"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…
Parrots numbered 44460 and 44461 don't know it yet, but they're about to meet the human species — with all the trauma that entails. It's late afternoon, yesterday's rain has…
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.
One unusual characteristic of Latin American nations is their proclivity to adopt new constitutions that reflect periodic swings in political philosophies. These documents are notable for their length and the…
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.
This is part three of a series on the operation to evict illegal gold miners from the Munduruku Indigenous Territory. Read part one here and part two here. Part four…
Brazil is facing an alarming surge in forest fires. Last year, the country registered 237,000 fires and over 30.8 million hectares of vegetation were consumed by flames—an area the size of Italy. This represented a 79% increase in…
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.
When markets fail to manage the supply of and demand for goods and services, the outcome is referred to as ‘market failure’. There are multiple causes for market failure, but…
In many parts of Brazil, rivers may be losing water to the ground instead of gaining from it. A recent study found that groundwater levels in several regions are lower…
Brazil is home to the world’s greatest diversity of amphibians: Of the more than 8,000 species known worldwide, some 1,200 are found in the country, mainly in the Amazon and…
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.
In a part of the world where throughout history only the pure white of snow and ice could be seen, today green moss and grass are emerging. Fish and penguins…
"They're curious about us, and we're curious about them." That’s how Daniel Cangussu describes the recent interaction with a small Indigenous group that had just contacted non-Indigenous society in the…
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.
Along the Amazonian coastline in Brazil’s northeastern state of Maranhão, plans are underway for a port project that will cover part of an important Ramsar wetland that connects to a…
This is part two of a series on the operation to evict illegal gold miners from the Munduruku Indigenous Territory. Read part one here and part three here. Part four…
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.
Neither Porto Alegre, Brazil, nor Valencia, Spain, are in the news this week. But they have been before, and almost certainly will be again, as bouts of extreme drought, followed…
This is part one of a series on the operation to evict illegal gold miners from the Munduruku Indigenous Territory. Read part two here and part three here. Part four…
The largest and most infamous corruption scandal of the last decade began with a criminal investigation into the operations of Brazil’s largest corporation: Petrobras. The scandal got its name because…
In the early 2000s, deforestation levels in the Brazilian Amazon rose so tremendously that, faced with both national and international pressure, the federal government decided to implement forest timber management…
The situation is worse than previously thought In February 2025, three scientific papers were published showing that the climate situation is much worse than the scientific community thought, much less…
Jeane Da Gama Costa, 42, grew up in Umburanas, a small municipality of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil. Her family raised cattle for meat and grew crops like beans, corn and…
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…
Journalist Alex Cuadros’s latest book, “When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon” tells the story of how an Indigenous group in Brazil was forced to reckon with Western culture.
“It’s amazing, it’s amazing! I have no other word to describe it.” That’s how biologist Marcos Roberto de Brito defines the thrill of seeing a jaguar up close for the…
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.
The mounting pressure on Brazil’s federal environmental agency (IBAMA) to approve the disastrous project to extract oil from the mouth of the Amazon River (see here and here) should be…
A wide range of sustainability, health and environmental programs in the Amazon Rainforest are at stake after the U.S. government announced a 90-day pause on all foreign aid funding, including…
