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…
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…
As Los Angeles faced unprecedented fires razing entire neighborhoods in late January, Latin America was not spared either. In Argentinian Patagonia, fires have destroyed more than 10,100 hectares (24,958 acres)…
Three years ago, while exploring the Mojanda mountain range in Ecuador, a team of researchers from a local NGO and a government research institute stumbled upon a small, unusual mouse.…
The constituency for the conservation of the Pan Amazon is broad-based and diverse. Academics and civil society organizations have been successful in framing conservation of the Amazon as an issue…
On one Saturday in August 2023, news of a jaguar (Panthera onca) death shook the small streets of the Amazonian town of Ixiamas in Bolivia. It was all community members…
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Bolivian society was profoundly traumatized by the Chaco War and the loss of about thirty per cent of its national territory; before…
Towering the grass islands of the Llanos de Moxos, the motacú palm (Attalea phalerata) has been around for thousands of years. It’s common across this flooded ecosystem, a mix of…
Tucabaca Valley Municipal Wildlife Reserve comprises more than 2,640 square kilometers (1,020 square miles) of semi-arid forest and tropical savannah in the heart of southern Bolivia’s Chiquitania region. However, this…
The period between the end of the rubber boom and the onset of the colonisation frenzy that began in the 1960s was a time of relative stasis in the Amazon.…
The invention of vulcanized rubber (1839), followed by the popularization of bicycles (1870s) and the invention of the automobile (1886), led to exponential growth in the demand for rubber, which…
Most of the Pan Amazonian population consists of immigrants or their descendants. They arrived over centuries, motivated by historical events that moulded their self-identity. This diverse assemblage of people represents…
Bolivia’s newest protected area, Gran Manupare Integrated Management Natural Area, sprawls across an area a tenth the size of Switzerland in the municipality of Sena, in the northern department of…
Rural-to-urban migration is a worldwide phenomenon and the Amazon is no exception. Nonetheless, a very large proportion of its immigrants are small farmers who originally came from the High Andes…
Every Sunday, Hermindo Vies wakes up early and travels by river from his village, Asunción de Quiquibey, in Bolivia’s Beni department, to the nearest major town to sell his produce.…
Cutting-edge machine-learning models have created one of the most detailed, high-resolution maps yet of aboveground carbon density in the Amazon Rainforest, revealing where the forest is most intact and what…
In Bolivia’s Madidi National Park, the Andes and the Amazon meet. Their landscapes gaze upon each other, converge and embrace with the full force of their diverse and vast vegetation.…
One of the most remarkable placer gold fields in the world is found in the Andean piedmont in the department of Madre de Dios in southern Peru. Gold was discovered…
A series of recently published data is shining a new light on patterns of deforestation in the Amazon, revealing where crops, cattle ranching and mining are encroaching on the rainforest.…
The Amazon’s most fertile, productive forests, which are critical for supplying Brazil’s agricultural region with rainfall, are also the most vulnerable to drought, according to recent research that has mapped…
Luis Fernando Pumuy turns on the spigot outside of his house and splashes water onto most of his body, trying to cool off from the unrelenting heat in the Indigenous…
A larger portion of the Amazonian region might be under protection or potentially conserved than official records indicate, according to a new study published in the journal One Earth. A…
The Pan Amazon is a significant source of several key industrial commodities. Global markets are not overly dependent on the region; nonetheless, production from Amazonian mines is not insignificant. Development…
Environmental activists in Bolivia say they’ve become the targets of discrimination, death threats and even bombings after speaking out against harmful mining operations in the department of Oruro. The activists,…
Bolivia is racing to attract foreign investment in its massive, untapped lithium reserves, with plans to expand operations and build new processing plants. But residents living near the lithium deposits…
In 2024, Latin America’s tiger cat, previously recognized as two species, was determined by scientists to be three species — a taxonomic reshuffling that has major conservation implications for these small cats.
JAKARTA — The tropics continue to lose primary forest at an alarming rate, with an area of tree cover half the size of Panama disappearing in 2023, new data from…
There are three fundamental rules of financial planning: (1) save continuously, (2) invest in a diversified portfolio of assets and (3) exercise patience via a long-term strategy. This common-sense advice…
Regardless of what satellite images show, inhabitants who have illegally planted crops within the protected area told committee officials that they “take care of Curichi”, because each union member’s rice…
In 2020, a Mongabay reporting team visited Bolivia’s Amboró National Park and Integrated Management Natural Area and found that portions of its protected forest had been cleared and replaced by…
Undesignated public land One of the objectives of the ZEE process was to assist the nations of the Pan Amazon to allocate their public lands among different constituencies and stakeholder…
Ecuador The territorial planning framework in Ecuador is known as the Plan de Desarrollo y Ordenamiento Territorial (PDOT). It is one component in an ambitious effort to articulate a Plan…
