By Ueslei Marcelino and Anthony Boadle 18 January 2024 (Reuters) – Brazil is losing the upper hand in its battle to save the Yanomami Indigenous people, who are dying from flu, malaria, and malnutrition brought into their vast, isolated Amazon rainforest reservation by resurgent illegal miners. A year after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva […]
By Victor Maus and Tim T. Werner 3 January 2024 (Nature) – Mining is a crucial industry — from iron and copper to gravel and sand, we depend on it for the basic building blocks of the modern world. It is a fast changing sector, as the clean energy transition and digitalization boost demand for […]
By Adriano Machado 28 December 2023 SUCUNDURI, Brazil (Reuters) – Deep in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil is fighting destructive wildcat gold mining as it spreads from Indigenous lands into government-protected conservation areas. Federal Police have joined the government’s biodiversity conservation agency ICMBio on a series of recent operations to catch illegal gold miners and destroy […]
By Stephanie Hegarty 25 December 2023 (BBC World Service) – The Amazon rainforest experienced its worst drought on record in 2023. Many villages became unreachable by river, wildfires raged, and wildlife died. Some scientists worry events like these are a sign that the world’s biggest forest is fast approaching a point of no return. As […]
By Orlando Junior 3 October 2023 (AFP) – Not far from the emblematic site where the black waters of the Rio Negro join the brown currents of the Solimoes, two chief tributaries of the Amazon, what once was a lake has given way to a vast stretch of cracked mud. Now, the only water remaining […]
By Luciana Magalhaes and Samantha Pearson 17 September 2023 JUAZEIRO, Brazil – Weighing more than 100 pounds, big cats have long reigned over this hot and semi-arid region of Brazil, developing tougher paws for the scorched earth and reaching speeds of 50 miles an hour to bring down wild boar and deer. But nothing could […]
By David Wallace-Wells 6 September 2023 (The New York Times) – Canadian wildfires have this year burned a land area larger than 104 of the world’s 195 countries. The carbon dioxide released by them so far is estimated to be nearly 1.5 billion tons — more than twice as much as Canada releases through transportation, […]
By Katharine Viner 1 June 2023 (The Guardian) – Forest defenders should not be killed for exposing crimes. Journalists should not be killed for reporting facts. But, one year ago, the Guardian was devastated by the awful news that in the Amazon rainforest, two lives had been taken on the frontline of the battle to protect the […]
23 May 2023 (Queen’s University Belfast) – A new study led by researchers from Queen’s University Belfast has shown that the global loss of biodiversity caused by human industrialisation is significantly more alarming than previously thought. The global-scale analysis has been published in the journal Biological Reviews. The study looked at changes in the population densities […]
By Steven Grattan 7 April 2023 São Paulo (Reuters) – Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest rose 14 percent in March from the previous year, preliminary official data showed on Friday, highlighting the continued challenges for the new leftist government. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office on 1 January 2023, pledging to end deforestation […]