Caquetá River Basin — traveled…
Austrian director and cinematographer Richard Ladkani knew little about the Amazon Rainforest before he decided to make a film about it. It was 2019. Fires raged across the Amazon. Ladkani…
CAMPO GRANDE, Brazil — In the wide, sandy stretches of Brazil’s Araguaia River, the piraíba, South America’s largest catfish, is a cornerstone of local fisheries. Fishers often recognize individual fish…
Locals warned Belo Monte would kill the river, and now the plant faces a turning point as prophecies become real.
Hatchlings talk inside their shells to time their birth, but the roar of massive barges may soon drown out their sound.
In May 2024, floodwaters submerged much of Porto Alegre. Brazil's fourth-largest city lost bridges, hospitals, and months of economic output. Hundreds died. The images briefly commanded global attention. Then the…
On Feb. 3, at the request of an association of the Indigenous Cinta Larga people in the Amazon, the Brazilian Supreme Court authorized the possibility of mining exploration and exploitation…
Families awaiting land reform in the Amazon now face a surge in mining that can destroy their chance at a decent life.
Throughout the Amazon Rainforest, forest fragmentation represents an escalating and existential threat to the preservation of fauna. Driven by intensive economic development, the expansion of agribusiness and large-scale infrastructure projects…
Brazil bet big on a mega river dam using old data, but climate change is leaving its massive turbines high and dry.
BRASÍLIA — Indigenous leaders and researchers in Brazil say an end to a key zero-deforestation agreement, the Amazon Soy Moratorium, will increase deforestation around Indigenous lands and encourage the invasion…
Conservation has long depended on measurement. Populations are counted, habitats mapped, trends plotted against baselines that often extend back only a few decades. Yet many ecosystems began changing long before…
The tropical forests of the Amazon and Andes are some of the most biodiverse places on the planet, but across both regions, changes in climate and landscape conditions are driving…
VAUPÉS, Colombia — The Vaupés River and its extensive network of waterways and lagoons in the southeastern Colombian department of the same name are integral to the Indigenous Macaquiño community,…
The Amazon Rainforest generates its own weather. Each day, the forest's 390 billion trees release approximately 20 billion metric tons of water vapor into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration, creating what…
In 2020, a research paper published in the journal Science found that 20% of soy exports and at least 17% of beef exports from Brazil’s Cerrado and Amazon biomes to…
Generations of fishers have called these rocky formations home. Now, they say Brazil is not hearing their knowledge.
Paul Rosolie has had a career unlike any other. First traveling to the Peruvian Amazon at the age of 18, Rosolie partnered with Juan Julio Durand, a local member of…
The production of food continues to eat its way into the world's tropical forests. Agricultural expansion drives nearly 90% of global deforestation, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of…
Rainfall is often treated as a gift of geography — a function of latitude, oceans, and atmospheric circulation. A growing body of research suggests that in the tropics, it is…
Despite hosting huge hydropower plants, Amazon people still pay high energy tariffs — so they found another way.
The Amazon Rainforest is approaching a dangerous threshold. Scientists warn that continued deforestation could push the world’s largest rainforest past a tipping point, transforming it into a degraded, fire-prone savanna…
PAU BRASIL, Brazil — Indigenous leader Fábio Titiah recalls the night he walked the trail to the village of Água Vermelha, in the Caramuru-Paraguassu Indigenous Territory. At around 10 p.m.,…
Brazil’s latest satellite alerts indicate that deforestation in the Amazon has continued to fall into early 2026, extending a downward trend that began after a sharp rise earlier in the…
Tucked into Brazil’s Amazon forest, along the Maici River where recently contacted Pirahã people live, journalists observed a dramatic uptick in forest loss. According to data from Global Forest Watch,…
The Brazilian government has built a map to help commodity exporters comply with the European Union’s new regulation on deforestation-free products, or EUDR. The country’s National Space Research Institute, INPE,…
Officials in Suriname are trying to cancel a controversial agribusiness contract that could result in the clearance of over a hundred thousand hectares of Amazon rainforest, risking the country’s carbon-negative…
Emotions were running high when Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced the formal recognition of several Indigenous territories at COP30, the U.N. climate conference held in the Amazonian…
