By Jeremy Hance18 July 2013 (mongabay.com) – Brazil has launched a military campaign to evict illegal loggers working from the fringes of an indigenous reserve home to the Awá people, reports Survival International. Inhabiting the Amazon rainforest in northeastern Brazil, only around 450 Awá, also known as Guajá, survive today, and around a quarter of […]
6 July 2013 (mongabay.com) – Data released by the Brazilian government Friday confirms an increase in Amazon forest loss. Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, INPE, updated data from its near-real-time deforestation tracking system, known as DETER. The system showed a near five-fold increase in forest loss during May 2013 relative to a year earlier, from […]
By Rhett A. Butler26 June 2013 (mongabay.com) – Peru had the largest extent of forest loss in 2012, losing 48,000 hectares, an increase of 15,431 ha or 47 percent over 2011. Venezuela (11,606 ha), Colombia (10,069 ha), Bolivia (6,975 ha), Suriname (6,569 ha), Guyana (3,713 ha), Ecuador (1,663 ha), and French Guyana (1,338 ha) followed. […]
By Rhett A. Butler26 June 2013 (mongabay.com) – Deforestation has sharply increased in Amazon rainforest countries outside of Brazil, finds a new analysis based on satellite data. Researchers from Terra-i and O-Eco’s InfoAmazonia team have developed updated forest cover maps for Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, French Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. The results reveal a […]
By Laurie Goering28 June 2013 LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Population growth, rising affluence, water shortages, and climate change are combining to create unprecedented pressure on the world’s food supply – pressure that is likely to play out both as slow rises in hunger and as famines linked to extreme weather events, a leading agriculture […]
18 June 2013, SANTIAGO (AFP) – Two thirds of Chile’s territory is facing desertification in which the bone-dry Atacama Desert grows by over a meter (3.3 feet) a day, President Sebastian Pinera warned Monday. The changing topography and consequences for the land “is one of the greatest threats to sustained development, and to sustainable development, […]
By David Hill 24 May 2013 (Guardian) – The local government in one of the remotest parts of the Peruvian Amazon has allegedly funded the illegal clearing of rainforest at the start of the proposed route for a controversial highway that would run through the country’s biggest national park. According to a report by Global […]
[Petition: Peace and Respect in the Amazon] By Gabriel Elizondo30 May 2013 Sao Paulo, Brazil (Al Jazeera) – It’s another standoff in the Amazon, and it could get very ugly very fast. On Monday, 170 indigenous people armed with bows and arrows from the Xingu river region again occupied a work site at the controversial […]
31 May 2013 (mongabay.com) – The extinction of large, fruit-eating birds in fragments of Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest has caused palm trees to produce smaller seeds over the past century, impacting forest ecology, finds a study published in the journal Science. The researchers — led by Mauro Galetti from Brazil’s Universidade Estadual Paulista — looked at […]
By Lacey Avery 28 May 2013 (mongabay.com) – The Madre de Dios region in Peru is recognized for its lush Amazon rainforests, meandering rivers and rich wildlife. But the region is also known for its artisanal gold mining, which employs the use of a harmful neurotoxin. Mercury is burned to extract the pure gold from […]
