By Tim Hirsch Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has approved a controversial bill allowing Amazon farmers to acquire an area of public land larger than France. But the president vetoed some of the most contentious clauses that would have enabled absentee landlords and companies to benefit from the measure. Smaller parcels of public […]
Brazil moved a step closer to passing a controversial law that would allow landowners who illegally deforested land in the Amazon to get legal title to these holdings. Environmentalists say HB 458 — which now only needs the signature of President Lula, an avid supporter — will legitimize years of illegal colonization and may promote […]
BY ALAN CLENDENNING SAO PAULO — Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 44 people and left 376,000 homeless. Flooding is common in the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer […]
By Andy Coghlan THE ongoing degradation of the Amazon rainforest has obscured the plight of its smaller sibling: the Atlantic forest in Brazil, which is a biodiversity hotspot. Once covering about 1.5 million square kilometres, the rainforest has been reduced to about one-tenth of its original area in the past 500 years, a new study […]
Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (AFP) May 7, 2009 – An acute drought in Brazil has hit the famed horseshoe-shaped Igauzu falls which straddle two countries, cutting back the tumbling waters to reveal the rocky sides. Only a third of the usual volume of water is now flowing over the top of the stunning falls, which […]
CORUMBA, Brazil (Reuters) – Jaguars still roam the world’s largest wetland and endangered Hyacinth Macaws nest in its trees but advancing farms and industries are destroying Brazil’s Pantanal region at an alarming rate. The degradation of the landlocked river delta on the upper Paraguay river which straddles Brazil’s borders with Bolivia and Paraguay is […]
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon forests has flipped from a decreasing to an increasing trend, according to new annual figures recently released by the country’s space agency INPE. Commenting on the figures, Brazilian environment minister Carlos Minc confirmed that the government will on Monday announce forest related carbon emission reduction targets, which will link halting deforestation […]
1992: 2006: Dense green vegetation gives way to pale fields in these newly released satellite images of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. The first image, from the Landsat Thematic Mapper in 1992, shows the beginning of agricultural development in a region of the southwestern state of Mato Grosso. It dissolves into a recently released image […]
