The petroleum industry has a long history of operational calamities, large and small, that has created an equally long history of efforts to manage the environmental and social liabilities that…
Carlos Zorrilla is a leader in what locals say is the longest continuous resistance movement against mining in Latin America. Zorrilla’s family fled from Cuba to the U.S. in 1962…
By now, dozens of countries have some version of a forestry incentive program, with the government paying local property owners to keep their trees in the ground. But a lot…
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…
When researchers arrived in Ecuador’s Esmeraldas province to document one of the most threatened animals on the planet, the brown-headed spider monkey, their initial plan was to simply carry out…
A new species of giant anaconda has been found in the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador, scientists announced. The snake, named the northern green anaconda (Eunectes akayima), is genetically distinct from…
A new road connecting eight Indigenous Waorani communities to urban centers in Ecuador’s Pastaza province aims to improve access to the interior of the Amazon and reduce transportation costs. But…
A recent study found that high-altitude ecosystems in the Andes, known as the páramo, managed by eight communities in Ecuador have led to a reduction in soil and vegetation decline,…
The sharecropping system that defined land tenure in the Ecuadorian highlands prior to agrarian reform was known as the ‘huasipungo’, a Quechua word that describes the relationship between landlords and…
The government in Ecuador is looking for ways to keep open a controversial oil block in the Amazon Rainforest, defying the results of a referendum to close the operation due…
When the body that manages fisheries across the vast international waters of the South Pacific Ocean met earlier this month, it made key decisions on bottom trawling, labor rights, observation…
Update 2/23/2024: Delegates to COP-14 approved Brazil's proposal to protect these species under Appendix II. The Amazon is the largest, most biologically diverse basin in the world. Its rainforest, the…
The political movement that brought Evo Morales to power incorporated a latent conflict between highland and lowland Indigenous communities. The lowland nations are intent on recuperating their ancestral territories, which…
Bolivia was a leader in the agrarian reform movement in South America. A defining moment in its modern history was the national revolution of 1952, which started as an uprising…
The need to fast-track the regularização of smallholder titles motivated the Terra Legal programme, which sent teams of surveyors to selected municipalities to accelerate the process for landholdings established prior…
The third pillar of the institutional mission of the Instituto Nacional de Colonização y Reforma Agraria (INCRA) encompasses both administrative and legal aspects of land tenure and, as such, is…
Ecuador’s new free trade agreement with China is getting backlash from critics worried about public health risks and potential damage to the environment. The agreement, which was signed last May…
Rural real estate markets in the Pan Amazon are regulated by institutions that are a legacy of the agrarian reform movements that played a prominent role in domestic politics during…
The adage ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’ is not legally true, but the concept reigns supreme on frontier landscapes in the Pan Amazon. Land grabbers and peasant pioneers share…
Humanity’s footprint in Ecuador now covers more than 30% of the country’s total area, at the expense of coastal ecosystems, the Andes, and forests across the country. But it’s the…
Occupying a plot of land is the first, and perhaps easiest, step in the process of creating a legally constituted private property. In all eight Amazonian nations, a title or…
New roads open wilderness landscapes to development, and commodity markets drive the expansion of the agricultural frontier. These two causes of deforestation are at the centre of deforestation policy discussions.…
After winning a historic lawsuit, an Indigenous community in Ecuador has finally obtained legal ownership of its land in a protected area — 80 years since being forcibly displaced. According…
In the Ecuadorian Amazon, uncontrolled illegal fishing with agrochemicals and explosives is causing long-lasting damage to aquatic ecosystems, while representing a real danger to human health, a recent study has…
Scientists named hundreds of new to science species this year, including an electric blue tarantula, two pygmy squids, a silent frog, and some thumb-sized chameleons. These newly uncovered creatures give…
The trade in shark fins is still underway in the United States, despite legislation making such activities illegal, an investigative report has found. Environmentalists say this indicates that officials need…
There is only limited potential for finance to change agricultural practices in the Andean Amazon, because landscapes are largely populated by smallholders who are notoriously risk-adverse in how they manage…
On Nov. 17, Ecuador’s highest court ruled in favor of Indigenous and local communities by rejecting a controversial decree that promised to shape how environmental consultations are carried out. Decree…
The agricultural producers of the Amazon have access to radically different levels of credit depending upon national policies, the willingness of each country’s financial services industry to engage rural populations…
Sustainability initiatives have been organised for most of the agricultural commodities of the Pan Amazon, including palm oil, soy and beef, but also for coffee and cacao. Several of these…