As global leaders, experts, activists and Indigenous voices meet this October in the Colombian city of Cali at the U.N. Biodiversity Conference, COP16, missteps and successes within President Gustavo Petro’s environment agenda are watched closely.
A new atlas by human rights groups assessed tree cover and biodiversity hotspots on lands belonging to Afro-descendant peoples in 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Rights…
Almost 20% of the Kayapó Indigenous Territory has burned in this year’s Amazon drought, the worst ever recorded in Brazil.
The world’s leading conservationists will flock to Cali, Colombia, this October for the U.N. biodiversity conference, COP16. Within Cali’s bustling urban environment, it’s easy to forget that the city lies…
Pará's state capital, Belém, which will host COP30 in 2025, may elect a mayor unconcerned about climate change.
Titled quilombo territories — traditional Brazilian communities originally formed by runaway enslaved people — have significantly lower deforestation rates, making them crucial for conserving Brazil's natural biomes.
AMBON/SURABAYA/JAKARTA, Indonesia — Criminal investigations of environmental advocates in Indonesia continue to undermine civil society in the world’s third-largest democracy, with two anti-mining activists the latest to be hauled before…
AGUÁN VALLEY, Honduras — In the years after 2018, during periods when the threats subsided and the paramilitary gunmen didn’t show up, nights in the village of Panamá were peaceful.…
BATAM, Indonesia — A major Chinese solar panel manufacturing development on an Indonesian island saw renewed clashes in September between a company allegedly controlled by an Indonesian household name and…
The Brazilian state of Pará has agreed to sell millions of carbon credits to multinational corporations, including Amazon, Bayer and Walmart Foundation, but many challenges loom.
Global collagen and meat industries are continuing to foster rampant deforestation and contribute to the rights violations of Indigenous communities in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco, one of South America’s last climate-critical…
At just six years old, Nemonte Nenquimo understood that there were two worlds. The first one was where her oko (a big house where she lived in the rainforest) existed.…
Researchers in Brazil are lobbying to register archaeological sites as national monuments, which would confer a new layer of protection status to parts of the rainforest.
JAKARTA — Indigenous Papuans say they’ve been caught off guard by helicopters flying over their villages and excavators tearing down their forests in their area, all while accompanied by the…
STUNG TRENG, Cambodia — It was late in the afternoon of Sept. 16 when Ouk Mao finally answered his phone. The environmental journalist had spent much of that Monday making…
Indigenous leaders gathered at New York Climate Week to call on global leaders to address the unprecedented drought and wildfire crisis in the Amazon Rainforest.
Military police in Brazil last week killed an Indigenous Guarani Kaiowá man and wounded several others during altercations over contested land, which the communities have been trying to take formal…
JAKARTA — As the Indonesian island of Lombok prepares to host the latest leg of the marquee MotoGP racing series this weekend, former residents of what’s now the Mandalika International…
After years of delays, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR) will soon meet for the first time to discuss Kenya’s failure to implement rulings recognizing the Ogiek…
A new report links Brazil's top meatpackers — JBS, Marfrig and Minerva — to widespread deforestation across the Pantanal, Amazon and Cerrado; of five farms investigated between October 2023 and February 2024, 86% of the destruction occurred in the Pantanal.
Reports show it failed (or sabotaged) airspace control and food deliveries to the Indigenous people, who suffer from malnutrition as a result of mercury contamination from illegal mining.
During the second week of October 2023, in northern Chile’s Coquimbo, Yasna Silva used social media to ask for help. She and her entire family had been sued by the…
Ten years ago, four Indigenous Asháninka environmental defenders were murdered in the forests near their community of Saweto in Peru’s Amazon Ucayali region. In 2023, a court in Pucallpa found…
Experts say the outlook for the next months is even worse, putting researchers on alert for the possibility of Amazon’s worst drought ever.
Following regulatory changes and heavier enforcement of the gold trade, the Amazonian municipality of Itaituba, notorious as Brazil’s illegal gold capital, is struggling to deal with the new restrictions.
In January 2023, the federal government of the United States issued landmark decisions affecting two controversial projects to exploit mineral resources on public lands. One was an industrial-scale copper mine,…
River levels in parts of the Brazilian Amazon are even lower than in 2023, when the region experienced its worst drought.
STUNG TRENG, Cambodia — Rain poured down in torrential sheets as Ouk Mao guided reporters through the winding dirt tracks that were, in August, rutted with deep trenches of mud and…
The Forest Stewardship Council has suspended its certification of a controversial logging company in the Peruvian Amazon accused of encroaching on the traditional territory of the Mashco Piro, an Indigenous group…
That amounts to 1.5 metric tons of the precious metal in 2023, sourced from wildcat mines known as garimpos, which have a long history of illegality and opaqueness.
Fire outbreaks are setting records all over Brazil, with flames burning the Amazon, the Cerrado, the Pantanal and the São Paulo state.
The article, published in Nature Sustainability, concluded that the domestic market answered for three times more deforestation than international sales.
